IN THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
New direction for 'West Side'
At 90, Arthur Laurents can't resist reviving the timeless musical
- By Peter Marks, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
- Published: 00:14 January 3, 2009
- Arthur Laurents, directing a rehearsal of 'West Side Story' in New York
- Image Credit: Helayne Seidman/The Washington Post
You can tell he is loving it. In a relaxed frame of mind, the legendarily exacting Arthur Laurents is taking West Side Story — the landscape-changing musical he helped create in 1957 — for another potentially revolutionary spin.
Eager to put a novel stamp on a show he feels has not always been astutely handled (he abhors, for instance, the “bogus'' Oscar-winning 1961 movie version), Laurents is tinkering with his new Broadway-bound production in intriguing ways.
Some of them reflect his role as the musical's book writer: More emphasis is being given to telling the story, to conveying the depth of feeling between its star-crossed characters, Tony and Maria, and among all their Jet and Shark compadres.
But the bigger news at the National Theatre in Washington is what is on the tip of Maria's tongue: She now sings one of the show's signature tunes, I Feel Pretty, in Spanish.
It is, in fact, a wholly new approach, this bilingual West Side Story. Other scenes involving the Sharks, the Puerto Rican gang-stand-ins for the Capulets in this urban updating of Romeo and Juliet, are being translated for linguistic verisimilitude, too.
No less a talent than Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tony-winning star and creator of the exuberant Latino musical In the Heights, has been recruited to rework song lyrics in Spanish.
A different view of change
What the show's about hasn't changed. The theatre has changed,'' Laurents says. The change Laurents means is in theatre's inclusiveness and sophistication about the country's cultural diversity, a shift in perspective that has helped him find his rationale for returning to the work.
“You can't have actors with high school Spanish,'' he explains.
Remember the movie — Natalie Wood playing Maria with an accent so put-on she came across as San Juan by way of Palm Springs? Nothing of the sort was going to happen this time.
After a long search, Laurents cast a young Argentine unknown, Josefina Scaglione, whose abilities he was smitten with when he was shown a clip of her singing on YouTube.
“I see no point in doing a revival of anything,'' he says, “unless you have a fresh look at it.''
So here he is, immersed not only in the Herculean task of putting a musical on its feet but also of discovering a new way to make it work.
Considering that he is coming off another taxing directorial assignment — the revival of Gypsy, also with a Laurents libretto, and starring Patti LuPone — you are allowed to wonder where a 90-year-old gets the stamina.
Until, that is, you talk to some of the cast members and determine that for some people, the drive to perfect a vision may impart as many life-extending properties as Lipitor.
“He cuts right through it,'' Matt Cavenaugh, who plays the revival's Tony, says of Laurents' directorial style and energy.
“It sometimes can be tough to hear, but hey, you know, it focuses you and you know exactly what to go for.''
Laurents professes to know, too. “I'm going for the emotion,'' he says.
“It's about love and how it's destroyed by the world we live in.'' Will audiences be blubbering by the curtain call, one wonders. Laurents grins mischievously.
“You might,'' he says. “You might.'' The risk, of course, is that you won't. Despite its one-of-a-kind qualities — the liquid Leonard Bernstein melodies, the Stephen Sondheim lyrics, the restless Jerome Robbins choreography — West Side Story has had a relatively undistinguished life in revival.
(Theatre lovers may recall it lost the Tony for best musical in 1958 to The Music Man.) While making musical theatre out of the story of warring groups of thugs — one Puerto Rican, the other Polish and Italian and Irish — has proved timeless for high-school drama clubs, the 51-year-old musical has not held up quite as formidably in the three times it has been revived on Broadway, the last in 1980.
That may be in part because of the special impact of the hugely successful film, which cemented for generations of audiences a look and aesthetic that now seem dated and synthetic to Laurents.
“I thought the whole thing was terrible,'' he says. “Day-Glo costumes and fake accents! Boys with dyed hair and colour-coded jeans doing jetes down real streets!''
Lopsided success
While the hit movie soundtrack popularised the Bernstein-Sondheim score, the film, patterned on the stage version, appeared to be weighted sentiment-wise in favour of the white boys.
The Jets were featured in number after number, including the comedic showstopper, Gee, Officer Krupke.
The darker-skinned Sharks, with their sinister glowering and chip-on-the-shoulder contempt for their adoptive homeland, don't get a single song of their own in the stage version; the movie, at least, managed to add them to the celebratory production number, America.
Karen Olivo, who made a splash last spring as a leggy love interest in In the Heights, was cast as Laurents's Anita.
One of many actors of Latino origin in the show, she says she always loved West Side Story but also felt a pang about its one-sidedness.
“Every time you've seen West Side Story, you've seen it from the perspective of the Jets,'' she says.
It's apparent that the cast members quickly have become close; also, that their director closely guards his own contribution, doesn't want it playing second fiddle to athleticism and musicality.
“From the onset,'' actor Cavenaugh says, “he's been very clear that he always wanted the story to come first.
"So he's been quite bold in his attempts to make sure the story is always front and centre — in terms of how we are singing the tunes and dancing the dances — so that there's more of a payoff than just a beautiful melody.''
“I think the best thing about the show is the music,'' Laurents says.
Sondheim, the other major surviving member of the creative team, was consulted about Miranda's lyric translations: “Steve insisted on (retaining) rhymes and inner rhymes,'' the director says.
For his part, Laurents has made some dialogue cuts. “I'm on good terms with the author,'' he explains.
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