(Horns blaring)
Snapping.
You can't even snap without thinking about this film.
It's just that ingrained into pop culture.
And it should be.
"West Side Story" is a classic. Go see it. Period.
Now I could sit down and count the number of Tony's won by the play (5 nominated 2 won)
and the number of Oscars won by the film (11 nominated 10 won)
or how it's hyper modern songs will be sung by so many singers and pop jazz and classical charts
or how its revolutionary choreography imitated by so many parodists.
We may dance into a storytelling tool rather than just a show
how directly influenced American artists, from Michael Jackson to...
*ahem*
Michael Bay, and there's a talk to be had about how it
reinvented the Broadway musical from pure romantic comedy to a vehicle of social commentary
or I can go into a musical analysis about how Leonard Bernstein's score made such fascinating use of hemiola and tritone
and how it marks the next step in the integration of jazz and latin aesthetics into classical music,
helping to complete the trail first blazed by the likes of George Gershwin and Duke Ellington
and how it's just so much fun to sing:
"Ma-riaa! I just met a girl named Maria."
But this is Shakespeare month, so...
Let's talk about "West Side Story" as a Shakespeare adaptation.
"West Side Story" is adapted from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"
and it follows the play very closely. There were two warring factions that get in trouble with the law.
People associated with the two sides follow madly in love.
There's a wedding, of sorts.
Two the most charming characters die in a street fight.
The lovers make kissy faces.
The guy dies. The girl...
...well, in this version, she lives, brokenhearted.
But, aside from that, it follows Shakespeare's play pretty much beat for beat.
It's even partially in iambic pentameter.
Now for last year's Shakespeare month, I tried to focus on the director's relationship to Shakespeare's text and how its adapted.
And, for this year, I thought it might be interesting to look at Shakespeare's place in culture,
wherever that culture may be. So for "West Side Story", a very New York centric thing,
how does Shakespeare fare as a new Yorker?
Pretty well actually.
Part of me wants to think that's because Shakespeare has been part of New York culture and American culture at large since the beginning.
Hey, remember that time one of our presidents was shot in the head by a Shakespearean actor.
Awkward~
Shakespeare's plays were popular in the United States of America since before the "States of America" were actually united.
The first recorded production of Shakespeare in the colonies was in New York State in the year 1730.
It was an amateur production of "Romeo and Juliet".
Twenty years later, New York City would see its first professional performance space in the theatre at Nassau Street.
The company debuted with productions of Shakespeare's "Richard the Third" and John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera",
making it the first musical performed in New York City.
Shakespeare and musicals, the two most popular forms of theatre in America.
Suck it improv.
Both styles were part of the New York theatre scene since the beginning
So it almost seems natural that the two would eventually meet.
And they did meet. Many times.
There is Rodgers and Hart's "The Boys from Syracuse", based on "The Comedy of Errors"
and Cole Porter's clever riff on the "Taming of the Shrew" in "Kiss me Kate".
So the idea of setting Romeo and Juliet in contemporary New York doesn't seem that risky an idea when you think about it.
So when choreographer Jerome Robbins, playwright Arthur Lawrence, composer and famed R.E.M. song lyric Leonard Bernstein
brought on lyricist Stephen Sondheim for the play and director Robert Wise for the film,
all five of whom churned out masterpiece upon masterpiece over long careers,
it almost seems fated that "Romeo and Juliet" would do well in the west side.
Though it took them a while to get to the west side.
Robbins' original idea was actually "East Side Story".
Like Shakespeare's play, it would be about two warring families.
Though, instead of Italian nobles, they would be about families of Irish and Jewish immigrants
in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
But during the play's long gestation period,
the creator started getting interested in juvenile delinquent street gangs.
Which in the 1950's was a relatively new thing in American culture
and the subject of a dozen or so pieces of 1950's Americana.
They were also swayed by then recent headlines in Hollywood about chicano gang wars.
Briefly, they considered moving the play to Los Angeles and replacing the Jewish family with a Mexican gang.
But they eventually brought it back to New York but kept the Latin influence.
So the Irish and Jewish families became two street gangs one Irish and Polish and the other Puerto Rican.
And the action was moved to Spanish Harlem, in the Upper West Side.
And so Bernstein had a ball bringing in the elements of modern jazz and Latin American music that made the play famous
"Mambo!"
"Go!"
Rich musicianship directly inspired by the music of the day,
that day being the 1950's. It's a very hip movie.
Hell, just look at this original trailer.
"Unlike other classics, "West Side Story" grows younger"
Yep, nothing dated going on here.
"Pow pow!"
"Wacko Jacko."
"You tell him daddy-o."
- "Oobly oo." - "And you can punctuate it."
"Ooo"
w00t, homie!
But that in itself is pretty Shakespearean.
It harkens back to Harley Granville Barker's famous description of Romeo and Juliet as:
Hence all the dated slang.
"Womb to tomb?"
"Birth to earth and I'll live to regret this."
See you on the set of "Twin Peaks" in 30 years!
Yeah, it blew my mind, too.
But, aside from that sympathy towards youth there are plenty of clever nods to the play,
not just obvious ones, like the balcony becoming a New York style fire escape,
but subtle ones that mimic the dramatic beats of the play.
Like, when Shakespeare has Romeo and Juliet meet,
their love for one another is so perfect that their first words form a perfect Elizabethan Sonnet.
The Broadway version expresses that moment in a Broadway style.
They're so in love that their first movements are perfectly choreographed.
Shakespeare has soliloquies, but Broadway has songs.
Shakespeare's smitten lover has a soliloquy asking "What's in the name Romeo?"
Broadway's smitten lover has a song asking "What's in the name Maria?"
"And that suddenly that name will never be the same to me."
But what makes Romeo and Juliet tick?
What drives the lovers?
(Aside from general teenage horniness.)
In their original incarnation,
(Not Shakespeare) I mean the story Shakespeare adapted - Arthur Brooks' "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet".
They were definitely judged to be dumb kids, foolishly disobeying their parents,
but Shakespeare's chorus calls them star-crossed.
Really think about that phrase: "star-crossed".
The universe brought them together.
The play has some famous astronomical symbolism.
And they're pretty much constantly begging the universe to allow them to stay together,
even though they know that the universe that united them will inevitably separate them.
And yet, they keep begging the sun, moon, and stars to their will.
"Oh moon, grow bright."
"And make this endless day endless niiiight."
The tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet" is that the same fate that brought them together also destroyed them
They're constantly subject to the whims of forces that they cannot control nor defend against.
Or as Romeo put it: "I am Fortune's fool."
Leo's never won an Oscar you say?
The idea that we are playthings for the gods shows up a lot in Shakespeare.
And it's definitely present here: hatred, envy, passion, lust.
In fair Verona, it all comes from an external source
Look at Mercutio's Queen Mab speech.
Queen Mab is a fairy who brings passions to mortals on her chariot,
driving them to lust and madness and greed and all our wild indulgences.
It's a speech about the forces that cause us foolish morals to do the foolish mortal things we do
There's no Queen Mab speech in "West Side Story", because the Mercutio analog is...
There is a Queen Mab speech.
"Deeear, kindly Sergeant Krupke, you gotta understand"
"It's just our bringing up-ke that gets us out of hand."
Hear me out.
The "Officer Krupke" song, like Queen Mab is about why humans are driven to passion and madness
or, in this case, murder and street ballet.
Riff is...um..."riffing" on the forces that govern human behavior.
He and the other Jets see themselves as innocents being forced to explain themselves to systems too grand for any of them to fully comprehend.
And so they have to justify themselves legally, psychologically, sociologically before society just gives up on them
"Deep down inside him, he's no good!"
"I'm no good!"
The point being that all individuals are forced to answer to a vast and uncaring cosmos and, well, "Krup" that.
"Gee, Officer Krupke, "Krup" you!"
Romeo and Juliet have so many people answer to.
They're subject to the demands of their families, their friends, their God, the state of Verona, and their own passions.
So in "West Side Story", who do Tony and Maria have to answer to?
Officer Krupke?
Their families?
Adults?
America?
"Life can be bright in America."
Oh right, there's a whole song about America isn't there.
"Life is all right in America."
"If you're all white in America."
Brush aside the superficial elements and "West Side Story" is ultimately a story about race.
In a non aristocratic society,
that's our ancient grudge constantly being brought to new mutiny.
A feud that must seem as petty and sad to Tony and Maria as the Montague and Capulet feud must have seen to Romeo and Juliet,
but no less deadly.
"Spicks!" "Micks!" "What!?"
Contemporary reviews didn't mention that much.
They viewed it as a product of a broken youth culture rather than systemic racism,
the fault of individuals rather than systems, the faults in ourselves rather than in our stars.
It's typical of how white middle-class America approached social issues back then.
Okay, how they still do.
In the New York Times review of the film, critic Bosley Crowther quoted this line:
"When do you kids stop?"
"You make this world lousy."
He went on to write:
Of course he missed the very next line.
"You make this world lousy."
"We didn't make it, Doc."
This was written before the 1960's, when identity politics blossomed
and racism sexism and classism were challenged across the country,
but that hint of what's to come simmers beneath the surface.
"So what if they do turn this whole town into a stinking pigsty?"
And when it explodes, it doesn't explode in the fight scenes or the dance scenes. It does so in the dialogue.
"Oh, yeah, sure, I know."
"It's a free country and I ain't got the right."
"But I got a badge."
"What do you got?"
Doc blames the kids, but he ignores the cops. Just look at the way Lt. Schrank treats the gangs,
asking the Sharks to leave
but staying with the Jets trying to appeal to them as equals,
sending the clear message that it's easier to speak to the authorities if you're a white in America.
- "Are there any questions." - "Yes, sir."
"Would you mind translating that into Spanish?"
Actually, the most recent Broadway revival hired Puerto Rican playwright and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda
to translate The Sharks' dialogue and some of the songs into Spanish,
providing them with a more authentic voice
and highlighting the cultural boundaries between the two gangs.
Boundaries which are alluded to and enforced by the adults and internalized by the youths.
So much so that even a well-meaning adult trying to reconcile them can't---
Wait, is that Gomez Addams?
Holy crap.
But, like the adults in "Romeo and Juliet",
the adults in "West Side Story" don't just exacerbate the problems,
they perpetuate them.
But, unlike the adults in "Romeo and Juliet", the adults in "West Side Story" don't have any real authority.
Shakespeare ended his play by having the prince stand over the bodies of lovers
and say with all the authority of the crown,
"West Side Story" ends with a similar speech about hate, but the prince character doesn't say a word.
He just stands there.
Dumb.
You know who gives the speech?
Juliet. "You all killed him and my brother and Riff."
"Not with bullets and guns."
"With hate."
"Well I can kill too, because now I have hate."
Juliet lives in this version showing both sides the effects of their petty hatred
"West Side Story" has its young perpetuate systems of hatred,
but it also gives them the insight to recognize these systems
and hopefully dismantle them.
Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, Sondheim, and Wise read "Romeo and Juliet" as a play about overcoming hate,
about how the tensions between duty to family and to society and duty to your own heart can both destroy
and change.
By showing where that tension lies - between races, between generations -
it shows how dangerous such systems are and questions, how we might resolve them.
And that's pretty good considering that Natalie Wood can't even pass for Puerto Rican.
I mean, come on.
I mean, I'm a Swedish/Irish mix and I am a more convincing Puerto Rican than Natalie Wood.
"West Side Story" is a classic in American cinema, American theater and American music,
and its reputation is well-deserved.
But, the thing is, I live in New York.
Queens to be specific.
"West Side Story" takes place in New York. It was shot in New York
It was written by New Yorkers. It debuted in New York.
And it's one of the most New York-y things ever to New York.
But I'm still an American talking about a product of American culture
Part of the reason I think understanding art is important, and that's any art
is because it gives you something to bring you closer to other people, like a window into what they value.
Soo....
why not expand our horizons a little bit?
Leave behind America Shakespeare and look at another country's Shakespeare.
Say, another large modern democracy with a popular film industry
with a strong tradition of musical drama that also just happens to be a former colony of Great Britain.