In the opinion of most theater patrons, moviegoers, and critics, West Side Story is one of the most famous and beloved Broadway musicals—of all times.
We’ll be seeing many new stage productions of West Side Story, since this year is the centennial celebration of Leonard Bernstein—Bernstein at 100. And it looks like there is going to be a movie re-make. In January, 2018, Vanity Fair posted:
Steven Spielberg Is Officially Remaking West Side Story—and He’s Looking for You
The sub-headline was “The director is explicitly seeking Latino and Latina actors for a non-whitewashed version of the classic musical.”
Non-whitewashed? Interesting to hear that.
A casting call was recently released, seeking actors to fill in the key principal roles of Tony, Maria, Anita, and Bernardo. The announcement explicitly asks for Latinx actors to audition for the latter three, a welcome sign that Spielberg won’t whitewash this story. In the original 1961 film, those three parts were played by Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno (who is Puerto Rican), and George Chakiris. Tony, as always, will be played by a white actor; in the original, Richard Beymer played the role. Actors must be between the ages of 15 and 25, and must be able to sing, naturally. Dance experience is “a plus” for this famously kinetic production, which boasted original choreography from Jerome Robbins (who also co-directed the first film version).
...
West Side Story has loomed large in the pop-culture landscape for the last six decades. A splashy Broadway revival in 2009 drew a mix of praise and confusion when some of its lyrics were translated into Spanish by Lin-Manuel Miranda (working with original lyricist Stephen Sondheim), in order to acknowledge half of the characters’s Puerto Rican roots. Eventually, though, some of those
lyrics were converted back to English, after producers realized audience members who didn’t speak Spanish weren’t able to connect with the altered words. While this might have been a difficult trick to pull off on the stage, perhaps Spielberg will be able to try again on the big screen, thanks to the aid of subtitles. According to BroadwayWorld, the casting call
explicitly ask for actors who can speak Spanish—a positive sign for those hoping the story will seem a little more authentic this time around.
My parents took me to see the original stage production at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1958. I was thrilled—not by theater going, since my dad was an actor and I got to see lots of shows, but by the setting and the fact that it was ostensibly about Puerto Ricans—not your standard Broadway musical fare. We belonged to the Columbia Record Club at the time and each if us in the family got to pick an album for each order. My choice was the cast album.
I wore out several copies over the next few years.
My friends and I would act out all the parts, we knew every song, and we didn’t think about the fact that Maria was played by a white actress — Carol Laurence, and that Bernardo was a white guy named Ken LeRoy.
It became a problem when the movie came out in 1961. I was a student at New York’s High School of Music and Art—we were all Leonard Bernstein fans there. He had a long association with our school. A large group of my classmates got together to go and see it. We were black, white and Puerto Rican. Though we sat in the theater and sang along with each number, we couldn’t understand why Natalie Wood was playing Maria, when she couldn’t even sing (Marni Nixon did her vocals) and we all knew talented dancers and actors of color at our sister school Performing Arts. Why did they cast George Chakiris, a Greek guy from Ohio, as Bernardo, and then paint him brown—which was also done to (go figure) Rita Moreno.
The West Side Story Appropriation We Never Really Talk About:
Moreno, 86, gave a candid interview last year about the brownface used in the original “West Side Story.” Anita’s accent “didn’t make any sense at all,” she said on the “In The Thick” podcast, adding that the makeup for the Puerto Rican characters was “extremely dark.” Even Moreno’s skin was darkened for the movie, she said.
“We all had the same color makeup, it was a very different time,” she recalled. “I remember saying to the makeup man one day ― because it was like putting mud on my face, it was really dark and I’m a fairly fair Hispanic ― and I said to the makeup man one day, ‘My God! Why do we all have to be the same color? Puerto Ricans are French and Spanish.’ And it’s true, we are very many different colors. We’re Taino Indian; we are black, some of us.”
“And the makeup man actually said to me, ‘What? Are you a racist?’” she added. “I was so flabbergasted that I couldn’t come back with an answer.”
My long held feelings of love for West Side Story, and uncomfortability with it at the same time, cropped up when I saw this tweet and read the story:
This Parody Video Outlines Everything ‘West Side Story’ Got Wrong About Puerto Ricans
In 1957, composer Leonard Bernstein’s musical, West Side Story premiered on Broadway. The story followed two rival gangs, the Anglo-American “Jets” and the Puerto Rican “Sharks” and a romance that develops between a Jet member and the sister of a Shark. The film version of the musical premiered in 1961 and is the poster child for Hollywood’s stereotypical portrayal of Latinos, considering only one of the leads was Hispanic, actress Rita Moreno. When director Steven Spielberg announced plans to remake the musical, with an eye towards casting actual Latinos in the production, audiences quickly latched on to it, but Puerto Rican actress Suni Reyes says we shouldn’t be too excited.
Here’s Suni Reyes’ version of “America”:
Directed, written, and choreographed by Reyes, as well as director Ana Breton, this interpretation of the song – performed by Moreno in the ’61 feature – follows Reyes as her white friends attempt to convince her to audition for Spielberg’s new remake. You know? Because Reyes is Puerto Rican. Reyes’ friend launches into a performance of the song, complete with exaggerated “Hispanic” accent, leaving Reyes to remind them the country is suffering from government corruption and people are dying. Left “cold on the island Manhattan,” a group of fellow Puerto Ricans – “real-life Sharks” – arrive to tell everyone “nothing is free in America” and “racism lives in America.” Reyes eventually interrupts the singing to discuss how the play wasn’t created by Puerto Ricans and every Shark wore brownface, “including Rita.” Reyes and crew dive into a fantastic authentic depiction of Puerto Ricans dancing before an ICE officer arrives to force “all the Latinos” into a van for deportation, regardless of their protests, “We’re Puerto Rican!” (read American citizens). The three-minute video concludes with Reyes, again, stuck singing “America” before mentioning how the film (and play’s) choreography isn’t Puerto Rican either – “it’s flamenco, that’s from Spain” – before declaring “we don’t need a remake of this.”
After watching the video several times, and sending it to all my friends, I went back over in my mind all the things that made me uncomfortable about West Side Story.
Given the fact that I have Puerto Rico and its current situation of abandonment by Trump and FEMA on my mind 24/7, and an awareness of Trump’s longstanding hatred of Puerto Ricans due to his growing up with a racist landlord for a dad, it worries me that once again the depiction of Puerto Ricans as stereotyped gang members will mesh with and reinforce Trump’s obsession with typecasting all Latinx as MS-13.
Ir’s bad enough that far too many folks have no clue Puerto Ricans are American citizens. If the only Puerto Ricans they are familiar with at all are characters from West Side Story, they’ve been presented a lopsided and false impression of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican culture.
Growing up in NYC during the 50’s and 60’s, a time of street gangs who carried baseball bats, switchblades and zipguns made in shop class, “gang member” had no particular racial or ethnic marker in my mind—I knew Irish guys, Italian guys, Jewish guys and Chinese, Black and Puerto Rican guys and their girlfriends who were in gangs. Popular do-wop albums like Rumble and the The Paragons Meet the Jesters had white gang guys on the cover. I remember the most feared gang I knew about was white—“The Fordham Baldies.” When I was in the sixth grade, kids in my school were all rounded up and sent into the auditorium because “the Fordham Baldies were coming” and we whispered to each other that they would catch us and cut off our pigtails. They never showed up—but they had a fearsome rep. Gangs were only one small slice of life in the Big Apple, and most of us kids lived in a world of families, stickball and baseball, stoop sitting, hopscotch, skully, double-dutch, hooky parties, museum trips and picnics at Rockaway, Orchard and Jones Beach.
Urayoán Noel writes in “How Puerto Ricans Have Reinvented West Side Story”:
The Puerto Rican and Latino New York community has always had a ‘complicated’ relationship with West Side Story, to say the least. On the one hand, West Side Story brought the New York Puerto Rican experience to the world stage, and its influence can be seen in everything from salsa and hip-hop, to literature and visual art. But, at the same time, West Side Story’s representation of Puerto Rican life is built on violence (both literal and symbolic), and on stereotypes and erasures that writers, artists, activists, and cultural workers have spent decades critiquing and countering.
In response, poets, performers and artists have been reusing, reinventing and remaking West Side Story ever since its release over half a century ago.
…
West Side Story gave rise to the careers of Chita Rivera (Anita in the musical) and Rita Moreno (Anita in the film), two legendary figures in Puerto Rican arts and culture. But what is the legacy of its depiction of women? The writer Nicholasa Mohr, a pioneering figure in Nuyorican and Latina fiction and nonfiction, famously dissected the gender politics of West Side Story. “Where was my own mother and aunt?”, she asks, exploring the ‘virgins and whores’ stereotypes for women in the film. Mohr shows the responsibility for New York Puerto Rican writers and artists (women and otherwise) to tell the stories of struggle and survival that West Side Story either stereotypes or erases altogether. Mohr’s own books, including classics like the young adult novel Nilda and El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Short Stories, fearlessly and sensitively tell the stories of those heroic working-class women whose strength and wisdom keeps them and their families and culture alive.
Sometimes, though, performing stereotypes could be a way of subverting them. Such is the case of “America” by La Lupe, the iconic Cuban singer whose work had a profound influence among New York Puerto Ricans. Sung in Spanish, La Lupe’s adaptation of Anita’s refrain is at once funny and profound, showing a sense of humor that can be found in many of the New York Puerto Rican responses to West Side Story.
Noel writes in conclusion (suggest you read the whole piece)
West Side Story is so ubiquitous in New York Puerto Rican arts and culture that it now doesn’t even need to be mentioned by name. Consider Ernesto Quiñónez’s debut Bodega Dreams, one of the most important and celebrated Puerto Rican novels of the past twenty years. Even as his novel tackles urgent contemporary topics, such as the gentrification of East Harlem, a few pages in Quiñónez defines his characters by who they are not. He gives a shout-out to West Side Story‘s legacy of style while claiming a bold, new voice: "They were not Puerto Ricans who danced in empty streets, snapping their fingers and twirling their bodies. Nor were they violent, with switchblade tempers. None of them were named Maria, Bernardo, or Anita."
A part of the legacy of West Side Story was been its use by Lin Manuel Miranda, who talks about its impact on him in “Holy sh*t! ‘West Side Story’ is about Puerto Ricans?” Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Enduring Legacy of ‘West Side Story’:
Although Miranda said “Maria” is his favorite song from West Side Story, it is by no means the only part of the show that has inspired him. In fact, he has a long history of experience with the Sharks and the Jets, starting with playing the role of Bernardo in his sixth-grade class’s production.
“My mother rented the movie so we could watch it together,” he said in an interview with Playbill. “When ‘America’ started and it was about whether to live in Puerto Rico, or live in the U.S. – as a kid who grew up here and was sent there every summer – I was like, “Holy sh*t! West Side Story is about Puerto Ricans?!”
Then, in his senior year of high school, he directed a production himself – and in 2009, Miranda worked on the Broadway revival, translating scenes with the Sharks into Spanish.
“Maria” was of course his inspiration for the video/song that has raised thousands of dollars for aid to Puerto Rico—and is still doing it close to 10 months after the storm.
I have it as a ringtone on my phone.
No matter how you feel about West Side Story, please continue to support Puerto Rico and its people.
The fund, called “Amanece/Road to Recovery,” is focused on building island infrastructure which is durable, sustainable and self-sufficient. The project’s mission is to fund innovative projects with a long-term vision for the recovery and rebuilding of the island and local communities. Grassroots organizations on the island can focus on housing, agriculture, workforce development and energy projects.
“The road to recovery in Puerto Rico is not a simple one nor is it one that relies solely on aid from the American government on the mainland, said Lin-Manuel Miranda. In partnership with the Hispanic Federation, I call on Puerto Rico’s existing nonprofit community to submit grant applications and ideas to rebuild and revitalize our island. Together, we will cultivate, fund and execute practical and actionable solutions to kick-start and continue the island’s road to recovery for years to come.”
“Our mandate is to support actions that can help Puerto Rico rise up better, stronger and more self-sufficient. We believe that in order for that to happen, local nonprofits and the communities that they serve, must be empowered to play a defining role in re-envisioning a new Puerto Rico. That’s what the Amanece Fund is focused on doing: ensuring that the island’s community-based organizations can help lead the way in the recovery and rebuilding of Puerto Rico.”