Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 10 - West Side Story

21 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Making difference West Side Story was never going to be about New York’s West Side. It was never intended to be a sociological depiction of Puerto Ricans—or of any group. Originally conceived as a musicalized Romeo and Juliet story adapted to Jews and Catholics on the Upper East Side at Passover/ Easter, in the hands of Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins the division eventually came to be between juvenile gangs. Jewish theatre-makers and songwriters of the time rarely staged Jewish stories for wider audiences, and here the creators took on the acculturated, but not assimilated, status of Jews and transposed it to a more recent group that had migrated to the mainland United States: Puerto Ricans. One reason for the shift was that the creators felt it was too soon after World War II to show Jews being killed on stage. (Although West Side Story premiered in 1957, its inception had begun years earlier.) Laurents was no stranger to switching one “Other” for another. His first play, Home of the Brave (1945), depicts a Jew as a member of an American platoon during World War II. When it was adapt- ed to the screen four years later, the Jewish male character was replaced by a Black male character in order to be more relevant to shifting politics. From the very outset, then, real contemporary concerns played into decisions for creating the theatrical work, even in a genre where characters peri- odically break out into song and dance. The very specificity of West Side Story ’s time and place, held in ambivalent tension with its omniform origins, is part of what makes it enduringly controversial. The work shows that difference can be deadly, though clearly illuminating the differences can come at a cost–a kind of diminishment, especially of Latinx identity. Paradoxically, the layers of transposition—from Jews and Catholics to the Sharks and the Jets, from tragedy to musical theatre, from West Side Story ’s paints an enduring, if sometimes problematic, picture of the dangers of division. Above: Rita Moreno as Anita in the 1961 lm version of West Side Story . Right: Chita Rivera originated the role of Anita on Broadway in 1957. Almay PhotoFest by Carla Della Gatta