At Last, Your Grandfather’s ‘West Side Story’

There’s an expression out there, “this isn’t your grandfather’s….” The idea is that something — whatever it is — has been updated, modernized, somehow improved. Yet we have to resist the notion that every update is a good idea. Take the classic Broadway musical “West Side Story” for instance. In recent years, producers have deemed it necessary to re-tool the piece in different ways. In 2009, the show’s original librettist, Arthur Laurents, had the idea to present the scenes with the Puerto Rican cast speaking and singing in actual Spanish, which was a good idea that was badly executed. In 2020, a producer decided what “West Side Story” had been lacking for sixty years was a stage filled with large video screens, a bad idea that was also badly executed.The triumph of this new production at Papermill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, directed by Mark S. Hobee, is precisely that it is your grandfather’s “West Side Story.” Except for, perhaps the haircuts of some of the Jets and the occasional tattoo, this is as close to the breakthrough 1957 Broadway production that we are going to get. The classic Jerome Robbins’s choreography and the masterful original orchestrations, by composer Leonard Bernstein working with Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, are still intact. And, with them we also have some of the same vintage, archaic notions on stage. The passage of time, however, now brings us to a wholly different place in our appreciation of the work. In the original production, which only ran less than two years essentially because of logistics, Laurents’s dialog was hip and, in the characters’ own parlance, “cool.” By the 1970s it surely seemed dated — more than anything, this was a show about the generation gap, and somehow “West Side Story” unfortunately fell on the wrong side of that divide. But what seemed dated 50 years ago now sounds no more so than the best dialog of Paddy Cheyefsky or Arthur Miller or any other major American playwright of the 1950s. Back in the day, I too would cringe when the Jets called each other “daddy-o” or “buddy boy” — rather like the lecherous Ray Walston in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” — but now it seems like beatnik slang takes its place next to King James Bible English.The success or failure of any production of WSS, whether original recipe or extra crispy, rises and falls on the Jets. They are a very difficult target to hit: they’re ostensibly juvenile delinquents who are all too willing to incite violence motivated by racial prejudice — the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers of their day — and they come as close to gang-raping poor Anita as could be depicted on stage in 1957. Yet they’re also ballet dancers, hep cats, and, in some of their antics, like the classic “Gee, Officer Krupke” number, they are the Bowery Boys in polka time.There’s little if anything here that cries out for an update, for better or worse: people all over the world are still willing to kill each other over skin color, and though today the Jet misfit “Anybody’s” (played memorably by Cydney Kutcipal) would be properly labelled non-binary — perhaps the character refers to their fluid gender — they still would be a victim of discrimination. And Lt. Schrank (Adam Monley) sounds eerily Trump-y when he addresses the Sharks with deliberately mispronounced Spanish phrases, rather like the President tweeting “praise be to Allah,” using someone’s own words as an insult.The sonic innovations of 1957 still seem fresh today. No other Broadway score, whether before or since, ever used dissonance — great crashing waves of sound, like this; no other score used percussion — vibraphones, tympany, jazz traps — like this; or ever forged contemporary classical music, jazz, and Afro Cuban sounds into a wholly new kind of show music like this. It’s like Stravinsky, Ellington, and Tito Puente all doing the mambo together. Thankfully, Papermill uses a full orchestra, and lets us hear every note.Orchids, as Walter Winchell would say, to Noah Henry as Tony. This is one of the most difficult roles in modern musical theater. No one has done it as well as the original Larry Kert, judging by the original cast album and “Ed Sullivan Show” footage. Richard Beymer was probably the most forgettable aspect of Robert Wise’s hit 1961 film adaptation, although Ansel Elgort was at least a step up in the 2021 Steven Spielberg version. At Papermill, Sarah-Anne Martinez is a tiny, Latina Dresden doll of a Maria, while Antony Sanchez and especially Mikaela Secada have a lot more fun, respectively, as Bernardo and Anita.All of which is not to say that there isn’t room for different interpretations of what Bernstein, Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim gave us 70 years ago. The jazz versions of the show are especially rewarding, most famously those orchestrated by Stan Kenton in 1962 and Bobby Sanabria in 2018. The latter illustrates the esteem in which Latin musicians have held Maestro Bernstein’s score. Latin scholars, like Senor Sanabria, still debate whether “America,” which he describes as “perhaps the quintessential song about the immigrant experience in this country” is written in the rhythm of huapango from Mexico or the joropo from Venezuela. Then there are those high electricity moments that hold up the story like tent poles: Tony provoked into attacking Bernardo, Maria and Tony laying down together for the first (and only) time, and the overall message that these petty prejudices and biases are what’s going to kill us all, which, sadly seems more necessary now than ever. Some things never change.

At Last, Your Grandfather’s ‘West Side Story’

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