Token Theatre Friends: Or at least, as white men, they tried. West Side Story has always had a fraught relationship with Latinx people. Said Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2009, as he was working on that year’s West Side Story Broadway revival: “I think West Side Story for the Latino community has been our greatest blessing and our greatest curse…As a piece of art, I think it’s just about as good as it gets. It also represented our foot in the door as an artistic community on Broadway. At the same time, because it’s just about the only representation of Latinos on Broadway and it’s about gangs, that’s where it gets tricky.”
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I saw the West Side Story movie once as a child, and I don’t remember what I thought of it. I’ve been meaning to rewatch it becomes it keeps popping on my Netflix, because as Lin-Manual Miranda said, there is not a lot of representation for Latinos. Unfortunately, I am disappointed that the 2020 revival failed to deliver a representation of my people that I would enjoy. It is so telling that white creatives fail to acknowledge the role whiteness has in a story like this one. The Jet’s being white is critical to the narrative. White is not the background noise everyone else must fight to be heard. It is the failing of these creatives that they are so used to thinking of white-centered narratives that they didn’t realize whiteness was serving a specific purpose in this narrative, and by making the Jets multiracial, it was a fundamental shift to the story. This is why we need BIPOC representation behind the scenes, not just on stage/on screen. This is a mistake Hollywood/Broadway keeps making like with the remake of Mulan that just came out with a white director and four white writers. That is not what representation looks like.
I am not necessarily comforted to find that my “Is it just me or has this play has always seemed mildly racist” vibe was not just me over evaluating. Something never sat right with me about one of the only productions depicting Latinx people having their characters purely rooted in a gang turf war. I most definitely understand how West Side Story must be a huge part of Latinx representation in the performing arts, and how it probably holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts. But it’s also like, let some Latinx writers/teams in to create genuine stories that expand beyond stereotypes? I cannot quite stop thinking also about how many times this show has been performed in brownface. About all of the negative stories and reviews I heard about the most recent Broadway production. All of the all-white creative teams. I feel like trying to erase the prominence of race in this show would be erasing how many times the production has been abused and appropriated by white people. I mean, the original MOVIE was all white people, it was written by a white guy, and it is about racism against Latinx people and the stigma against interracial relationships. I was hoping to see some better representation in the new film, but the actor playing Tony is a pedophile and a r*pist, and I’m so sure other problems will present themselves once it is released. So. I continue to be disappointed.
I actually got to see this revival of West Side Story back in March. I personally found it awful. One of the worst, if not THE worst, shows I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of bad theatre. Seeing it get rave reviews online has honestly been confusing for me. As a POC but also as somebody who loves and enjoys theatre, I found this show to be an atrocious excuse of theatre and a lame attempt of appealing both POCs and to a younger audience. Gosh… I could go on for a few hours about all the qualities of this show and how they left me with a bitter taste in my mouth after leaving the theatre that day. This bitter taste still lingers with me now, 6 months later.
This article touches on a few points I could deeply delve into, mentioning semantics like cutting “I Feel Pretty”… but that all pales in comparison when we talk about the race problems with this show.
This revival marketed itself as something new and innovative. It clearly WANTED to be a show with positive latinx and black representation… but as a POC it is so clear that it was directed by a white man…
How white savior. Well, if anybody asks me to talk about this 2020 revival of West Side Story feel free but expect me screaming.
I leave you with this: “And if in the next decade you have to revive West Side Story again, give it to a Latinx person to direct.”
I have seen the original West Side Story movie more times than I can count, and even did a character analysis project on it for my technical theatre class in high school. I also had the opportunity to see the revival of West Side Story on Broadway when it first opened in December of 2019. I thought it was visually stunning and unlike anything I had seen in theatre ever before, but I do have to agree with Diep Tran, the author, on some of my grievances with the performance. I entirely agree with furthering inclusion and minority representation on stage but as much as it pains me to say, it disrupts the storyline here. Without drawing a clear line of why the Jets and Sharks are fighting, it unravels the fantasy for the audience because then they are just being violent against one another for no reason. In prior adaptations of West Side Story this was comprehensible because of the racial barrier, but with the 2019 revival (especially after the white Riff actor Benjamin Cook was injured and replaced with black actor Dharon Jones) they are basically just kids committing gang on gang brutality. Also addressed by Tran, with the cutting from a full two hour musical to an hour and a half, it becomes a male dominated show. For the longest time, Latinx women were not truly shown on stage aside from the characters in West Side Story and so “I Feel Pretty” became a sort of anthem. Removing that song diminished any importance of Maria as a character and further centered the show on violence.
West Side Story, serving as a form of representation for Latinx people, was really the only thing they had and it depicted them bring involved in gang fighting, not helping in the slightest with the stereotypes that revolve around their community. The new revival of West Side Story seemingly cuts out the original flow of the storyline of racial conflict and tries to center it more around male violence. I think this ultimately ignores the major role that whiteness in America plays in this show. The problem here, like with a good number of other shows such as Miss Saigon or Hairspray, is that the writers and directors for it are white, so they’ll have written these stories and characters through the lenses of whatever biases they have, no matter the intentions. Representation isn’t real representation when the voices onstage are coming from white people. We need more diversity backstage. To make matters worse on this specific production, the production had sexual harassment problems and safety issues. I hope that sometime soon Broadway will learn from these kinds of things.
I was not able to see the revival of West Side Story before the shutdown, and I don’t think I will be seeing it after. I was somewhat intrigued by the re-imagining and hopeful that it would do what it promised and “recontextualise” and “modernize” the production. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. I completely agree with the article and some of the prior comments that say you can’t just cast POC and call it inclusivity. You also need to have diversity behind the scenes and think about how the communities in your production are being represented. I’m not super surprised that this revival flopped the way it did. Any white director who thinks it's their right to “re-imagine” West Side Story in a more inclusive way is already missing the point entirely. The real re-imagining comes with bringing in a new perspective that has been missing from the production since its creation. Not from you, Mr. van Hove. A white creative team assuming they have the knowledge to make a progressive revival of West Side Story is what went wrong with this production. I believe that even before it started rehearsals it was doomed. While the production prided itself on inclusivity, its lack thereof is what caused its downfall.
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