Bernstein: West Side Story

THEATER
TUESDAY – SUNDAY, MARCH 10 – 15, 2020 (indefinite run currently scheduled through SEPTEMBER 6)*
7:00 PM TUESDAY & THURSDAY
8:00 PM WEDNESDAY, FRIDAY & SATURDAY
2:00 PM WEDNESDAY & SATURDAY
3:00 PM SUNDAY
(suspension continuing through APRIL 12)

Broadway Theater
1681 Broadway, Midtown, Manhattan

$39-$229
https://westsidestorybway.com/

When the world's leading avant-garde theater director, Ivo van Hove, teams up with the world's leading avant-garde choreographer, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, for a Broadway production of West Side Story, there are only two possible (and mutually consistent) responses:  what the fuck?????????????, and "I need to see this!"  And then you do see it, and you think:  fail.  As he did to much better effect with another slice of 1950s New York ethnic melodrama, A View from the Bridge, van Hove presents the Grim '90s version of a tale from ethnic '50s New York, ramping up the grit, sex, and violence.  The problem is that in this case it's all set to catchy Jewish '50s showbiz music that won't go away (not that you'd ever want it to).  So you keep thinking these menacing contemporary thugs would never be singing these tunes or those lyrics.  Indeed, sometimes the presentation is contrary to the text.  "Officer Krupke" is emblematic.  The actors act menacing and are backed with ("backed" is the wrong word:  overcome by) huge videos showing anti-black police violence and social-services depradations.  But they're singing a (great) jokey showbiz song from the '50s that actually puts the blame on the juvenile delinquents, not the authorities.  It doesn't scan.  Yet there's no irony, no sense of any purposeful undercutting of the material.  Nor is there any frisson of interrogation of the text — no exploration of why four gay men in the '50s would create a coded story of societally forbidden love.  (Broadway producers would never permit either of those.)  All there is, is a near-total disjunction between what you're seeing and what you're hearing.  And finally, if "Officer Krupke" isn't funny, what is it?

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  Russian Samovar:  more fun that a barrel full of matryoskas.