Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s new version of West Side Story brings the classic musical about star-crossed lovers in 1950s New York to vivid and visceral life for a new generation. That the director and writer are both Jewish feels appropriate, since despite what eventually appeared on stage and then on screen, in Robert Wise’s multi-Oscar winning 1961 film, West Side Story has deep Jewish roots.
Although the show would not open on Broadway until September 27, 1957, its origins go back to the late 40s, and a discussion Jerome Robbins (born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz), the esteemed Broadway director, choreographer and producer, had with his lover, the actor Montgomery Clift, who was weighing up an offer to play the role of Romeo. The Hollywood star said the character felt very passive and he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to bring it to life. What should he do? After giving it some consideration, Robbins advised him to think of Romeo as a modern man, and compared the rage and resentment fuelling the family feud in Romeo and Juliet to that driving hostilities between Jews and Catholics.
The idea lit a fire in Robbins’ imagination. In 1949 he contacted the writer Arthur Laurents (born Levine) and the composer Leonard Bernstein to talk about doing an updated take on the Bard’s tale, in which religion would replace blood ties, and the action would be moved from Renaissance Italy to the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, during Passover and Easter.
In Laurents’ script, tentatively titled East Side Story, Romeo was transformed into an Italian Catholic while Juliet became a recent Jewish immigrant and Holocaust survivor. Together, they reach across the religious divide and rise above the tensions that spark gang violence on the streets.
Writing in the Washington Post last year, in connection with a “reconceived new production” of West Side Story directed by Ivo van Hove, Warren Hoffman, the author of The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, revealed that an early version of the script “featured a Passover seder at the Capulets, with a mention of the Four Questions. Tybalt, the child who should ask the questions, is absent because he is ‘loafing with that gang,’ or so thinks his ‘irritated’ mother. But the audience learns that Romeo has actually murdered Tybalt, and police are chasing him as the seder progressed.”
He said: “A show featuring Jewish cultural traditions like the specifics of a seder would have been revolutionary at the time. Broadway’s most Jewish musical, Fiddler on the Roof (1964), was still a few years away. Putting Jewishness onstage so overtly would have been game-changing.”
However, it wasn’t to be. Laurents became increasingly concerned that the idea was too close to Anne Nichols’ popular Broadway play about an Irish woman and her Jewish lover, Abie’s Irish Rose. While improving relations between Jews and Catholics, and changes to the racial and ethnic makeup of the United States, especially with regard to the growing Latin American population, meant that the nascent show’s politics were already somewhat outdated.
The script went through numerous drafts, but it couldn’t be made to work in a way that felt fresh and contemporary.
The breakthrough came in 1955 when Laurents and Bernstein found themselves both staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles as they worked on independent projects.
One day, as they were shooting the breeze poolside, a newspaper headline about Chicano youth gang violence grabbed their attention. They started thinking about the musical that had slipped their creative grasp, and began toying with the notion of using Latin music in the show. Here, they thought, was a way to revive Robbins’ concept in a manner that would make it feel genuinely of the moment.
“It would have Latin passion, immigrant anger, shared resentment. The potential was there; this could well be a ‘Romeo’ to excite all of us,” Laurents wrote in his memoir.
Robbins agreed and they fitfully forged ahead, bringing in Stephen Sondheim, then only 25 and making his Broadway debut, to write the lyrics to the overstretched Bernstein’s compositions.
The Jewish dimension was dispensed with, and the Sharks and the Jets gangs that bring tragedy into the lives of the story’s young lovers, Tony and Maria, became Puerto Rican and white respectively.
Nevertheless, Bernstein’s “deeply felt Jewish heritage” still formed an “integral part of the music”, according to the pianist and broadcaster Debra Lew Harder, insofar as “a basic shofar call” or tritone “provides the musical motif” upon which some of the show’s most important songs —for example Something’s Coming, Maria and Cool — are based.
Dramatically, West Side Story’s combination of realistic, torn-from-the-headlines subject matter and use of choreography to drive the characterisation and plot was groundbreaking. Even so, the show ran for only 732 performances and won just two Tony awards. It was ahead of its time — a point seemingly driven home when the film was showered with ten Oscars, including Best Picture.
The ecstatic reviews for Spielberg’s adaptation, which unlike Wise’s version features ethnically-correct casting, suggest that it will also be a strong contender across numerous Oscar categories.
The legendary director, who had never made a musical before, told the BBC that he has been in love with West Side Story since the age of ten, adding that it offered him “a tremendous way of throwing myself into a genre that physically I would never be part of, except to be able to tell a story in that idiom.”
Kushner has said the “villain” of West Side Story is “racism and xenophobia.” This might also have been part of the draw for Spielberg, who, having grown up in the only Jewish family in a gentile neighbourhood in Phoenix, Arizona, knows what it’s like to be the target of such hate. Only he can say how much his own experience informed the film, but in 2018 he told the JC:“I know what it feels like to stand out. I know what it feels like to be looked at differently, to be discriminated against. I know what it feels like to be excluded from conversations, because I kind of wore a sign. That was a difficult kind of thing to endure as a kid.”
West Side Story opens this week.
