Publication Design - Sophia Graack by sgraack

How ‘West Side Story’ Was Reborn Sophia Graack

PROCESS BOOK

SUMMARY

The article, by Sasha Weiss, follows the newest production of the 1960’s musical West Side Story and how it was dismantled and brought back to life. Weiss covers how the creators, director Ivo van Hove and choroegrapher Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, wanted to represent America today. Whether that be their choices in casting actors and dancers of all kinds or the new renditions of the original songs to convey the fast and intricate feel of their production. The article also attempts to convey the unpolished feeling that the production gives through its black and white photography provided by Phil Montgomery. The photos show the fast paced and visceral feeling that the actors potray on stage. Weiss wants to show just what the creators want the viewers of their production to see and feel, to “reveal just how risky and politically fraught it remains.”

KEY IMAGERY Photography by Phil Montgomery for The New York Times

KEY WORDS

Intricate: visceral: risky: punctuated: commanding: unpolished: political: heavy: dark: revealing: grunge: immigration: struggle: fast: intense: condescending: impulsive: emotional: loose: harsh: raw: shaky: trust

INSPIRATION

TIna Smith for The New York Times

SKETCHES

SKETCHES In my sketches, I wanted to explore different ideas that could showcase the photos as well as give you an insight into the feel of both the article and the production. Since all the photos are in black and white, I want to mainly focus on using black, white and tints to follow the theme of the photos. However, I do want to include a single color and use it minimally to bring a small pop of color in the grey. I was looking at using either and orange or red, almost as a homage to the original West Side Story poster, which is a bright red/orange. Also, with my sketches I did explore almost an homage to the original poster and known scenes within the musical through simple imagery. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to have my spreads be super busy as most of the photos are already very dynamic and full of energy. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want my design to conflict with that. A few of my sketches do not feature a photo, as I wanted to attempt using shape imagery that can be seen in 1960s design.

INITIAL DESIGN

From my initial 36 sketches, I took 11 of those designs and began putting them into my computer. Through using Adobe Illustrator, I attempted to make my sketches follow some of my key words, while also having a small homage to the original West Side Story poster design. Through all my designs, I attempted to create different imagery and feeling from the type. I used the fonts Eurostile for the subtitle and author as well as changing between Scarlet Wood Bold and Brother 1816 Printed. I wanted to stay away from serif fonts due to the fact that my spread ideas are not formal. They arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t something you would find in a nice editorial magazine. They are supposed to reflect the feel from the article.

INITIAL DESIGN

PARAGRAPH STUDIES As the orchestra strikes up its first clanging notes, they start moving, but minimally, leaning from left to right. Suddenly their faces are projected behind them on the back wall — which is not a wall at all but a giant screen. A camera placed somewhere in the audience pans slowly across their faces and shoulders — you can see scars, tattoos, piercings, sprays of acne. One boy has a linebacker’s physique and wears a wool cap; another is compact, bare-chested underneath a blue satin bomber jacket; a third has stubble above his lip and is dressed in a leather jacket and sweatpants. Their expressions are hard, their eyes bright. From the right side, a new pack of people enters, stalking the stage with the same contained aggression. They are also dressed in modern streetwear, in shades of red and maroon. One of them approaches someone from the first group and stares him down. The first group, silently, mockingly, turns on its heels, and the new group takes over the edge of the stage. Now their faces appear on the big screen — they, too, are tough and sad, prematurely worn down by life. These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for “West Side Story,” they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti.

As the orchestra strikes up its first clanging notes, they start moving, but minimally, leaning from left to right. Suddenly their faces are projected behind them on the back wall — which is not a wall at all but a giant screen. A camera placed somewhere in the audience pans slowly across their faces and shoulders — you can see scars, tattoos, piercings, sprays of acne. One boy has a linebacker’s physique and wears a wool cap; another is compact, bare-chested underneath a blue satin bomber jacket; a third has stubble above his lip and is dressed in a leather jacket and sweatpants. Their expressions are hard, their eyes bright. From the right side, a new pack of people enters, stalking the stage with the same contained aggression. They are also dressed in modern streetwear, in shades of red and maroon. One of them approaches someone from the first group and stares him down. The first group, silently, mockingly, turns on its heels, and the new group takes over the edge of the stage. Now their faces appear on the big screen — they, too, are tough and sad, prematurely worn down by life. These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for “West Side Story,” they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti.

paragraph break 1 :Indent

paragraph break 2 : Bold

These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for “West Side Story,” they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti.

paragraph break 3 :color

paragraph break 4: square

From the right side, a new pack of people enters, stalking the stage with the same contained aggression. They are also dressed in modern streetwear, in shades of red and maroon. One of them approaches someone from the first group and stares him down. The first group, silently, mockingly, turns on its heels, and the new group takes over the edge of the stage. Now their faces appear on the big screen — they, too, are tough and sad, prematurely worn down by life. These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for “West Side Story,” they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti.

paragraph break 5 :line

paragraph break 6: Bold italic

paragraph break 7 :side line

paragraph break 8: large first letter

paragraph break 9 :side line

paragraph break 10: large first letter

TYPEKIT DESIGN Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

“This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished.”

By Sasha Weiss As the orchestra strikes up its first clanging notes, they start moving, but minimally, leaning from left to right. Suddenly their faces are projected behind them on the back wall — which is not a wall at all but a giant screen. A camera placed somewhere in the audience pans slowly across their faces and shoulders — you can see scars, tattoos, piercings, sprays of acne. One boy has a linebacker’s physique and wears a wool cap; another is compact, bare-chested underneath a blue satin bomber jacket; a third has stubble above his lip and is dressed in a leather jacket and sweatpants. Their expressions are hard, their eyes bright. From the right side, a new pack of people enters, stalking the stage with the same contained aggression. They are also dressed in modern streetwear, in shades of red and maroon. One of them approaches someone from the first group and stares him down. The first group, silently, mockingly, turns on its heels, and the new group takes over the edge of the stage. Now their faces appear on the big screen — they, too, are tough and sad, prematurely worn down by life. These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for “West Side Story,” they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti.

How ‘West Side Story’ Was Reborn

TYPEKIT DESIGN Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

How ‘West Side Story’ Was Reborn “This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished.”

TYPEKIT DESIGN How ‘West Side Story’ Was Reborn Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

“This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished.”

INITIAL SPREAD DESIGN “The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzingly active.”

Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

How

‘West Side Story’ Was

Reborn

Written by Sasha Weiss Photography by Philip Montgomery 14

The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn

revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti. Here, Robbins’s bounding, almost joyful sense of menace has been replaced by something more inward. There’s no snapping — instead there’s swaying, slow walking. The complexions of the groups are different, too. The Jets, who consider themselves the true masters of their neighborhood, are not, as they were in the original production and its 1961 film version, all white. The Sharks are of Latino descent (in the movie, many of them were white, and all wore brown makeup). It’s not the 1950s anymore but a world, like our own, of images — a place where a face instantly becomes a photograph projected on a screen, an assertion of selfhood. And we are not being entertained — at least not yet. We are being prodded, maybe provoked. What are these people capable of? This new staging originated several years ago in the mind of the director Ivo van Hove, who runs a major theater in Amsterdam and who has become, in recent years, a Broadway brand name, known for his bloody, irreverent interpretations of classics: “A View From the Bridge” and “The Crucible.” His work has been called merciless, brutal and gimmicky but also ingenious, imaginative and true — and he welcomes this divided response. Van Hove had admired “West Side Story” since he saw the movie as a teenager growing up in rural Belgium. In recent years, the play’s portrayal of a divided society acquired a new urgency for him, and he decided he wanted to offer his own vision of the classic show. But a 21st-century production demanded a more complete renovation than had ever been attempted. He had in mind some drastic cuts and the jettisoning of Robbins’s beloved choreography. It took some persuading to secure permission from the estates of the original creators (with the exception of Stephen Sondheim, the only one living, who knew van Hove’s work and embraced the concept from the beginning). When they finally agreed, van Hove enlisted the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — a rigorous formalist who directs Rosas, a celebrated dance company, but had never made movement for musical theater. The show I saw in January was the product of more than three years of collaboration, during which “West Side Story” was dismantled and put back together again — a process that was intricate, physically demanding and sometimes maniacally ambitious. The production cost more than $15 million. The two months of previews that originally were planned — far more than

16 The New York Times Magazine

for most shows — were extended by three more weeks when a lead actor was injured onstage (it is scheduled to open Feb. 20). The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzyingly active. Some people have walked out, but on the four nights I was there during previews, the house was full and the applause enthusiastic. Still, the show wasn’t finished yet — each day, video was being reshot, numbers were being restaged, new meaning was being discovered in the text. As opening night drew near, van Hove projected a wry calm. He and De Keersmaeker knew that their task was delicate, even perilous — an update of a beloved 20th-century work of popular art, one that had its own risks in 1957. They wanted to reveal just how risky and politically fraught it remains. So many of the contentious issues of contemporary life — poverty, immigration, racism, gender discrimination and dysphoria, sexual violence, police brutality — are written into the play from the very first scene. “You shouldn’t overdo it,” van Hove told me, “but it’s all there.” At 10 a.m. on a chilly morning in early October, Stephen Sondheim, wearing a patient smile, took his seat in a large Flatiron studio amid the cast members of “West Side Story” on the first day of rehearsal. The oldest of the gang members was 25, the youngest was 17, and they were all — in their own particular and mesmerizing ways — beautiful. Casting “West Side Story” has always been a challenge. You need actors who can handle the high-level dancing and singing but also convincingly play teenagers. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker auditioned more than 1,500 people during 2018 and 2019 in New York, Los Angeles and Miami before they found their 50 cast members, 33 of whom will be making their Broadway debuts. For De Keersmaeker, casting the right dancers was the solution to the temporal riddle she and van Hove had devised. Their production is set approximately now, but the music remains the music of the 1950s, or Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant reimagining of it. How could the new choreography be responsive to the music and still feel ofthe-moment? De Keersmaeker’s answer was dancers who brought “edge and fire and sensibility,” people who “have really chosen a life of examining the world through dance.” Dancing, she said, is a way of thinking. The dancers that they assembled — among them a gamin Latina woman with dark, sympathetic eyes and a confident stride (Yesenia Ayala, playing the role of Anita); a short, muscular black woman with a shaved head and a winning, defiant expression (Zuri Noelle Ford, a Jet); a swaggering, acrobatic black man who moved like lightning (Dharon E. Jones, also a Jet) — exuded vigor and raw assurance. They had chosen to cast people of different races to reflect America today. The diverse cast also heightened an absurdity built into the script: “West Side Story” is explicitly about a group

How West Side Story Was Reborn 17

“This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished. Not refined, so it goes right to your heart and tells the exact story it wants to tell.”

It’s hard to imagine now, when “West Side Story” is a staple of high school musicals, and its film version adored around the world, that it was once considered an artistic oddity, even unperformable.

of more settled immigrants, who believe themselves to be natives, battling a group of more recent ones. The mood in the rehearsal room was jubilant, the din of voices punctuated by little whoops of greeting. It was unclear as they were settling down if any of the cast members noticed that one of the creators was sitting among them. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker, both of whom are accustomed to commanding a room, took turns approaching Sondheim, almost diffidently. “Are you having a good time?” Sondheim asked, with friendly, deflationary wit. “Well,” De Keersmaeker said softly, “I just got here.” As De Keersmaeker and van Hove took their places in front of the room, the crowd quieted. They were each dressed elegantly, van Hove in a navy blue dress shirt, his gray hair the fine texture of a boy’s; De Keersmaeker in loose blacks, her white hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. There was something comical in the contrast between their cool, inscrutable expressions and the boisterous young Americans who sat before them. Van Hove began to speak — so quietly that it was difficult to hear — and the cast was rapt. Van Hove wears authority lightly, almost as an afterthought; he appears to be communing with the visions in his head. “West Side Story,” he explained, is “brutal, and very rough.” Crucially, it’s a world without parents. These young people are essentially orphans, forced to live by their wits, and defining their turf is the primary ratification of their existence. Cuts to the original production were being considered — no intermission, jettisoning “I Feel Pretty” (one of the show’s most charming songs) — precisely because van Hove wanted the play to move at the speed of adolescent instincts. These characters, he explained, have no time to think about what they’re doing. They live in the now: They kill, they suffer, they kill again. “This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished. Not refined, so it goes right to your heart and tells the exact story it wants to tell.” There were murmurs of assent. The set (designed by Jan Versweyveld, one of van Hove’s main collaborators and his romantic partner) would be stark on its surface but would reveal, as the play went on, certain elaborate tricks, like the projection wall, which played video — sometimes recorded from the stage by the cast members themselves, sometimes sumptuous images shot on location in the Bronx, East Harlem and Puerto Rico. The stage would occasionally fill with fog. “It’s difficult to explain,” van Hove said softly. “But nature elements are important to me. That New York becomes a mythical city that could also be Shanghai or Buenos Aires. Nature elements will be onstage — it’s a

18 The New York Times Magazine

little bit scary, but there will be rain.” “Nah, that’s cool!” someone from the crowd called out. Van Hove smiled, a little shyly, a little subversively. “It will be one big flood, like a Kurosawa film, where the earth splits open.” De Keersmaeker spoke next, more tersely. “Needless to say, this is a huge challenge. What makes ‘West Side Story’ so strong is the way that theater, music and dance come together and fuse together.” She admitted to being nervous: “As a European, you feel a little bit like, I’m going to be roasted!” Whereas van Hove’s manner is definite, De Keersmaeker’s is searching. When I first met her last summer, at the headquarters of her dance school and company in Brussels, she talked about the difference between their styles. “He’s really somebody who has an extremely articulated vision, and he knows how to embody that strategy from the beginning,” she explained, whereas for her, the “process itself indicates how the material is going to be developed. I very often start from people, how they are.”

There was something comical in the contrast between their cool, inscrutable expressions and the boisterous young Americans who sat before them. Van Hove began to speak — so quietly that it was difficult to hear — and the cast was rapt. When van Hove first approached her in 2016 about joining the project, she didn’t reply for three weeks. De Keersmaeker knew that an American audience might not be sympathetic to a revision of Jerome Robbins’s cherished choreography — by a Belgian woman, no less. But she shared with Robbins an interest in stylized transformations of everyday movement: in showing the way human beings go from walking to fighting, moving through territory to defending it, how group animus can be contained or unleashed. Robbins observed kids at high school dances in Spanish Harlem in the ’50s, borrowing steps from the mambo and the jitterbug. Once De Keersmaeker decided to sign on, she watched YouTube videos of teenagers krumping on street corners in Los Angeles, breakdancing contests, circles of hip-hop dancers in clubs egging on central combatants. There’s a frantic energy to this movement, De Keersmaeker explained, a form of expression somewhere between

How West Side Story Was Reborn 19

“dancing, fighting and screaming.” It captures the way young people relate to the world, absorbing the onslaught of news, assimilating and rearranging the glut of digital imagery on social media, trying on multiple identities. In fall 2017, with five members of her company, she began marrying her geometric, highly formal dance to the conventions of contemporary movement. But De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death. The new choreography would draw, as her work always does, on the universal laws of the body, which she started to demonstrate that summer day in her office. As she talked, she got up from her chair and started to move. We lie down when we’re vulnerable, wounded, dying, she explained, sinking to the floor, propping herself up on an arm to face me; we lie down when we are engaging in erotic intimacy. She was exploring ideas of the horizontal, rolling and falling and lying down, but also of defying gravity, rising, leaping, propelling the body with knifelike arms. The arms, she explained, are our most immediate tools of expressiveness. They reach and punch and caress, push and point. She extended her arm and finger and said: “Get out of my house!” De Keersmaeker’s way of working is slow, collaborative and nonlinear. She invents a sequence of movements and then asks dancers to go away and improvise, using the basic grammar she has given them and elaborating on it. When they return, she watches them and begins to harvest details they bring her — reducing or adding — until the language becomes a shared one. When she works with her company, this exchange can go on for months, even years. She began this work with the cast in a series of labs the previous winter, and they would continue it throughout the fall. She was getting to know them, beginning to thread their ideas into the work — but the choreography was still revealing itself. On Broadway, dancers are usually told exactly where to stand, how to space themselves, how to move. In the rehearsal room that first day, De Keersmaeker told the cast that this process would be different. “We’re going to start with basic material,” she said, modest yet also definitive, “and then make together new material — things we’re going to have to find out together.” Van Hove and De Keersmaeker had never worked together before, but they anticipated the uncertainty of joining forces with characteristic composure. “I have to get out of my comfort zone to work with her,” van Hove told me. “She has to get out of her comfort zone to work with me.” Their collaboration replicates an important aspect of the original “West Side Story,” which sprang from a group of ambitious, restless artists who recognized, in one another, forces of equal and opposite weight. For years, Robbins had been talking to the

20 The New York Times Magazine

composer Leonard Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents about a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” that would seamlessly combine dance, music and storytelling. Discussion of the project began in the late 1940s — they first toyed with a story about Jews and Catholics on the Lower East Side. Over the next several years, as the three were diverted by other projects, none of them entirely lost sight of it. It was a shared fantasy — still inchoate but somehow powerful. One day in 1955, according to most accounts, Bernstein and Laurents were lounging by a hotel pool in Los Angeles. Bernstein was in town conducting; Laurents was working on a screenplay. The subject turned to the headlines in that day’s paper about Chicano gang violence. The two fell to talking. What if they revised their original idea of an East Side story and made it about white and Latino teenagers? Bernstein, who was married to Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean, was immersed in Latin music, and he could immediately hear rhythms and melodies. When they told Robbins of their new idea, he seized on the dance possibilities. Getting away from their own experiences, as descendants of immigrant Jews, and mapping their sense of outsiderdom onto a different set of tribal animosities proved freeing. All three were gay men in various states of acceptance of their sexualities, and a story of forbidden love may have been a way to write clandestinely about their own lives. They set to work. Soon after a pair of experienced lyricists turned down the project in 1955, Laurents ran into Stephen Sondheim, who was then only 25, at a party and remembered having heard him play a few songs from an unproduced musical shortly before. He invited him to audition for Bernstein. By that point, Bernstein had written lyrics to a number of songs, but he quickly understood that Sondheim was the superior lyricist and was eager to work with him. All four men had uncompromisingly high standards but different strengths. Laurents, who honed his skills writing radio plays for the Army, was economical, tart and resistant to sentiment. Bernstein married emotional warmth to operatic bravura, and his capacious musical intelligence could synthesize Beethoven, bebop, mambo and Puerto Rican seis. Sondheim had a knack for embedding plot in lyrics and a playful, prickly sense of language. Robbins brought his fearsome perfectionism, his sense of search, his impeccable showman’s instinct for contrast and mood. Working together was not always easy. During the rehearsal period, Bernstein would sometimes retreat across the street to a bar to avoid Robbins after a particularly unpleasant argument (though there are also stories of the two of them together, Robbins with his hand on Bernstein’s shoulder as he sat at the piano, revising music measure by measure, as if they shared one

intelligence). Robbins was a fierce editor of the material until the very end, scrapping and reworking songs (“Something’s Coming” was written just a few weeks before the play debuted) and driving the actors to tears. The four collaborators gradually arrived at a shared vision, discovering what Sondheim later called “a wholeness” — a synthesis of dramatic language, music and dance. Think of “Maria,” one of the most affecting love songs written for the stage. It’s so familiar now that it’s hard to hear its strangeness, the haunting tritone of the song’s first word, “Maria,” the very same notes that can be heard in the prologue (what has been called “the shofar”), establishing an atmosphere of threat. The tension in the music is softened by the lyric, which is reverent but also sensual, with Tony invoking Maria’s name over and over, as if the word could be made flesh. Or think of “Cool,” a song whose breezy slang (“Boy, boy, crazy boy, get cool, boy”) pulls against its thrashing melodic line — and also quotes that same tritone — evoking barely contained adolescent aggression that explodes into dance. Or the way “America,” an escalating argument between the Puerto Rican men and women about the humiliations and advantages of moving to the United States, culminates in a danceoff. It’s hard to imagine now, when “West Side Story” is a staple of high school musicals, and its film version adored around the world, that it was once considered an artistic oddity, even unperformable. When the four men first presented a few songs for potential backers, the music was pronounced too difficult and the subject matter too dark. A major Broadway producer — one of the few willing to take it on — quit before the creators found the ones who saw it through. Carol Lawrence, who played Maria in the original production, reported that on opening night, there was

an eerie silence in the theater for several seconds at curtain call. She assumed the show had bombed. Suddenly, the audience leapt to their feet, hooting and weeping. It was a musical dancing on a knife’s edge between rage and love, tension and release, realism and transcendence. Throughout October and November, the cast occupied the Gibney rehearsal studios, just above Union Square — large, bare rooms that they filled with gray dance floors, wooden tables arrayed with Purell and breath mints and metal folding chairs that stood in for the set. The rooms hummed with activity. In Studio B, the show’s musical director, Alexander Gemignani (a disciple of Sondheim’s), would be instructing the cast members on the intricacies of the score, trying to strip them of any inherited notions about these familiar songs. He reminded them that the score is full of jaggedness and dissonance, intervals that make the hair on your neck stand on end. They shouldn’t be afraid to sound ugly. In Studio C, De Keersmaeker was teaching the dancers her highly detailed, precise language — “The most extreme external thing reflects the most internal,” she instructed a group of Shark women who were learning sequences from “America.” “You want to have expressive fingers. You want to have expressive feet so that you get a longer line.” They often moved without music, and the atmosphere was intensely focused, even solemn. Van Hove, meanwhile, was close-reading the text with the actors in the main studio space. His script, which was almost always in his hand, was annotated on nearly every line with spidery notes. One day in mid-October, he was rehearsing the scene that is the audience’s first introduction to Tony, the show’s Romeo, just after we’ve met the Jet clan. The “West Side Story” book is famously lean — it’s one of the shortest books in Broadway history

How West Side Story Was Reborn 21

INITIAL SPREAD DESIGN “The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzingly active.”

Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

How

‘West Side Story’ Was

Reborn

The new “West Side Story” begins with nothingness: a huge black brick wall rising behind a cavernous blank stage. A group of young people enter, walking slowly, surveying the territory. They form a line at the lip of the stage and stare at the audience. As the orchestra strikes up its first clanging notes, they start moving, but minimally, leaning from left to right. Suddenly their faces are projected behind them on the back wall — which is not a wall at all but a giant screen. A camera placed somewhere in the audience pans slowly across their faces and shoulders — you can see scars, tattoos, piercings, sprays of acne. One boy has a linebacker’s physique and wears a wool cap; another is compact, bare-chested underneath a blue satin bomber jacket; a third has stubble above his lip and is dressed in a leather jacket and sweatpants. Their expressions are hard, their eyes bright. From the right side, a new pack of people enters, stalking the stage with the same contained aggression. They are also dressed in modern streetwear, in shades of red and maroon. One of them approaches someone from the first group and stares him down. The first group, silently, mockingly, turns on its heels, and the new group takes over the edge of the stage. Now their faces appear on the big screen — they, too, are tough and sad, prematurely worn down by life. These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for “West Side Story,” they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks — the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti. Here, Robbins’s bounding, almost joyful sense of menace has been replaced by something more inward. There’s no snapping — instead there’s swaying, slow walking. The complexions of the groups are different, too. The Jets, who consider themselves the true masters of their neighborhood, are not, as they were in the original production and its 1961 film version, all white. The Sharks are of Latino descent (in the movie, many of them were white, and all wore brown makeup). It’s not the 1950s

Written by Sasha Weiss Photography by Philip Montgomery 14

The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn

anymore but a world, like our own, of images — a place where a face instantly becomes a photograph projected on a screen, an assertion of selfhood. And we are not being entertained — at least not yet. We are being prodded, maybe provoked. What are these people capable of? This new staging originated several years ago in the mind of the director Ivo van Hove, who runs a major theater in Amsterdam and who has become, in recent years, a Broadway brand name, known for his bloody, irreverent interpretations of classics: “A View From the Bridge” and “The Crucible.” His work has been called merciless, brutal and gimmicky but also ingenious, imaginative and true — and he welcomes this divided response. Van Hove had admired “West Side Story” since he saw the movie as a teenager growing up in rural Belgium. In recent years, the play’s portrayal of a divided society acquired a new urgency for him, and he decided he wanted to offer his own vision of the classic show. But a 21st-century production demanded a more complete renovation than had ever been attempted. He had in mind some drastic cuts and the jettisoning of Robbins’s beloved choreography. It took some persuading to secure permission from the estates of the original creators (with the exception of Stephen Sondheim, the only one living, who knew van Hove’s work and embraced the concept from the beginning). When they finally agreed, van Hove enlisted the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — a rigorous formalist who directs Rosas, a celebrated dance company, but had never made movement for musical theater. The show I saw in January was the product of more than three years of collaboration, during which “West Side Story” was dismantled and put back together again — a process that was intricate, physically demanding and sometimes maniacally ambitious. The production cost more than $15 million. The two months of previews that originally were planned — far more than for most shows — were extended by three more weeks when a lead actor was injured onstage (it is scheduled to open Feb. 20). The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzyingly active. Some people have walked out, but on the four nights I was there during previews, the house was full and the applause enthusiastic. Still, the show wasn’t finished yet — each day, video was being reshot, numbers were being restaged, new meaning was being discovered in the text. As opening night drew near, van Hove projected a wry calm. He and De Keersmaeker knew that their task was delicate, even perilous — an update of a beloved 20th-century work of popular art, one that had its own risks in 1957. They wanted to reveal just how risky and politically fraught it remains. So many of the contentious issues of contemporary life — poverty, immigration,

16 The New York Times Magazine

racism, gender discrimination and dysphoria, sexual violence, police brutality — are written into the play from the very first scene. “You shouldn’t overdo it,” van Hove told me, “but it’s all there.” At 10 a.m. on a chilly morning in early October, Stephen Sondheim, wearing a patient smile, took his seat in a large Flatiron studio amid the cast members of “West Side Story” on the first day of rehearsal. The oldest of the gang members was 25, the youngest was 17, and they were all — in their own particular and mesmerizing ways — beautiful. Casting “West Side Story” has always been a challenge. You need actors who can handle the high-level dancing and singing but also convincingly play teenagers. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker auditioned more than 1,500 people during 2018 and 2019 in New York, Los Angeles and Miami before they found their 50 cast members, 33 of whom will be making their Broadway debuts. For De Keersmaeker, casting the right dancers was the solution to the temporal riddle she and van Hove had devised. Their production is set approximately now, but the music remains the music of the 1950s, or Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant reimagining of it. How could the new choreography be responsive to the music and still feel ofthe-moment? De Keersmaeker’s answer was dancers who brought “edge and fire and sensibility,” people who “have really chosen a life of examining the world through dance.” Dancing, she said, is a way of thinking. The dancers that they assembled — among them a gamin Latina woman with dark, sympathetic eyes and a confident stride (Yesenia Ayala, playing the role of Anita); a short, muscular black woman with a shaved head and a winning, defiant expression (Zuri Noelle Ford, a Jet); a swaggering, acrobatic black man who moved like lightning (Dharon E. Jones, also a Jet) — exuded vigor and raw assurance. They had chosen to cast people of different races to reflect America today. The diverse cast also heightened an absurdity built into the script: “West Side Story” is explicitly about a group of more settled immigrants, who believe themselves to be natives, battling a group of more recent ones. The mood in the rehearsal room was jubilant, the din of voices punctuated by little whoops of greeting. It was unclear as they were settling down if any of the cast members noticed that one of the creators was sitting among them. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker, both of whom are accustomed to commanding a room, took turns approaching Sondheim, almost diffidently. “Are you having a good time?” Sondheim asked, with friendly, deflationary wit. “Well,” De Keersmaeker said softly, “I just got here.” As De Keersmaeker and van Hove took their places in front of the room, the crowd quieted. They were each dressed

How West Side Story Was Reborn 17

Members of the Sharks.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

18 The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn 19

elegantly, van Hove in a navy blue dress shirt, his gray hair the fine texture of a boy’s; De Keersmaeker in loose blacks, her white hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. There was something comical in the contrast between their cool, inscrutable expressions and the boisterous young Americans who sat before them. Van Hove began to speak — so quietly that it was difficult to hear — and the cast was rapt. Van Hove wears authority lightly, almost as an afterthought; he appears to be communing with the visions in his head. “West Side Story,” he explained, is “brutal, and very rough.” Crucially, it’s a world without parents. These young people are essentially orphans, forced to live by their wits, and defining their turf is the primary ratification of their existence. Cuts to the original production were being considered — no intermission, jettisoning “I Feel Pretty” (one of the show’s most charming songs) — precisely because van Hove wanted the play to move at the speed of adolescent instincts. These characters, he explained, have no time to think about what they’re doing. They live in the now: They kill, they suffer, they kill again. “This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished. Not refined, so it goes right to your heart and tells the exact story it wants to tell.” There were murmurs of assent. The set (designed by Jan Versweyveld, one of van Hove’s main collaborators and his romantic partner) would be stark on its surface but would reveal, as the play went on, certain elaborate tricks, like the projection wall, which played video — sometimes recorded from the stage by the cast members themselves, sometimes sumptuous images shot on location in the Bronx, East Harlem and Puerto Rico. The stage would occasionally fill with fog. “It’s difficult to explain,” van Hove said softly. “But nature elements are important to me. That New York becomes a mythical city that could also be Shanghai or Buenos Aires. Nature elements will be onstage — it’s a little bit scary, but there will be rain.” “Nah, that’s cool!” someone from the crowd called out. Van Hove smiled, a little shyly, a little subversively. “It will be one big flood, like a Kurosawa film, where the earth splits open.” De Keersmaeker spoke next, more tersely. “Needless to say, this is a huge challenge. What makes ‘West Side Story’ so strong is the way that theater, music and dance come together and fuse together.” She admitted to being nervous: “As a European, you feel a little bit like, I’m going to be roasted!” Whereas van Hove’s manner is definite, De Keersmaeker’s is searching. When I first met her last summer, at the headquarters of her dance school and company in Brussels, she talked about the difference between their styles. “He’s really somebody who has an extremely articulated vision, and he knows how to embody that

20 The New York Times Magazine

strategy from the beginning,” she explained, whereas for her, the “process itself indicates how the material is going to be developed. I very often start from people, how they are.” When van Hove first approached her in 2016 about joining the project, she didn’t reply for three weeks. De Keersmaeker knew that an American audience might not be sympathetic to a revision of Jerome Robbins’s cherished choreography — by a Belgian woman, no less. But she shared with Robbins an interest in stylized transformations of everyday movement: in showing the way human beings go from walking to fighting, moving through territory to defending it, how group animus can be contained or unleashed. Robbins observed kids at high school dances in Spanish Harlem in the ’50s, borrowing steps from the mambo and the jitterbug. Once De Keersmaeker decided to sign on, she watched YouTube videos of teenagers krumping on street corners in Los Angeles, break-dancing contests, circles of hiphop dancers in clubs egging on central combatants. There’s a frantic energy to this movement, De Keersmaeker explained, a form of expression somewhere between “dancing, fighting and screaming.” It captures the way young people relate to the world, absorbing the onslaught of news, assimilating and rearranging the glut of digital imagery on social media, trying on multiple identities. In fall 2017, with five members of her company, she began marrying her geometric, highly formal dance to the conventions of contemporary movement. But De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death. The new choreography would draw, as her work always does, on the universal laws of the body, which she started to demonstrate that summer day in her office. As she talked, she got up from her chair and started to move. We lie down when we’re vulnerable, wounded, dying, she explained, sinking to the floor, propping herself up on an arm to face me; we lie down when we are engaging in erotic intimacy. She was exploring ideas of the horizontal, rolling and falling and lying down, but also of defying gravity, rising, leaping, propelling the body with knifelike arms. The arms, she explained, are our most immediate tools of expressiveness. They reach and punch and caress, push and point. She extended her arm and finger and said: “Get out of my house!” De Keersmaeker’s way of working is slow, collaborative and nonlinear. She invents a sequence of movements and then asks dancers to go away and improvise, using the basic grammar she has given them and elaborating on it. When they return, she watches them and begins to harvest details they bring her — reducing or adding — until the language becomes a shared one. When she works with her company, this exchange can go on for months,

Tony and Maria, played by Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

even years. She began this work with the cast in a series of labs the previous winter, and they would continue it throughout the fall. She was getting to know them, beginning to thread their ideas into the work — but the choreography was still revealing itself. On Broadway, dancers are usually told exactly where to stand, how to space themselves, how to move. In the rehearsal room that first day, De Keersmaeker told the cast that this process would be different. “We’re going to start with basic material,” she said, modest yet also definitive, “and then make together new material — things we’re going to have to find out together.” Van Hove and De Keersmaeker had never worked together before, but they anticipated the uncertainty of joining forces with characteristic composure. “I have to get out of my comfort zone to work with her,” van Hove told me. “She has to get out of her comfort zone to work with me.” Their collaboration replicates an important aspect of the original “West Side Story,” which sprang from a group of ambitious, restless artists who recognized, in one another, forces of equal and opposite weight. For years, Robbins had been talking to the composer Leonard Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents about a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” that would seamlessly combine dance, music and storytelling. Discussion of the project began in the late 1940s — they first toyed with a story about Jews and Catholics on the Lower East Side. Over the next several years, as the three were diverted by other projects, none of them entirely lost sight of it. It was a shared fantasy — still inchoate but somehow powerful. One day in 1955, according to most accounts, Bernstein and Laurents were lounging by a hotel pool in Los Angeles. Bernstein was in town conducting; Laurents was working on a

screenplay. The subject turned to the headlines in that day’s paper about Chicano gang violence. The two fell to talking. What if they revised their original idea of an East Side story and made it about white and Latino teenagers? Bernstein, who was married to Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean, was immersed in Latin music, and he could immediately hear rhythms and melodies. When they told Robbins of their new idea, he seized on the dance possibilities. Getting away from their own experiences, as descendants of immigrant Jews, and mapping their sense of outsiderdom onto a different set of tribal animosities proved freeing. All three were gay men in various states of acceptance of their sexualities, and a story of forbidden love may have been a way to write clandestinely about their own lives. They set to work. Soon after a pair of experienced lyricists turned down the project in 1955, Laurents ran into Stephen Sondheim, who was then only 25, at a party and remembered having heard him play a few songs from an unproduced musical shortly before. He invited him to audition for Bernstein. By that point, Bernstein had written lyrics to a number of songs, but he quickly understood that Sondheim was the superior lyricist and was eager to work with him. All four men had uncompromisingly high standards but different strengths. Laurents, who honed his skills writing radio plays for the Army, was economical, tart and resistant to sentiment. Bernstein married emotional warmth to operatic bravura, and his capacious musical intelligence could synthesize Beethoven, bebop, mambo and Puerto Rican seis. Sondheim had a knack for embedding plot in lyrics and a playful, prickly sense of language. Robbins brought his fearsome perfectionism, his sense of search, his impeccable showman’s instinct for contrast and mood. Working together was not always easy. During the

How West Side Story Was Reborn 21

INITIAL SPREAD DESIGN “The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzingly active.”

Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

How

‘West Side Story’ Was

Reborn

Written by Sasha Weiss Photography by Philip Montgomery 14

The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn

16 The New York Times Magazine

temporal riddle she and van Hove had devised. Their production is set approximately now, but the music remains the music of the 1950s, or Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant reimagining of it. How could the new choreography be responsive to the music and still feel ofthe-moment? De Keersmaeker’s answer was dancers who brought “edge and fire and sensibility,” people who “have really chosen a life of examining the world through dance.” Dancing, she said, is a way of thinking. The dancers that they assembled — among them a gamin Latina woman with dark, sympathetic eyes and a confident stride (Yesenia Ayala, playing the role of Anita); a short, muscular black woman with a shaved head and a winning, defiant expression (Zuri Noelle Ford, a Jet); a swaggering, acrobatic black man who moved like lightning (Dharon E. Jones, also a Jet) — exuded vigor and raw assurance. They had chosen to cast people of different races to reflect America today. The diverse cast also heightened an absurdity built into the script: “West Side Story” is explicitly about a group of more settled immigrants, who believe themselves to be natives, battling a group of more recent ones. The mood in the rehearsal room was jubilant, the din of voices punctuated by little whoops of greeting. It was unclear as they were settling down if any of the cast members noticed that one of the creators was sitting among them. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker, both of whom are accustomed to commanding a room, took turns approaching Sondheim, almost diffidently. “Are you having a good time?” Sondheim asked, with friendly, deflationary wit. “Well,” De Keersmaeker said softly, “I just got here.” As De Keersmaeker and van Hove took their places in front of the room, the crowd quieted. They were each dressed elegantly, van Hove in a navy blue dress shirt, his gray hair the fine texture of a boy’s; De Keersmaeker in loose blacks, her white hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. There was something comical in the contrast between their cool, inscrutable expressions and the boisterous young Americans who sat before them. Van Hove began to speak — so quietly that it was difficult to hear — and the cast was rapt. Van Hove wears authority lightly, almost as an afterthought; he appears to be communing with the visions in his head. “West Side Story,” he explained, is “brutal, and very rough.” Crucially, it’s a world without parents. These young people are essentially orphans, forced to live by their wits, and defining their turf is the primary ratification of their existence. Cuts to the original production were being considered — no intermission, jettisoning “I Feel Pretty” (one of the show’s most charming songs) — precisely because van Hove wanted the play to move at the speed of adolescent instincts. These characters, he explained, have no time

Members of the Sharks.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

But a 21st-century production demanded a more complete renovation than had ever been attempted. He had in mind some drastic cuts and the jettisoning of Robbins’s beloved choreography. It took some persuading to secure permission from the estates of the original creators (with the exception of Stephen Sondheim, the only one living, who knew van Hove’s work and embraced the concept from the beginning). When they finally agreed, van Hove enlisted the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — a rigorous formalist who directs Rosas, a celebrated dance company, but had never made movement for musical theater. The show I saw in January was the product of more than three years of collaboration, during which “West Side Story” was dismantled and put back together again — a process that was intricate, physically demanding and sometimes maniacally ambitious. The production cost more than $15 million. The two months of previews that originally were planned — far more than for most shows — were extended by three more weeks when a lead actor was injured onstage (it is scheduled to open Feb. 20). The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzyingly active. Some people have walked out, but on the four nights I was there during previews, the house was full and the applause enthusiastic. Still, the show wasn’t finished yet — each day, video was being reshot, numbers were being restaged, new meaning was being discovered in the text. As opening night drew near, van Hove projected a wry calm. He and De Keersmaeker knew that their task was delicate, even perilous — an update of a beloved 20th-century work of popular art, one that had its own risks in 1957. They wanted to reveal just how risky and politically fraught it remains. So many of the contentious issues of contemporary life — poverty, immigration, racism, gender discrimination and dysphoria, sexual violence, police brutality — are written into the play from the very first scene. “You shouldn’t overdo it,” van Hove told me, “but it’s all there.” At 10 a.m. on a chilly morning in early October, Stephen Sondheim, wearing a patient smile, took his seat in a large Flatiron studio amid the cast members of “West Side Story” on the first day of rehearsal. The oldest of the gang members was 25, the youngest was 17, and they were all — in their own particular and mesmerizing ways — beautiful. Casting “West Side Story” has always been a challenge. You need actors who can handle the high-level dancing and singing but also convincingly play teenagers. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker auditioned more than 1,500 people during 2018 and 2019 in New York, Los Angeles and Miami before they found their 50 cast members, 33 of whom will be making their Broadway debuts. For De Keersmaeker, casting the right dancers was the solution to the

How West Side Story Was Reborn 17

to think about what they’re doing. They live in the now: They kill, they suffer, they kill again. “This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished. Not refined, so it goes right to your heart and tells the exact story it wants to tell.” There were murmurs of assent. The set (designed by Jan Versweyveld, one of van Hove’s main collaborators and his romantic partner) would be stark on its surface but would reveal, as the play went on, certain elaborate tricks, like the projection wall, which played video — sometimes recorded from the stage by the cast members themselves, sometimes sumptuous images shot on location in the Bronx, East Harlem and Puerto Rico. The stage would occasionally fill with fog. “It’s difficult to explain,” van Hove said softly. “But nature elements are important to me. That New York becomes a mythical city that could also be Shanghai or Buenos Aires. Nature elements will be onstage — it’s a little bit scary, but there will be rain.” “Nah, that’s cool!” someone from the crowd called out. Van Hove smiled, a little shyly, a little subversively. “It will be one big flood, like a Kurosawa film, where the earth splits open.” De Keersmaeker spoke next, more tersely. “Needless to say, this is a huge challenge. What makes ‘West Side Story’ so strong is the way that theater, music and dance come together and fuse together.” She admitted to being nervous: “As a European, you feel a little bit like, I’m going to be roasted!” Whereas van Hove’s manner is definite, De Keersmaeker’s is searching. When I first met her last summer, at the headquarters of her dance school and company in Brussels, she talked about the difference between their styles. “He’s really somebody who has an extremely articulated vision, and he knows how to embody that strategy from the beginning,” she explained, whereas for her, the “process itself indicates how the material is going to be developed. I very often start from people, how they are.” When van Hove first approached her in 2016 about joining the project, she didn’t reply for three weeks. De Keersmaeker knew that an American audience might not be sympathetic to a revision of Jerome Robbins’s cherished choreography — by a Belgian woman, no less. But she shared with Robbins an interest in stylized transformations of everyday movement: in showing the way human beings go from walking to fighting, moving through territory to defending it, how group animus can be contained or unleashed. Robbins observed kids at high school dances in Spanish Harlem in the ’50s, borrowing steps from the mambo and the jitterbug. Once De Keersmaeker decided to sign on, she watched YouTube videos of teenagers krumping on street corners in Los Angeles, break-dancing contests, circles of hip-hop dancers

Tony and Maria, played by Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

18 The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn 19

in clubs egging on central combatants. There’s a frantic energy to this movement, De Keersmaeker explained, a form of expression somewhere between “dancing, fighting and screaming.” It captures the way young people relate to the world, absorbing the onslaught of news, assimilating and rearranging the glut of digital imagery on social media, trying on multiple identities. In fall 2017, with five members of her company, she began marrying her geometric, highly formal dance to the conventions of contemporary movement. But De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death. The new choreography would draw, as her work always does, on the universal laws of the body, which she started to demonstrate that summer day in her office. As she talked, she got up from her chair and started to move. We lie down when we’re vulnerable, wounded, dying, she explained, sinking to the floor, propping herself up on an arm to face me; we lie down when we are engaging in erotic intimacy. She was exploring ideas of the horizontal, rolling and falling and lying down, but also of defying gravity, rising, leaping, propelling the body with knifelike arms. The arms, she explained, are our most immediate tools of expressiveness. They reach and punch and caress, push and point. She extended her arm and finger and said: “Get out of my house!” De Keersmaeker’s way of working is slow, collaborative and nonlinear. She invents a sequence of movements and then asks dancers to go away and improvise, using the basic grammar she has given them and elaborating on it. When they return, she watches them and begins to harvest details they bring her — reducing or adding — until the language becomes a shared one. When she works with her company, this exchange can go on for months, even years. She began this work with the cast in a series of labs the

20 The New York Times Magazine

previous winter, and they would continue it throughout the fall. She was getting to know them, beginning to thread their ideas into the work — but the choreography was still revealing itself. On Broadway, dancers are usually told exactly where to stand, how to space themselves, how to move. In the rehearsal room that first day, De Keersmaeker told the cast that this process would be different. “We’re going to start with basic material,” she said, modest yet also definitive, “and then make together new material — things we’re going to have to find out together.” Van Hove and De Keersmaeker had never worked together before, but they anticipated the uncertainty of joining forces with characteristic composure. “I have to get out of my comfort zone to work with her,” van Hove told me. “She has to get out of her comfort zone to work with me.” Their collaboration replicates an important aspect of the original “West Side Story,” which sprang from a group of ambitious, restless artists who recognized, in one another, forces of equal and opposite weight. For years, Robbins had been talking to the composer Leonard Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents about a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” that would seamlessly combine dance, music and storytelling. Discussion of the project began in the late 1940s — they first toyed with a story about Jews and Catholics on the Lower East Side. Over the next several years, as the three were diverted by other projects, none of them entirely lost sight of it. It was a shared fantasy — still inchoate but somehow powerful. One day in 1955, according to most accounts, Bernstein and Laurents were lounging by a hotel pool in Los Angeles. Bernstein was in town conducting; Laurents was working on a screenplay. The subject turned to the headlines in that day’s paper

How West Side Story Was Reborn 21

“

Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzingly active.

“

ONE REFINED SPREAD

Members of the Sharks and the Jets improvising movement for the rumble. Credit...Philip Montgomery

How

‘West Side Story’ Was

Reborn

Written by Sasha Weiss Photography by Philip Montgomery

The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn

Members of the Sharks.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

This is all very heavy,” he acknowledged. The script was “masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It’s unpolished. Not refined, so it goes right to your heart and tells the exact story it wants to tell.

“

The New York Times Magazine

How West Side Story Was Reborn

The New York Times Magazine

Tony and Maria, played by Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

transformations of everyday movement: in showing the way human beings go from walking to fighting, moving through territory to defending it, how group animus can be contained or unleashed. Robbins observed kids at high school dances in Spanish Harlem in the ’50s, borrowing steps from the mambo and the jitterbug. Once De Keersmaeker decided to sign on, she watched YouTube videos of teenagers krumping on street corners in Los Angeles, breakdancing contests, circles of hip-hop dancers in clubs egging on central combatants. There’s a frantic energy to this movement, De Keersmaeker explained, a form of expression somewhere between “dancing, fighting and screaming.” It captures the way young people relate to the world, absorbing the onslaught of news, assimilating and rearranging the glut of digital imagery on social media, trying on multiple identities. In fall 2017, with five members of her company, she began marrying her geometric, highly formal dance to the conventions of contemporary movement. But De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death. The new choreography would draw, as her work always does, on the universal laws of the body, which she started to demonstrate that summer day in her office. As she talked, she got up from her chair and started to move. We lie down when we’re vulnerable, wounded, dying, she explained, sinking to the floor, propping herself up on an arm to face me; we lie down when we are engaging in erotic intimacy. She was exploring ideas of the horizontal, rolling and falling and lying down, but also of defying gravity, rising, leaping, propelling the body with knifelike arms. The arms, she explained, are our most immediate tools of expressiveness. They reach and punch and caress, push and point. She extended her arm and finger and said: “Get out of my house!”

“

De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death.

“

De Keersmaeker’s way of working is slow, collaborative and nonlinear. She invents a sequence of movements and then asks dancers to go away and improvise, using the basic grammar she has given them and elaborating on it. When they return, she watches them and begins to harvest details they bring her — reducing or adding — until the language becomes a shared one. When she works with her company, this exchange can go on for months, even years. She began this work with the cast in a series of labs the previous winter, and they would continue it throughout the fall. She was getting to know them, beginning to thread their ideas into the work — but the choreography was still revealing itself. On Broadway, dancers are usually told exactly where to stand, how to space themselves, how to move. In the rehearsal room that first day, De Keersmaeker told the cast that this process would be different. “We’re going to start with basic material,” she said,

modest yet also definitive, “and then make together new material — things we’re going to have to find out together.” Van Hove and De Keersmaeker had never worked together before, but they anticipated the uncertainty of joining forces with characteristic composure. “I have to get out of my comfort zone to work with her,” van Hove told me. “She has to get out of her comfort zone to work with me.” Their collaboration replicates an important aspect of the original “West Side Story,” which sprang from a group of ambitious, restless artists who recognized, in one another, forces of equal and opposite weight. For years, Robbins had been talking to the composer Leonard Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents about a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” that would seamlessly combine dance, music and storytelling. Discussion of the project began in the late 1940s — they first toyed with a story about Jews and Catholics on the Lower East Side. Over the next several years, as the three were diverted by other projects, none of them entirely lost sight of it. It was a shared fantasy — still inchoate but somehow powerful. One day in 1955, according to most accounts, Bernstein and Laurents were lounging by a hotel pool in Los Angeles. Bernstein was in town conducting; Laurents was working on a screenplay. The subject turned to the headlines in that day’s paper about Chicano gang violence. The two fell to talking. What if they revised their original idea of an East Side story and made it about white and Latino teenagers? Bernstein, who was married to Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean, was immersed in Latin music, and he could immediately hear rhythms and melodies. When they told Robbins of their new idea, he seized on the dance possibilities. Getting away from their own experiences, as descendants of immigrant Jews, and mapping their sense of outsiderdom onto a different set of tribal animosities proved freeing. All three were gay men in various states of acceptance of their sexualities, and a story of forbidden love may have been a way to write clandestinely about their own lives. They set to work. Soon after a pair of experienced lyricists turned down the project in 1955, Laurents ran into Stephen Sondheim, who was then only 25, at a party and remembered having heard him play a few songs from an unproduced musical shortly before. He invited him to audition for Bernstein. By that point, Bernstein had written lyrics to a number of songs, but he quickly understood that Sondheim was the superior lyricist and was eager to work with him. All four men had uncompromisingly high standards but different strengths. Laurents, who honed his skills writing radio plays for the Army, was economical, tart and resistant to sentiment. Bernstein

How West Side Story Was Reborn

JUSTIFICATION Use your body text font for this exercise. Hyphenation ON Duplicate page and change the font to see how it changes. Repeat 4 x

keep track... word spacing: letterspacing

80% 0%

100% 0%

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watchers to nonwatchcrs, infecting children and their parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact well alter the children stopped watching the show. * By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. Bui it isn’t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find the kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile.... Television has no potential, no power to do that.” Good teaching is interactive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. * But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner— Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York — set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from television commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or about their own emotions. Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children’s show had, and the extraor-

JUSTIFICATION Use your body text font for this exercise. Hyphenation ON Duplicate page and change the font to see how it changes. Repeat 4 x

keep track... word spacing: letterspacing

100% 0%

110% 5%

110% 10%

JUSTIFICATION Use your body text font for this exercise. Hyphenation ON Duplicate page and change the font to see how it changes. Repeat 4 x

keep track... word spacing: letterspacing

80% 5%

110% 5%

120% 5%

JUSTIFICATION Use your body text font for this exercise. Hyphenation ON Duplicate page and change the font to see how it changes. Repeat 4 x

keep track... word spacing: letterspacing

50% 15%

70% 15%

100% 15%

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epi demic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began ele mentary school, spreading prolearning values from watch ers to nonwatchcrs, infecting children and their parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact well alter the children stopped watching the show. * By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. Bui it isn’t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find the kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile.... Television has no potential, no power to do that.” Good teaching is interactive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. * But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner— Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York — set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from tele vision commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or

FINAL SPREAD LAYOUT Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020

How

‘West Side Story’ Was

The New York Times Magazine

Reborn

Written by Sasha Weiss Photography by Philip Montgomery

How West Side Story Was Reborn

“

The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzingly active.

Members of the Sharks and the Jets improvising movement for the rumble. Credit...Philip Montgomery

The New York Times Magazine

gangs who try to destroy each other — were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti. Here, Robbins’s bounding, almost joyful sense of menace has been replaced by something more inward. There’s no snapping — instead there’s swaying, slow walking. The complexions of the groups are different, too. The Jets, who consider themselves the true masters of their neighborhood, are not, as they were in the original production and its 1961 film version, all white. The Sharks are of Latino descent (in the movie, many of them were white, and all wore brown makeup). It’s not the 1950s anymore but a world, like our own, of images — a place where a face instantly becomes a photograph projected on a screen, an assertion of selfhood. And we are not being entertained — at least not yet. We are being prodded, maybe provoked. What are these people capable of? This new staging originated several years ago in the mind of the director Ivo van Hove, who runs a major theater in Amsterdam and who has become, in recent years, a Broadway brand name, known for his bloody, irreverent interpretations of classics: “A View From the Bridge” and “The Crucible.” His work has been called merciless, brutal and gimmicky but also ingenious, imaginative and true — and he welcomes this divided response. Van Hove had admired “West Side Story” since he saw the movie as a teenager growing up in rural Belgium. In recent years, the play’s portrayal of a divided society acquired a new urgency for him, and he decided he wanted to offer his own vision of the classic show. But a 21st-century production demanded a more complete

renovation than had ever been attempted. He had in mind some drastic cuts and the jettisoning of Robbins’s beloved choreography. It took some persuading to secure permission from the estates of the original creators (with the exception of Stephen Sondheim, the only one living, who knew van Hove’s work and embraced the concept from the beginning). When they finally agreed, van Hove enlisted the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — a rigorous formalist who directs Rosas, a celebrated dance company, but had never made movement for musical theater. The show I saw in January was the product of more than three years of collaboration, during which “West Side Story” was dismantled and put back together again — a process that was intricate, physically demanding and sometimes maniacally ambitious. The production cost more than $15 million. The two months of previews that originally were planned — far more than for most shows — were extended by three more weeks when a lead actor was injured onstage (it is scheduled to open Feb. 20). The dancing is visceral and sharp; the play’s inherent violence graphic; the staging, with the video elements, dizzyingly active. Some people have walked out, but on the four nights I was there during previews, the house was full and the applause enthusiastic. Still, the show wasn’t finished yet — each day, video was being reshot, numbers were being restaged, new meaning was being discovered in the text. As opening night drew near, van Hove projected a wry calm. He and De Keersmaeker knew that their task was delicate, even perilous — an update of a beloved 20th-century work of popular art, one that had its own risks in 1957. They wanted to reveal just how risky and politically fraught it remains. So many of the contentious issues of contemporary life — poverty, immigration, racism, gender discrimination and dysphoria, sexual violence, police brutality — are written into the play from the very first scene. “You shouldn’t overdo it,” van Hove told me, “but it’s all there.” At 10 a.m. on a chilly morning in early October, Stephen Sondheim, wearing a patient smile, took his seat in a large Flatiron studio amid the cast members of “West Side Story” on the first day of rehearsal. The oldest of the gang members was 25, the youngest was 17, and they were all — in their own particular and mesmerizing ways — beautiful. Casting “West Side Story” has always been a challenge. You need actors who can handle the high-level dancing and singing but also convincingly play teenagers. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker auditioned more than 1,500 people during 2018 and 2019 in New York, Los Angeles and Miami before they found their 50 cast members, 33 of whom will be making their Broadway debuts. For De Keersmaeker, casting the right dancers was the solution to the temporal riddle she and van Hove had devised. Their production is How West Side Story Was Reborn

Members of the Sharks.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

“

The New York Times Magazine

“

How West Side Story Was Reborn

“

The New York Times Magazine

Tony and Maria, played by Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

“

De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death.

“

But De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins’s classicism and captured the musical’s elemental themes of love and death. The new choreography would draw, as her work always does, on the universal laws of the body, which she started to demonstrate that summer day in her office. As she talked, she got up from her chair and started to move. We lie down when we’re vulnerable, wounded, dying, she explained, sinking to the floor, propping herself up on an arm to face me; we lie down when we are engaging in erotic intimacy. She was exploring ideas of the horizontal, rolling and falling and lying down, but also of defying gravity, rising, leaping, propelling the body with knifelike arms. The arms, she explained, are our most immediate tools of expressiveness. They reach and punch and caress, push and point. She extended her

arm and finger and said: “Get out of my house!” De Keersmaeker’s way of working is slow, collaborative and nonlinear. She invents a sequence of movements and then asks dancers to go away and improvise, using the basic grammar she has given them and elaborating on it. When they return, she watches them and begins to harvest details they bring her — reducing or adding — until the language becomes a shared one. When she works with her company, this exchange can go on for months, even years. She began this work with the cast in a series of labs the previous winter, and they would continue it throughout the fall. She was getting to know them, beginning to thread their ideas into the work — but the choreography was still revealing itself. On Broadway, dancers are usually told exactly where to stand, how to space themselves, how to move. In the rehearsal room that first day, De Keersmaeker told the cast that this process would be different. “We’re going to start with basic material,” she said, modest yet also definitive, “and then make together new material — things we’re going to have to find out together.” Van Hove and De Keersmaeker had never worked together before, but they anticipated the uncertainty of joining forces with characteristic composure. “I have to get out of my comfort zone to work with her,” van Hove told me. “She has to get out of her comfort zone to work with me.” Their collaboration replicates an important aspect of the original “West Side Story,” which sprang from a group of ambitious, restless artists who recognized, in one another, forces of equal and opposite weight.

How West Side Story Was Reborn