Some people may think me an artistic luddite, but I have a major beef with the Broadway-bound revival of "West Side Story". The new staging is directed by librettist Arthur Laurents. It's more authentic in that the Puerto Ricans are played by Latinos and the dialogue and songs between the Puerto Ricans are spoken and sung in Spanish, excepting one.
America! is sung in English and the dialogue leading up to it is spoken in English. But very abruptly at the beginning of Act II, all inter-Puerto Rican dialogue and song is in Spanish. Where's the authenticity of that? If you're going to sing America! in English because everyone knows it and might reject the play flat-out without it, why not Siento Hermosa which people also know (more from being parodied by men since the first staging)?
There's also my concern with the "authenticity" of its being in Spanish. Sure, first-generation immigrants speak their native tongue. But why not see "Fiddler on the Roof" done in Yiddish? Or "Evita" in Spanish? Or "The Lion King" in Swahili? Or "Aida" in Arabic? Or "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in Latin? Or "Zorba the Greek" in Greek? Or, more recently, Valkyrie (the Tom Cruise movie) in German? If you want to be authentic, let's really be authentic. To hell with whether the audience can understand it or not.
Which leads me to another rub. There are no subtitles in the new staging. When you go to opera, there are subtitles on a scrim. Mr. Laurents thought that subtitles would distract from the play. Did he stop to think that, in our multilingual society, there are people who speak languages other than Spanish who, yes while being able to get the gist of the scene from the acting itself, don't understand the impact of the powerful words written by Laurents in the first place? Not all theatre-goers are middle-age and older folks who know the story well enough to get by on memory. Try introducing the new staging to teenagers who speak Russian, German, and French rather than Spanish. The confrontational scene between Maria and Anita is completely lost on them.
Perhaps I'm being a whiny WASP for whom for years the theatrical universe centered around. Are we now feeling the white-man's burden in all things entertainment? If this is the wave of the future, perhaps my entertainment dollars are better spent in venues that don't feel the need to change the libretto just to appease the fastest growing demographic, most of whom probably won't darken the door of the theatre it lands in.
For Pete Sake!
3 weeks ago
Great show although I would personally not see it in Spanish.
ReplyDeleteHere is a related story from the Wall Street Journal about this revival
"I've Just Met a Girl Named Josefina
A revival of 'West Side Story' bets on a little-known actress from Argentina
By ELLEN GAMERMAN
Arthur Laurents needed a Maria for his upcoming Broadway revival of "West Side Story." The 91-year-old director, who wrote the libretto for the legendary 1957 musical, found her on YouTube.
Josefina Scaglione was an Argentine stage actress working in Buenos Aires. She spoke English with a rich Spanish accent, was unknown to American audiences and was exactly what Mr. Laurents had been searching for.
The hunt for one of the central characters in "West Side Story," which Mr. Laurents is restaging with parts of the book and lyrics translated into Spanish, began about a year ago. The show's producers wanted a particular combination for their Maria -- a Latina, a strong soprano and a skilled musical theater actress who didn't look too old for the part. They scoured New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. No luck. "It was impossible," says Jeffrey Seller, one of the producers.
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Aaron Clamage for The Wall Street Journal
Josefina Scaglione, in her dressing room at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Then last fall, Mr. Laurents heard about Ms. Scaglione through friends in the Buenos Aires arts community, who directed him to a YouTube video of her singing the melody of Libertango, by Astor Piazzolla. The director had only seen YouTube once before -- someone sent him a clip of Patti LuPone awhile back -- and he was mesmerized by Ms. Scaglione's performance. Soon after, he flew her to New York for an audition and gave her the part the same day, just three days after her 21st birthday.
"She has this incredible, ineffable something," the director says. "She's trained as an opera singer, she's trained as a ballet dancer and she's trained as an actress. It's unbelievable in somebody that young."
Now playing through Jan. 17 at the National Theatre in Washington, the show is scheduled to open at New York's Palace Theatre on March 19. When the curtain fell after the first preview performance in Washington, Matt Cavenaugh, who plays Tony, hugged his costar. "I'm so thankful they searched far and wide for you," he told her.
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Watch: Josefina Scaglione's YouTube video
When Mr. Laurents first called the willowy soprano, who speaks with lushly rolled r's and sometimes interrupts conversation to ask the meaning of an English word, she was performing the role of Amber Von Tussle in a Buenos Aires production of "Hairspray." Before that she was in an Argentine "Cinderella." The only other musicals in her Playbill bio include "Annie" and "Fame," but that's reaching back; she played Annie at age 9 and, at 14, a "Fame" character whose name she now can't remember. She'd only been to the United States once, for four days, before arriving in New York for rehearsals last November. "I feel like Maria in a lot of ways in my own life," she says. "It takes a lot of courage to leave your country."
The casting of Ms. Scaglione was part of an effort by Mr. Laurents to create a more authentic "West Side Story," one that gives more depth to the Puerto Rican characters and, he hopes, will resonate with Latino audiences. The revised book and lyrics include sequences translated into Spanish by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Tony Award-winning musical "In the Heights." Characters alternate between English and Spanish within songs and scenes. "I Feel Pretty" has become "Siento Hermosa," and "A Boy Like That/I Have a Love" is reinvented as "Un Hombre Asi/Tengo un Amor." The new language can be striking: When Maria sees Tony after learning he has killed her brother, she lunges at him and cries, "Asesino!" -- Spanish for "killer" -- again and again.
The revival also includes other updated touches in an attempt to portray a grittier impression of urban gang life. In one sequence, an angry Jet gives someone the finger, and during the dance in the gym scene, Jets and Sharks grind and grope their partners in ways that are much more suggestive than in the original choreography. But characters still utter some of the more innocent expressions, such as "leapin' lizards" and "gloryosky," that are sprinkled throughout the original.
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Joan Marcus
Josefina Scaglione and her costar Matt Cavenaugh
Mr. Laurents, who also wrote the book for "Gypsy" and directed that show's current Broadway revival starring Ms. LuPone, decided it was time for a new look at "West Side Story." It's been nearly 30 years since the last Broadway revival of the musical; that production was directed by Jerome Robbins, the show's original director and choreographer. Today, most people know the musical, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein, from the 1961 movie starring Natalie Wood.
Mr. Seller says it took two months to put together funding for the $14 million production; investors include Weinstein Co., headed by movie moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein. If the show sells 90% of its tickets at full price in the first year it will recoup its cost, Mr. Seller says. It's sold a "robust" $8 million in advance tickets, he says.
Whether audiences will pay $120 for seats in an economic downturn remains to be seen, however. The final performance of "Gypsy," which won three Tony Awards, is slated for Sunday, nearly two months before the scheduled end of its limited run. And last weekend nine Broadway shows were shuttered. Some were at the end of their limited runs, but others, like "Hairspray," were victims of the poor economy.
The downturn, says "Hairspray" producer Margo Lion, "really did make staying alive an impossibility for us." Ms. Lion says she wanted to keep the musical running through this summer, but weak ticket sales in September forced a different outcome. "We didn't see the advance growing, so it was obvious that we were going to have to try and go out in a blaze of glory at one of the high moments of the season," she says.
Some producers say there will still be hit shows, but musicals that are modest successes may not last long. Theatergoers may prefer to choose a familiar revival when they have limited money to spend. Still, brand names come with their own set of challenges.
"'West Side Story' is one of the great musicals -- their problem is a revival has to be better than the original," says Elizabeth I. McCann, a veteran Broadway producer currently raising money for a revival of "Hair." "It has to be better than people's memory of it, because you're fighting that memory."
On a recent afternoon at the National Theatre, Ms. Scaglione fidgeted in a creaky chair in her dressing room, playing with the zippers on her black leather boots, tying up her hair in a knot, untying it. She was at turns open, beaming as she described the dog she left with relatives (a shih tzu she named Romeo long before she was cast in the musical inspired by "Romeo and Juliet"), and guarded, clamming up when asked about her boyfriend.
She shares the stage with powerful performers like Karen Olivo, fresh from the Broadway production of "In the Heights." Ms. Olivo plays a sharp-edged Anita with lusty moves and major attitude. Ms. Scaglione says her directions from Mr. Laurents and music director Patrick Vaccariello were straightforward: perform the way she did during her New York rehearsals. "Open your mouth and sing," she says she was told.
Ms. Scaglione says her Latin background is enough to help her understand the role, even though she is Argentine, not Puerto Rican. "I love dancing salsa and Latin rhythms and everything, so I think I'm related to that," she says. She's also been practicing her Puerto Rican dialect.
So far, she says, the only thing tripping her up is emotion. While rehearsing "Tonight" with Mr. Cavenaugh, she says they got so absorbed that they forgot whose parts were whose. "When we're so in the moment," she says, "we forget about singing."
Offstage, Ms. Scaglione often seeks out George Akram, a native Venezuelan who plays Bernardo, her brother. The two sometimes translate for each other, he says, adding, "We're there for each other." Ms. Scaglione says they've become "like brother and sister in real life." She says the two share the "Latin way of being," hugging and kissing people when they meet them.
They went shopping for Christmas presents in Soho, saw a tango performance together, and hunted around Manhattan for yerba maté, an herbal beverage that's a staple of South American culture. "Maté is for my soul," she says. "It reminds me of my country." (She also prefers a good Argentine steak over American beef. So far, she says, she's mostly been sticking to fish.)
Raised in Rosario, a city of nearly a million people near Buenos Aires, Ms. Scaglione says she used to sing and dance around the house as a kid; though her parents work in medicine, two of her grandparents were professional violinists. When she was 9, she begged her parents to enroll her in a school for the arts that a friend was attending. Soon after, she was cast in the title role in a production of "Annie" in Rosario.
She later spent a summer studying dancing and acting on a scholarship at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and after high school moved to Buenos Aires to pursue a career in musical theater. She's never made a CD. The YouTube video was a calling card she made in case a casting director called. "I just wanted to have something to show," she says.
When she came to New York in the fall, Ms. Scaglione asked her mother to live with her for the first couple of weeks as she settled into the apartment near Times Square that the production staff found for her. The day her mother left, Ms. Scaglione says she panicked: "I was just like, 'I want to go with you!'"
At the curtain call on the night of the first preview in Washington four weeks ago, Ms. Scaglione was in tears. She says she was thinking about her parents, who will not see her perform until her Broadway debut, and about the new life unfolding for her: "This is a huge step for me."
I really don't like "redo's".. I think if they want a more "latin" play, they should write one.. I don't think the latino community will support it the way they think. We'll see..
ReplyDeletehugs,
Jean
Here's a snippet of the Washington Post's review of West Side Story:
ReplyDeleteTo "West Side Story's" generations of fans -- and the smaller legions who know the score by heart -- the alterations will probably not affect comprehension. (A decision was made during the show's preview weeks to abandon the use of English surtitles for scenes in Spanish.) Singing "I Feel Pretty" in Spanish restores vitality to a chestnut and won't seriously impede understanding, since its meaning is pretty much summed up in its title.
Still, a serious miscalculation has been made in the shorter second act and the culminating drama of Anita's confrontation with Maria, after Anita discovers Maria has just slept with Bernardo's killer. Anita's accusatory "A Boy Like That" and Maria's defiant response, "I Have a Love," are rendered entirely in Spanish. Unlike "I Feel Pretty," the numbers form a protracted musical conversation, critical to the plot. "Tengo un amor/Un amor sin igual" ("I have a love, a love without equal"), Maria sings, imploring Anita to see her predicament from her perspective, and thus help her to run away with Tony.
Non-Spanish speakers and those new to the musical will be frustratingly at sea, and may have to find satisfaction in other aspects of the production.
People NOT buying a ticket will soon show this producer that artsy and financially successful often do not go hand in hand. And, without financially successful, the production will fold... Survival of the fittest.
ReplyDeleteMaybe an Hispanic composer can replace Bernstein's score for West Side Story with a nice, tidy medley of Puerto Rican folk songs or such.
ReplyDelete