Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! In Bilingual ‘West Side’

More than 50 years after the musical “West Side Story” had its original Broadway premiere, it is set to return in February in a darker, grittier, bilingual revival, the show’s producers said on Wednesday.

In an element that its director, Arthur Laurents, said would heighten the passion and authenticity of the show, much of the dialogue — both spoken and sung — will be in Spanish.

“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray to the translation.”

Mr. Laurents, the author of the book for “West Side Story” and the director of the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” whose book he also wrote, has vowed to make this revival a more realistic version of the original, a teenage-gang-romance musical modeled after “Romeo and Juliet” and set on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. With music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it was first staged on Broadway, to great critical success, in 1957. Writing in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it “a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/theater/17bway.html

particularly for the 30 piece orchestra the show will be using, a size unheard of in today's broadway theaters. It will be interesting to see how Mr. Laurents integrates the languages together, especially if its any of the songs.

oh, those hot-blooded Latinos! Funny how Americans can't resist an ethnic stereotype even when they write a musical supposedly condemning ethnic stereotypes.

Cursing and swearing in Germanic languages is much clumsier than Romance languages.

From your first opening night to your last cabaret!

If they're still dancing during the fight scenes, it will not be all that darker and grittier.

There was a comedy skit from a show called, "House of Buggin'" which was essentially a Hispanic "In Living Color" (came on right after it for the short time it was on), where a gang was walking down an alley, and they were suddenly attacked by members of the Sharks with their pompadours and finger-snapping and dance moves. A member of the normal gang got fed up and shot the leader, causing the other Sharks to run away. They walk a bit longer and then they're attacked by the cast of "Cats!" causing one of the members to say, "Man, I hate being in a gang in the theater district."

I thought it was funny.

TlalocW

People usually run away from gang wars in real life.....

That sounds like what I've been doing in my head all along and wishing they'd done from the first.