By the 1950s, Jews were finding ways to assimilate into white America while new concerns about racialized violence among newer immigrant groups, particularly Latino communities, were bubbling up in the city. The original show’s transformation from a Jewish story to a Puerto Rican one mirrored the American Jewish community’s own assimilation and shedding of its outsider status in the mid-20th century. Yet in the current cultural climate, when audiences are highly sensitive to onscreen depictions of underrepresented groups, new questions have emerged: Were Spielberg and Kushner the right people to attempt a remake of “West Side Story,” or should that task have fallen to Puerto Rican creatives? And there is also a deeper question: Should the show, which some critics and academics have said is fundamentally outdated, even have been remade at all? This new “West Side Story,” which is being released just weeks after Sondheim’s death, retains the general arc of the original musical while making notable changes to the story and presentation, including casting Latino actors to play the Sharks and their significant others. Sixty years after the first “West Side Story” film was released, another two highly acclaimed Jewish creatives - director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner - have returned to the material to helm a hotly anticipated remake. The Puerto Rican element also allowed him to introduce a mambo – which gives the score a "hyper-contemporary" feel, said Valiere.The Jewish creators of “West Side Story,” Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, on the opening night of the original Broadway musical, Sept. The racial element – with the Puerto Rican Sharks taunted by the white Jets – resonated with Bernstein, who had struggled through anti-Semitism as a younger man. It struck them as the perfect framing for the updating of 'Romeo and Juliet' that they had been searching for. The idea for 'West Side Story' supposedly came about when Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents were sat around a pool in Hollywood and came across a newspaper story about gang warfare. However, many people will say that 'West Side Story' is the great American opera." She said he spent his whole life "wishing he could write the great American opera. "He had to work all the harder to get people to focus on his other works, especially his symphonic works."
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"It became a sort of albatross around his neck," his daughter told Britain's Radio Times. The irascible Bernstein, who was head of the New York Philharmonic by then, also grew tired of constantly being reminded of his most famous work. "The music of 'West Side Story' transcends classical music, with elements of jazz, be-bop and Latin rhythms," he added.Īlthough the operatic recording went down as a classic of the genre, it was a fraught process, with Bernstein famously throwing a tantrum at Spanish star tenor Jose Carreras as he struggled with the pronunciation and pacing of playing the all-American Tony. "In the documentary about the recording, you can hear him saying that he thought it would have aged badly, but it hadn't at all," said Laurent Valiere, host of a new podcast about the movie. Having never actually conducted his own score – either for the stage or screen versions – he was invited to re-record it with opera singers in 1984. The Wu-Tang's lyrics over the sample – "Knew this bitch named Traj, she had a hella fine ashcan ass" – seem rather distant from the vibe of the original, though that only emphasises how deeply the musical had embedded itself in American culture.īernstein, who died in 1990, had not expected the score to have such a long life. The inclusions were less obvious when it came to the Wu-Tang Clan sampling elements for 'Maria' in 1997, from the song of the same name in 'West Side Story'. One of the pioneers of hard rock, Alice Cooper, also mined the musical for inspiration on his 'Gutter Cat vs The Jets' in 1972, using the theme song from one of the rival gangs in the story. Three decades after its appearance, Metallica used a clip from one of its biggest tunes, 'America', as the surprise intro to 'Don't Tread On Me' on their seminal 'Black Album'. Early reviews suggest that Steven Spielberg's new film version proves the music still resonates today.
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The original play first appeared on Broadway in 1957, before transferring to the silver screen in 1961.