As a white, non-Latinx person, I’m not the right person to judge that. The question is whether the stereotypes are vile, destructive. Without the stereotypes, you probably couldn’t have ensembles. They often rely on stereotypes to make larger points than they could if they focused on specific, actual characteristics. GREEN I’ve never seen musicals as documentaries. “I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean - to me, and to the ‘average’ American.” Luckily, I had already gotten to know it by then - from the music. JESSE GREEN The first time I saw it was in a high school production featuring extremely clumsy dancing, warbly singing and an all-white (non-Latinx) cast. SCOTT HELLER What stays with you about the first time you saw “West Side Story”? Or the most memorable time? Scott Heller, the interim editor of Arts & Leisure, kicked off the conversation, and it got going quickly from there. They gathered before seeing the new film and just before news broke that Sondheim, the show’s lyricist and the last survivor from its creative team, had died at 91. We asked five experts to weigh in: Jesse Green, the chief theater critic at The New York Times Isabelia Herrera, a Times critic fellow Carina del Valle Schorske, a contributing writer at the Times Magazine and the author of a 2020 Times Opinion piece challenging the show’s place in the culture the Tony Award-winning playwright Matthew López ( “The Inheritance”) and Misha Berson, the author of “Something’s Coming, Something Good: ‘West Side Story’ and the American Imagination.” Not to mention that the 1961 movie featured the white actress Natalie Wood playing the Latina role of Maria. And now, this month, a movie remake by none other than Steven Spielberg.Īnd yet, from the beginning, the show (directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Arthur Laurents) has discomfited some audience members and critics - for its violence, its mix of tones and, especially, for the way it underscores stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as gang members. The show has been regularly revived, most recently on Broadway last year in a short-lived radical rethinking by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove. The 1961 movie won best picture and nine other Oscars.

The score, featuring such Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim classics as “Somewhere” and “Maria,” is considered one of the best in Broadway history. Since its Broadway premiere in 1957, “West Side Story” - a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” and created by four white men - has been at once beloved and vexing.

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