Why <em>West Side Story</em> Abandoned Its Queer Narrative

“I think West Side Story for the Latino community has been our greatest blessing and our greatest curse,” Lin-Manuel Miranda told The Washington Post in 2009. Miranda was cast as Bernardo, the Sharks’ leader, in a sixth-grade performance, and was thrilled, as a Nuyorican who spent summers on the island, to see the question of whether to return to Puerto Rico staged in “America.” He directed West Side Story at his high school in 1998, bringing in his dad to teach his Upper East Side classmates how to act Latino. That same year, Paul Simon’s short-lived musical The Capeman ran on Broadway, dramatizing the mid-century story of a Puerto Rican teenager convicted of stabbing a white boy to death. “It was us as gang members in the ’50s, again,” Miranda explained to Grantland. “We should be able to be onstage without a knife in our hand. Once.” In college, Miranda wrote his own musical, In the Heights, which celebrated the daily struggles of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican New Yorkers—no knives involved. It became a 2008 Tony-winning hit, and Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the script for West Side Story, hired him to translate some of the Sharks’ lyrics into Spanish for the previous Broadway revival, in 2009.

The Belgian director Ivo van Hove, known for his radical revisions of American classics—stripped-down, often brutally violent stagings with dynamic video projections—thought he could create a West Side Story that represents America today. He told me that he got the idea for his production during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the rise of Black Lives Matter. “I thought, There’s a story that has been telling these things about America, an America that we had forgotten that it still existed.” He picked up the script of West Side Story, which he’d seen on television as a teenager in Flanders, and was amazed that its dialogue about rival gangs still spoke to the present. “It touches on poverty, it touches on racism, it touches on prejudice, it touches on violence,” van Hove said. He proposed a new vision of the show to the producer Scott Rudin: “a West Side Story for the 21st century.”

There’s no mistaking van Hove’s version for the one you grew up with. Instead of brownface, the Sharks reflect the youthful diversity of Latinidad, tattooed with the word tiburón (Spanish for “shark”). Instead of all-white American boys in high-waisted pants, the Jets include black men and women in sweats, hoodies, and sports bras. There’s no more finger-snapping ballet; instead of Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, van Hove tapped Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker—known for angular moves that Beyoncé lifted for her “Countdown” music video—to channel hip-hop and club styles. (At the cast’s request, De Keersmaeker told me, Latinx choreographers were also hired to make the Sharks’ dances more authentic.)

Isaac Powell’s Tony looks fresh and rough, with a scar on his cheek and “Jets for Life” tattooed on his neck. Shereen Pimentel’s Maria is powerful and ardent, no dainty ingenue. Perhaps most striking, there’s no visible set, just an exposed stage painted black with giant video projections along the back wall—now a close-up on Tony’s face; now a scene in Maria’s bedroom, performed offstage; now an extension of the deserted street where the gangs roam; now a shot of a white police officer pointing a gun at an unarmed black man.