march 2–15, 2020 | new york 79ies to include bandeaux, sequined dance
slacks, and temporary face tattoos. (Call it
elevated gang-leisure.) Soon, the enormous
back wall fills with their images. A cam-
era mounted on the balcony rail zooms in
to show us 20-foot-high close-ups of the
company sneering and posing hard. Seen
from the audience, they look so grim! But
onscreen, they look ... so pretty. The choreog-
raphy of the long camera pan along their line
turns the Jets and Sharks from toughs giving
us a hard stare into models serving runway-
ready stink eye. That’s the first gesture the
video undermines; it won’t be the last.
Van Hove’s interpretation is Hobbesian:
brutal and short. The lush 1957 Romeo-
and-Juliet story has been tightened to an
intermissionless hour and 45 minutes, and
one of Sondheim’s least-favorite songs, “I
Feel Pretty,” has been chopped entirely.
Robbins’s choreography is gone, replaced by
the Belgian postmodernist Anne Teresa De
Keersmaeker’s work, though her contribu-
tion is a surprisingly conventional mélange
of styles. The musical itself forces her hand:
If people sing about mamboing, then they’re
gonna have to mambo.
Even though this show has been freaking
out critics since its beginnings, the new team
has decided to (further?) emphasize its sav-
agery. The already vile “taunting” of Maria’s
friend Anita (Yesenia Ayala, a profoundly
effective actor and astounding dancer)
has been translated into an unambiguous
rape scene caught in a corner of the set by
a voyeuristic camera. The racial makeup
has changed; the Jets, written as a white
gang, are now a diverse group led by a black
Riff (Dharon E. Jones), sometimes deliber-
ately making it difficult to tell the Jets and
Sharks apart. The authority figures remain
all white, though: Doc (Daniel Oreskes,
affecting in tiny moments) is still the well-
meaning Jewish pharmacist; Lieutenant
Schrank (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Officer
Krupke (Danny Wolohan) are still terrify-
ing, unsympathetic portraits of white legal
coercion. These attempts at political com-
mentary rebound unflatteringly, since the
show seems unsure of how to handle explicit
violence when the fights are so dancy. The
sly, vaudevillian “Gee, Officer Krupke” is
already about police malfeasance, so put-
ting a montage behind it of black people in
handcuffs and a shrine to those cut down by
cops’ bullets is somehow both embarrass-
ingly on the nose and a grave tonal misfire.
And real-world trouble has already
touched this production. Protests continue
over Amar Ramasar’s casting as Bernardo.
Last year, Ramasar was one of the New York
City Ballet dancers suspended and expelled
for exchanging nude photographs of women
in the company. After arbitration, he was
reinstated. Van Hove and producer Scott
Rudin have both been asked about the choice
to cast him; both have expressed full sup-
port. The director has described the dancer
as “acquitted,” which may mean he hasn’t
understood the NYCB’s disciplinary actions.
But Ramasar, once cast, actually needed
a very different form of directorial support.
West Side Story requires enormous things of
its performers, and Ramasar’s singing voice
is unsteady; his acting, rendered ludicrous
by his stage–Puerto Rican accent, hammy.
Among so many triple and double threats,
even his balletic elegance—when he jumps,
it’s like a dolphin spinning—seems like a
small offering. In Ramasar’s Broadway
debut, Carousel, Jack O’Brien’s production
heavily weighted the dancer’s time onstage
toward movement, bending to his strengths.
Here, he is one of many in the “America”
ensemble and is lost in the scrum of the fight
scenes. De Keersmaeker never offers him a
bravura sequence. In the plot, though, he’s
the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Tybalt, the
Prince of Sharks who needs to keep an entire
Puerto Rican community together. Bernardo
sets the tone: It’s a tough acting challenge.
Van Hove leaves Ramasar exposed.
Which brings us back to that strange
divided quality, that sense of a production
fighting internally and leaving the actors to
fend for themselves.
Van Hove’s austere aesthetic, devised by
his brilliant longtime designer, Jan Vers-
wey veld, is leaner and more abstract than
the typical Broadway look; he automatically
modernizes everything he touches, from
Shakespeare to O’Neill. But when van Hove
introduces those video components, his
control wavers and crashes. The film scapes
in his shows are too frequently sloppy and
unattractive, and here they’re at their worst.
They’re aesthetically inchoate (as if made by
a half-dozen different hands), and the entire
stage composition has almost never been
taken into account.And what good do they do? We watch a
25-foot Tony walk moodily down a street in
slow motion, or the Jets bro-ishly pummel
one other in slow motion, or Bernardo put
on a shirt ... in slow motion. We don’t tend to
see much of the women in these sequences,
so they steer directly into a boy-band-music-
video vibe. (Man, One Direction got seri-
ous.) For the live images, actors sometimes
shoot one another from unsteady iPhones,
which makes a dizzying, distracting back-
drop. And some interior scenes, like Doc’s
pharmacy, are shot in sets that are either
partly or completely obscured from the
audience. The camera transmissions have
the flat look of soap operas, and they do no
favors to the actors.
So is it all trash? No. It’s self-defeating for
long sections, but there’s enough promising
material to wish that everyone could have
just taken a year off and tried again. Sure,
the screen utterly overpowers the stage
while also feeling like an afterthought, but
that makes the first decision easy: Switch
off the projectors. The good moments are
already the ones that don’t rely on video;
the rumble in the rain is thrilling, and De
Keersmaeker echoes other Romeo and
Juliet ballets to stage an effective non-
balcony Balcony Scene, with Maria and
Tony leaning together like ships’ figure-
heads as their communities pull them apart.
And instead of the traditional “Somewhere”
ballet, van Hove has the ensemble sing the
song under deep-orange sodium light, lov-
ers everywhere dreaming of walking two by
two. He generalizes the central pair’s plight
out to the entire company. In this simple
“Somewhere,” van Hove touches the live
wire of his own show. He escapes the claus-
trophobic literalism of the video and says
something new and valuable and beautiful
about West Side Story. “Somewhere” turns
out to be just a stage with bodies on it. Start
from there. ■season four ofPamela Adlon’s FX seriesBetter Things,created, directed
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