72 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
THETHEATRE
COOLED JETS
Ivo van Hove’s grim take on “West Side Story.”BY ALEXANDRASCHWARTZ
ILLUSTRATION BY XAVIERA ALTENA
T
he Belgian director Ivo van Hove
is invariably referred to as “avant-
garde,” but, considering that he has
spent more than two decades making
theatre in this country, including three
recent productions on Broadway, that
thorny honorific no longer really fits.
The avant period is over; he is sim-
ply part of the garde, influential and
much imitated, not least by himself.
Van Hove is celebrated for his aus-
tere, violent, video-heavy stagings,
which attempt to reveal the hidden
layers of classic texts. When it was
announced that he would be taking
on “West Side Story,” among the most
beloved and fraught of American mu-
sicals, the buzz began. Now, after more
than a year of preparation and no
shortage of complications—two in-
jured stars, one of whom had to drop
out; a delayed opening; a nightly rally,
held in front of the theatre, to protest
the casting, as Bernardo, of Amar Ra-
masar (a New York City Ballet prin-
cipal who was fired from and then re-
instated to that company after sharing
nude photos of a colleague), a fore-
seeable controversy that the produc-
ers have responded to in stiff, baffled
fashion—van Hove’s “West Side
Story” has at last opened (at the Broad-
way). The production is an infuriating
example of what happens when a pow-
erful style calcifies into shtick—infu-
riating because so much that is excit-
ing, even revelatory, here is crushed
beneath the director’s insistence on a
vision that feels narrow and doctri-
naire. He wants to make us see an
iconic work with new eyes, but all we
can see is him.The play, loosely updated to the
present, opens in moody silence, as a
line of young men files onto the vast,
naked stage. Their faces are projected
by video camera onto the enormous
wall behind them, and the orchestra
strikes up its first notes. The menace
and the delight of Leonard Bernstein’s
score feel irrepressible, but these boys
know how to repress—to “play it cool,”
as they later sing. They are in street
wear, immaculate sneakers and glossy
track jackets, sweatsuits, and beanies
(An D’Huys did the appealing cos-
tume design); they have branded their
necks with tattoos reading “Jet for Life.”
Another line of boys appears, edgy and
coiled—the Sharks—and a fight breaks
out. Someone is knifed; somebody else
films the assault with a smartphone,
and shaky footage of the grimacing
boy clutching his bloody ear fills the
backdrop as bodies thrash below. The
melee is interrupted by the nasty Lieu-
tenant Schrank (Thomas Jay Ryan),
and the Sharks scatter, leaving the Jets
to regroup and pledge their allegiance
to themselves:When you’re a Jet,
You’re a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin’ day.Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, im-
printed on generations of American
brains, are as thrilling as ever, but when
the Jets’ leader, Riff (Dharon E. Jones),
sings them they are not so much a
declaration of solidarity as a threat.
He and his crew are far from the care-
free showboaters of the original, 1957
Broadway production or the 1961
movie, snapping and leaping in Je-
rome Robbins’s indelible choreogra-
phy. Those Jets were inventing the
American teen-age experience, com-
ing alive to the possibility of power
and control in a world where adult au-
thority had crumbled; their bragging
felt childish, all hot talk, until, sud-
denly, the game got real. These Jets
know that they have signed a death
pact. The turn is typical of van Hove,
who is determined to snuff out any
lightness that might temper the full-
blown tragedy to come. (To that end,
he has cut the song “I Feel Pretty” and
trimmed Arthur Laurents’s sleek book,
already one of the shortest in Broad-