THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 73
way history, to keep the play to an in-
termissionless hour and forty-five min-
utes.) There’s no joy to be found on
these streets.
But what streets are they? As the
Jets discuss their plans to challenge
the Sharks at the school dance that
evening, the video screen shows a dead-
end block lined with shuttered ware-
houses, a nowhere land that could be
on the edge of any city in the indus-
trialized world. (Van Hove’s partner
and frequent collaborator, Jan Ver-
sweyveld, did the scenic and lighting
design; Luke Halls did the video de-
sign.) The camera advances in a slow
dolly shot, producing the weightless,
gliding momentum of a first-person
shooter game. This moving street-
scape, like others that occur through-
out the play, bears no perspectival re-
lationship to the actors on the stage;
it shrinks and dislocates them. When
the Jets sing, van Hove projects re-
corded footage of the cast gallivanting
around Brooklyn, chewing on gold
chains and mugging for the camera in
pastiches of rap-music videos, which
dwarfs the actors with their own gi-
gantic images. In the next scene, he
plays peekaboo with them as they dis-
appear into Doc’s drugstore, a bodega
cut into the back wall that looks as
tiny as a doll house, and the action is
live-streamed onscreen above the aban-
doned stage. As a metaphor—for the
insignificance of these characters’ lives
in a vast, hostile world, perhaps?—the
technique is banal. As a theatrical de-
vice, it is a ludicrous waste, verging on
an insult to the actors, who can’t hope
to compete with the billboard-size ver-
sions of themselves that loom over
their heads.
This is all the more disappointing
because they are a gorgeous cast, youth-
ful, fresh—more than thirty actors
are making their Broadway débuts—
and physically spectacular, especially
in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s cho-
reography, which, with its sharply
thrown elbows and triangular forma-
tions, closes the gap between modern-
ist constructivism and TikTok preen-
ing. When Tony (Isaac Powell) appears,
he is lithe and jittery, jabbing the air
with his hand as if he wanted to free-
style, though he is contractually obliged
to sing one of the simplest and most
sublime songs in musical theatre,
“Something’s Coming,” which he does,
beautifully, with a supple, mellow voice.
Shereen Pimentel’s Maria is another
revelation. In body and attitude, Pi-
mentel is the welcome opposite of Na-
talie Wood, who fixed the role in the
American mind as a virgin verging on
sainthood. This Maria is a girl with
curves and spirit, and one of the things
that the production gets right is the
puppyish attraction between the young
lovers, who touch each other with a
hunger tinged by natural self-con-
sciousness. The senselessness of the
tragedy that befalls them is not that
they were destined to be together for-
ever. It’s that they could have helped
each other get out, grow up, and learn
how to be free.V
an Hove, who auditioned more
than a thousand actors, has done
something unusual and intriguing in
his casting. The Puerto Rican Sharks
are played by Latino actors, which is
a relief; we are far from the miserable
days of brownface. (Yesenia Ayala,
who moves like a knife across the stage,
is a highlight as Anita; Ramasar, lean-
ing heavily on a gluey “Spanish” ac-
cent, is the weak link.) Meanwhile,
the Jets, originally a white gang made
up of the sons and grandsons of Irish,
Italian, and Polish immigrants—“an
anthology of what is called ‘Ameri-
can,’” Laurents wrote in the script—
are a diverse bunch; in fact, the white
actor Ben Cook, who was first cast as
Riff, was replaced by the talented Jones,
who is black, when Cook was injured.
With apologies to Cook, that may
have been a stroke of luck, since it’s
more conceivable that white street
kids would pay allegiance to a black
leader—there’s that haunted idea of
American “cool” again, inextricable
from white obsession with African-
American culture—than the other
way around.
And yet the casting introduces tan-
gled layers of complexity that van Hove
has either misunderstood or ignored.
The lyrics of the film version of “Amer-
ica”—in which Anita and the Shark
women sing of their love of the coun-
try’s capitalist conveniences, and the
men sing of its brutality and bankrupt
racism—remain as current as Twitterdiscourse, if, mercifully, a lot cleverer.
“Life is all right in America,” the
women sing, and the men reply, “If
you’re all white in America,” but I didn’t
hear that line in this production, maybe
because it makes less sense for the
Sharks to sing it when it no longer ap-
plies to their adversaries. Meanwhile,
the production has confusingly kept
references to both gangs’ immigrant
status. “Who asked you to come here?”
Riff says to Bernardo; Bernardo’s re-
tort—“Who asked you?”—has a bitter,
unintended irony in the context of Af-
rican-American history.
Or take the classic comic number
“Officer Krupke,” which van Hove re-
frames as an indictment of the carceral
state and accompanies with a bleak
video montage of young men being
humiliated and abused by the police.
Naturally, this plays to big applause,
but the effect is obvious and pander-
ing, effacing the specificity of the char-
acters’ experience in favor of generic
sociological observations. Changing
the tone of the song, which is performed
here with spitting fury, would have been
enough. The dark side of the Ameri-
can Dream is not a subtext of “West
Side Story,” waiting to be excavated
through appallingly didactic images—
like that of the Puerto Rican and Amer-
ican flags strung up on a chain-link
fence, which appears during “Amer-
ica,” or, worse, an aerial shot of the bor-
der wall with Mexico that looks like
something out of a dystopian travel in-
fomercial. The critique has been right
there on the surface all along.
Van Hove used to wage war on
naturalism. Naturalism, however, has
caught up to him. It is no longer strange
to see the world filtered through a
screen; that’s how we do most of our
seeing. Here and there, we get startling
glimpses of what van Hove could do,
if he were to return to eye level and re-
ground himself in the idiom of the
stage. The rumble that closes the first
act is one such exquisite moment. The
screen goes blessedly dark, and we are
free to focus on the enraged, passion-
ate bodies that fly and claw at one an-
other, as lightning crackles through the
theatre and an unseen sky opens to re-
lease torrents of rain. It’s like witness-
ing an act of God—clear, spectacular,
and all too brief.