A 'West Side Story' That Finally Speaks to Latinos

I like to be in America!

OK by me in America!

Everything free in America!

For a small fee in America!

Miranda said he loves "West Side Story" so much that "it's probably the only show I know better than my own." He was inspired to create "In the Heights" because, in the decades since "West Side Story," few portrayals of Latinos have made it to Broadway.

Translating Sondheim's famously dexterous lyrics, with their interior rhymes, was the hard part for Miranda. Sondheim gave him license to change the imagery as long as the Spanish rhymed in the same places the English did.

What Sondheim "said to me was, you know, 'I don't speak Spanish. All I can tell you is that, as an English-speaking person familiar with the music, my ear will expect it to rhyme at these places,' " Miranda said.

"I holed up in my parents' house and used my dad as a human thesaurus. It was really a lot of fun."

Laurents told The Post last month that "what the show's about hasn't changed. The theater has changed" -- meaning it can handle a more authentically multicultural and multilingual approach. Laurents is critical of the movie version, which he did not work on, for being especially contrived.

One effect of incorporating some Spanish is to put the Sharks on a more equal footing with the Jets. It also dramatizes the cultural misunderstanding -- the physical and metaphorical distance -- between the two gangs. Language choice becomes part of the meaning of the play. Tony and Maria discover love is more profound than barriers of language and culture. In Tony's dying breath, he sings a line in Spanish from Maria's part in the duet "Somewhere" -- the Jet boy symbolically sharing both languages with the Shark girl.

Language helps define Anita. In the beginning, being the hopeful immigrant who wants to make it in America, she insists on speaking English. After Bernardo is killed, she becomes disillusioned and reverts to Spanish.

"She thinks that speaking her native tongue is not embracing the place she has chosen to live," said Karen Olivo, the actress who plays Anita. "When things don't work out the way she hoped, like any person, you revert to the things you know best."

Olivo recalls seeing the movie with her Puerto Rican father when she was about 6. "I remember immediately identifying with the female characters, Maria and Anita," she said. "That was the first time I'd ever seen anyone on TV that looked like me."

It was one of her father's favorite musicals, and yet "I remember when I was old enough to really discuss it with him he always voiced some pretty harsh opinions about the way the Sharks were viewed" in the movie.

She thinks the new version addresses those concerns. And it's about time.

"To give a direct representation of a culture," she said, "I think we can ask more of people."