A 'West Side Story' That Finally Speaks to Latinos
National's Staging Is Truly Bilingual

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 3, 2009

Many Latinos remember the first time they saw "West Side Story." Their memory of that musical reworking of "Romeo and Juliet" by way of Hell's Kitchen is bittersweet.

One of the things to accept but not exactly love about the show was the language -- the sometimes clumsy accents, the random sprinkling of Spanish -- "Okay, Sharks, ¡Vámonos!" -- which gave a veneer of cultural savvy to the tale of gangs, lovers and immigrant dreams.

Now we're in an age when Dora the Explorer and George W. Bush speak more Spanish than do Maria, Anita, Bernardo and the Sharks. The musical seemed less savvy all the time.

But in a new production at the National Theatre, "West Side Story" is finally displaying a PhD in linguistics from the streets. The Puerto Rican characters now speak and sing in Spanish.

For audience members who do not understand Spanish, the bilingual revival must at least seem more authentic.

But for bilingual theatergoers -- Latinos in general, but especially Puerto Ricans -- the meaning of the translation is more than what's found in a dictionary. When Maria sings "Siento Hermosa" instead of "I Feel Pretty," it marks a fitting resolution of the complicated 52-year relationship that this once-revolutionary musical has had with Spanish-speaking audiences.

"I was just blown away by it," said Cesar Huezo, a concierge from El Salvador who works at the Fairfax at Embassy Row. "I'm a fan of the play, a fan of the movie [the 1961 film starring Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno]. It's the first movie that I really felt like, Oh my God, Hispanics can do it! I think Spanish adds more interest to the play. When one [gang member] is singing in Spanish and one in English, even without a translation you can see both sides of the story."

"I thought it made it more authentic and probably less offensive and less comical, for somebody who might find it offensive," said Mercedes Lemp, director of the D.C. Office on Latino Affairs, who grew up in Spain.

The 1957 Broadway hit by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins provided a stunningly high profile to often-ignored Latinos in a landmark work of American pop culture. The movie and the play helped launch the careers of Latinas Moreno and Washington-born Chita Rivera.

But many of the actors in the early productions were non-Latinos wearing dark makeup and putting on fake accents, so the showbiz opportunities for Latinos were limited.

And the portrayal of Latino males exclusively as gang members has stung -- even though they're paired with a rival non-Latino gang. Also, because the non-Latino Jets sing more songs than the Latino Sharks, the play can seem weighted against the Latino characters.

For these reasons, the play occasionally has been the target of parody and protest by Latinos over the years.

"I think 'West Side Story' for the Latino community has been our greatest blessing and our greatest curse," said Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning creator and star of "In the Heights," the Spanish-inflected current Broadway hit set in the Dominican and Puerto Rican neighborhood of Washington Heights in Manhattan.

"As a piece of art, I think it's just about as good as it gets," said Miranda, who grew up near Washington Heights, the son of Puerto Ricans. "It also represented our foot in the door as an artistic community on Broadway. . . . At the same time, because it's just about the only representation of Latinos on Broadway and it's about gangs, that's where it gets tricky."

Laurents, now 90 and directing the bilingual "West Side Story," invited Miranda to translate much of the Sharks' speaking and singing into street-smart, lyrical Spanish.

The play officially opens Wednesday and runs through Jan. 17, but it has been in previews since Dec. 15. After Washington, the show is supposed to go to Broadway, as did the original 1957 production, which also had its premiere at the National Theatre.

The bilingual version is still being tweaked during the preview period. One of the most noticeable changes: The English subtitles for Spanish dialogue and lyrics are being scrapped; Laurents deemed them unnecessary and possibly distracting, according to producer Kevin McCollum. Without that crutch, non-Spanish-speaking audience members may better appreciate the identity and integrity of the Sharks and comprehend the Jets' insecurity, he said.

Many Latino theatergoers have not had a chance to see the new show yet -- but they like the idea of it being bilingual. The concept has provoked reflections on their own relationships with "West Side Story."

"When I first saw it, this was my first exposure to what Puerto Ricans were going through when they moved to New York," said Marisa Ramírez de Arellano, chief operating officer of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation in Washington, who saw the movie while growing up in Puerto Rico.

"Anita in the movie was so powerful, a spitfire, you know. . . . People loved Rita Moreno's portrayal. They were very proud of that."

Sara Nieves-Grafals, a clinical psychologist in Washington, also saw the movie as a girl in Puerto Rico. "I see it as exciting in many ways and worrisome in some ways, because it gives a monochromatic view of what Puerto Ricans are in the United States," she said.

Cesar Perales, a Puerto Rican civil rights lawyer, was attending the City University of New York around the time the movie came out. "While I understand that subsequent generations of Puerto Ricans took umbrage at what they thought was a stereotyping of Puerto Ricans, I don't think Bernstein and the others behind that show were disparaging of Latinos but wanted to talk about the complexity involved in a migration," he said.

Miranda, the creator of "In the Heights," has his own "West Side Story" story. As a sixth-grader in the early 1990s, he watched the movie at home with his mom because he had just been cast as Bernardo in a school play. "I had heard of 'West Side Story' by osmosis, but the first time I saw it I was, like, 'Oh, there's a number about whether to live in Puerto Rico or not?' As a Puerto Rican who grew up here, that blew my mind."

That number is "America," still performed in English in the revival and featuring Anita.

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."