Changing the Spanish in WSS revival

[qazdannywsx]

Me and my friends had an argument about this lately: who do you think was pressuring the production into changing most of the Spanish back..? Who didn't like it, audiences or influential theatre patrons and reviewers..? Was it changed back because people were not following and enjoying the show, or because people wanted the good old West Side Story they grew up on..? We're people too close minded to accept an adapted classic? What did YOU think of it...?

[ljay889]

The changes were hardly drastic. I FEEL PRETTY and A BOY LIKE THAT became Spanglish. THE QUINTET and the Spanish dialogue remained the same.

I believe Laurents decided to change it when he realized audiences were just not able to follow those songs completely in Spanish.

[GavestonPS]

I don't know the truth, but Arthur Laurents was quoted as saying that the cast didn't like it that the audience could not follow the lyrics as they were sung,especially the jokes.

[CurtainPullDowner]

I think it was a mis-guided idea from the git go.
The Sharks are much less humanized and visable than the Jets to begin with in the script. Speking Spanish did not help their case. It does make some sense in a poltically correct world but it just didn't fly. WSS has worked as is for many years. Tinkering was not really needed.
For me that production had worse problems (some casting, changing the ending etc.) than the addition of Spanish. A die-hard fan (me. et al), knows the lines and lyrics inside out so the language change didn't really affect me.
I think the word on the street was the producers wanted the English back.

At this point I have trouble believing anything Artie "quoted".

[bdn223]

From someone who did only saw the "Spanglish" version and not the spanish version I still had difficulty following the second act. I know many may crucify me for saying this, but the revival was my first interaction with the West Side Story, and it did not leave a good impression. The issue is those who are not DIE HARD fans, don't know what is actually being said. Yes i do know the basic lyrics of "I feel pretty" and that song it honestly did not matter, but for "A Boy Like that" and Chino's announcement of Bernardo's death were pure emotion with little substance. I got the gist, but was begging to understand what was actually being said. If she show used Super/subtitles like they originally did in their DC run, it may have worked for me, but I was left wondering what happened.

[Dollypop]

I know someone who was in the cast and he explained that the PRODUCERS wanted to get rid of ALL the Spanish because theater parties were balking. It was the producers who called a cast meeting and told them more English was being restored to the show.

[dramamama611]

BDN -- don't feel too bad, the revival ruined the beauty of WSS for a lot of young theater goers. A shame, really. I think it was the only time I didn't shed a tear while watching it. And I've seen a LOT of production of WSS.

[My Oh My]

Apparently the Spanish/Spanglish/whatever was added to warm the hearts of bilingual Hispanic Americans, like myself.

It warmed my heart to know that Lin Manuel Miranda met with Sondheim in working on the Spanish lyrics, otherwise, I heavily rolled my big, dark, Latino eyes.

Simply put...it was completely unnecessary. I was actually slightly offended because I had seen other productions of the show that left me breathless that were performed only in English and the addition of Spanish to a musical for the purpose of "humanizing" characters that were already human, was irritating. Partly because theatre is built upon not being so literal and has developed that to an art that is sadly disappearing these days and partly because if they intend to warm the hearts of us spicy Latinos, they can start by removing the ridiculous stereotypes STILL seen in the show, even in its latest revival...oh, excuse me...REVISAL.

All that effort contracting a Spanish lyricist, altering stuff that landed with a thud to anyone who doesn't speak Spanish (90% of the theatre-going crowd), and still landed with a thud to those of us who can speak it because the idea of making us more real by forcing us to speak Spanish to a bunch of people who don't understand it, well, is just not a very smart thing to do. Progressive, even less. I think it's somewhat cute how ambitiously old shows are REVISED for modern audience approval, then there is great shock and surprise when they land with a thud and get compared to their supposedly irrelevant original versions. The WSS revival should have put further effort into not murdering the orchestrations by intending to lay off half its string section once they saw ticket sales were promising (we made a good impression, now let's slash the single most important component of this musical in half! *Ker-ching!* *Ker-ching!*), restoring the 2nd most important element--it's iconic choreography--to its full glory, and dumping the very idea of stuffing such a time-tested musical with gimmicks.

I'm still happy for Lin Manuel Miranda's landing such an incredible job and meeting such a legend in the process. Boy has come a long way and should feel eternally accomplished, even if his successes end with In the Heights. Good for him. And us.

[CarlosAlberto]

That production of WSS was such a let down and it wasn't all about the Spanish/Spanglish translations. Editing, casting choices and watered-down choreography were also to blame.

[Dollypop]

The most recent revival of WSS lacked emotion but it wasn't because of the Spanish that was interpolated. It was the result of peculiar staging.

[bwayphreak234]

I saw the national tour and loved it, but I absolutely HATED the Spanish in I Feel Pretty. Luckily they took out the Spanish lyrics in the other songs.

[PalJoey]

Arthur had always railed against directors who imposed what he called "directorial notions" on a script.

After the show opened and he realized that audiences weren't able to follow the text, he started to realize that he had been an idiot--something Arthur Laurents was not exactly prone to admitting.

Everywhere he turned, no one thought it was as nifty an idea onstage as it had been in his head: not his friends, not the producers, not his one remaining collaborator and not the cast.

No one thought it worked. No one.

What was said in Spanish and what was left in English never made any logical sense. And Arthur had been surprisingly foolish not to consider what effect it would have on the audience's level of involvement in the show. If another director had suggested the idea, Arthur would have embarrassed and humiliated that director brutally: "It was a lousy idea to begin with and you didn't even carry it out well," he might have started out...

So he started to think of ways to change it back in isolated places--and that only made it worse. Finally, he had to admit he had been wrong.

It was not something Arthur Laurents liked to do. EVER.

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

^ Please write a book. Please. I will do anything you might require of me.

[PalJoey]

Maybe it should be a play...

[ljay889]

Maybe David Saint could direct it at the George Street Playhouse!

[PalJoey]

On second thought...

[CATSNYrevival]

I think the bilingual version would have played much better in Southern California or other places where the Spanish speaking population is a bit larger. In New York it just didn't seem to work for most audiences. As much as I dislike Laurents, I still think it was an interesting idea that could have worked if better executed. Although, I believe the idea was Tom Hatcher's so Authur doesn't actually get any of the credit from me.

[morosco]

The anachronistic length of those skirts. Oy.

[PalJoey]

The idea to mix Spanish and English was not Tom's at all. Tom saw a production in Bogota, Colombia, and told Arthur that seeing it in Spanish--completely in Spanish--put a different spin on the power balance between the Jets and the Sharks.

Then, after Tom died. Arthur found a copy of a Spanish translation of the script with some notes in Tom's handwriting, and this is where the story gets both weird and mawkishly sentimental:

Arthur took finding the notes in the script as a "sign" (his word, not mine--it sounds like something Mama Rose would make up) that he should do the production for Broadway but not (of course) in all-Spanish. The Jets would speak English and the Sharks would speak Spanish.

It was the worst idea he ever had. But he had it, not Tom.
New York Magazine: 'When You're a Shark You're a Shark All the Way' by Jesse Green

[NotAnotherSN]

Both the Equity and upcoming Non-Eq tour have the Spanish back in, so clearly it's working on tour!

[PalJoey]

Not in Toronto.
Theatre Review--Dancap's West Side Story

[jdtp12]

I never saw the revival and didn't really read a bunch about it at the time, what changes were made to the ending?

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

PJ, that's actually the only time I've ever felt sorry for him. It sounds like a project born, yes, out of his deep inner pools of vindictiveness and spite toward his collaborators, but also out of despair at not having Tom.

[PalJoey]

Shed no tears, g.d.e.l.g.i.

jdtp12: Arthur removed the final processional that Jerome Robbins had staged in perfect sync with a beautiful piece of Bernstein's music. In Robbins's staging, several of the Jets lifted Tony's body to carry him off stage, with Maria following.

At one point, Tony's lifeless hand slips and one of the Shark boys instinctively runs up to keep the body from falling. Wordlessly, as the music builds, Maria looks at him with gratitude, and one by one, all the gang members, Jets and Sharks, slowly join the procession until all that is left onstage are the helpless adults. You can see the staging in the end of the movie--it's a perfect piece of poetry-in-movement.

Arthur cut this, saying, "I never believed that ending for a minute. They all have this great epiphany and everybody's happy?" He went on to say that it was "unrealistic," because the police wouldn't let civilians carry a dead body from a crime scene. That might be true, but it missed the poetry of the moment, which Robbins and Bernstein had created together and which Laurents deeply resented. (One old associate remarked, "If Arthur really wanted to remove everything that wasn't realistic from West Side Story, there'd be nothing left, starting with his dialogue."

[dry2olives]

While having dialogue/lyrics in Spanish did confuse people unfamiliar with the show, the way the language was used made sense dramatically. The Sharks spoke Spanish when they were among themselves or when they didn't want the Jets to know what they were saying. The Puerto Rican women used English when Anita was around because she was the leader who favored assimilation into the American way of life, but they went back to Spanish when she wasn't around ("I Feel Pretty"). Having Anita go back to speaking Spanish after finding out Tony killed Bernardo was a great sign of her American dream being destroyed.

[jdtp12]

Thanks, PalJoey. The original ending Robbins had in place is what I always have known the ending to be and what it should be. So did Arthur basically just end it with everyone standing on stage as Tony just laid there dead?