Racism, immigrant misery, violence, and all told at high speed. The grandiose new production of “West Side Story”, which is now going on a major tour from the Deutsches Theater, is a frighteningly up-to-date classic.
When “West Side Story” was presented to a German audience for the first time in the Deutsches Theater in June 1961, they were not exactly enthusiastic about Leonard Bernstein’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. The musical fans didn’t find the piece cheerful enough, and fans of serious music preferred to go to the opera instead of the musical anyway. Only the success of the film adaptation of the musical, which won ten Oscars, awakened a continuing enthusiasm for that masterpiece in Germany, which could also have been convincing as pure dance theater thanks to Jerome Robbins’ great choreography. Instead, Bernstein also had the dancers sing. The story of two rival street gangs with a migration background, told in this way, has remained frighteningly topical over the decades. After Steven Spielberg was recently able to score with a remake of the musical by finally casting it with actors who were also seen to have an immigrant background, Broadway director Lonny Price is now daring to do a new production for the theater.
“Life is all right in America, if you’re all white in America,” says the song “America,” which Anita and her girls sing. A scathing reckoning of Puerto Rican immigrants with racist US society.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
The fast-paced choreographies of West Side Story still ignite. This is where the jets dance.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
This new production had its world premiere again at the Deutsches Theater in Munich. This time, however, audiences reveled in the West Side Story, which Lonny Price surprisingly left original. No graffiti updates the set, which depicts 1950s New York. No comment on Donald Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico resonates in the piece. Even the costumes keep the story traditional in the fifties.
But that is exactly what makes the accusation leveled by this work even clearer: because nothing has improved since the play’s premiere. The immigrants will still not be part of the American Dream, reserved for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. This is also underlined in the new production by advertising posters on the house walls, which only show white, well-off people who have nothing in common with the reality of life of the Puerto Rican immigrants in the play. But even the socially weaker Americans in the play will never achieve the advertised American dream.
And just as the character Anybodys was fighting in vain for recognition in the 1950s because society reads her as a woman while she sees herself as a man, it still takes a lot of strength from her actress Laura Leo Kelly, in a heteronormative society living with a non-binary gender identity. Seen in this light, Laura Leo Kelly also plays a little bit of herself. But this year, of course, the audience’s attention is again on the couple who aren’t allowed to be lovers: Tony, played by Jadon Webster, and Maria, played brilliantly by Melanie Sierra.
Alexander Bernstein, son of the famous composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, has traveled to Munich for the premiere.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Sierra enthusiastically hugs Leonard Bernstein’s son Alexander Bernstein, who has traveled from New York and is invited onto the stage as a guest of honor after the performance. Otherwise, the 67-year-old kept himself modest in the background. He also followed the piece from one of the back rows of the stalls, while the front seats were occupied by all kinds of celebrities such as Rufus Beck, Maria Furtwangler and Ron Williams. Because unlike in 1961, one had already expected the total work of art made up of dance, music and drama, which was then also presented in a breathtakingly beautiful way.