West Side Story by Arthur Laurents (review)

No one was snapping fingers; the Jets were not uniformly pale nor the Sharks a few shades darker; it was definitely not the 1950s. This was contemporary New York City; the Jets and the Sharks were racially diverse and their conflict was about birthright. Tony and his gang were native born; Maria and her brother’s gang were born in Puerto Rico. Ivo van Hove was tapping into America’s hot-button issue—immigration. Appropriately, a wall became a central motif. However, this mercurial aspect of the mise en scène challenged the audience’s focus, often distracting from the story. The actors stood and danced in stark contrast to their far-larger-than-life projections on a wall that filled the entire upstage. Was this theatre or film? It was both. Just as the gang members were pulled to the excitement of violence, the audience was pulled to exciting cinematic effects. The results? Tony and Maria’s love was lost to bloodshed, and the artistry of the actors was often overshadowed by the projections. This was West Side Story in the age of media distraction.

Distract it did. Unlike most theatre, where staging directs audiences’ eyes to important action, here was choice, as in life: look to the big and shiny, or seek the small and human. The actors were confined to a completely level playing floor while their projected images towered to the top of the proscenium. Van Hove often employs video, and West Side Story was heavily invested in prerecorded and live video (designed by Luke Halls). But this was not immediately apparent. At first, the scenic design of van Hove’s long-time partner Jan Versweyveld seemed to be an homage to Peter Brook’s spare stages. The stage appeared devoid of scenery: radiators, pipes, and an exit door were barely visible on the back wall. But as the two gangs filed onstage and stared at the audience, the seeming reality of that stage wall evaporated and was replaced by a live projection scanning each gang member. Brook’s empty, deeply human space had dissolved into Josef Svoboda’s Laterna Magika of extreme media/human interface. The massive projections revealed performers’ most minute facial tics, making them each intensely individual rather than a united gang. The cinematic effects wooed audience members’ attention away from the human actors.

The Wall: projections upstaging actors. Shereen Pimentel (Maria) and Isaac Powell (Tony) and company in West Side Story. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.)

These effects increased as the story of star-crossed lovers unfolded in front of a dizzying variety of projection styles and actor/projection relationships: actors performed in front of live and prerecorded projections; they also performed upstage of the projections through openings in the wall; some scenes were shot live backstage and only seen on the wall. Many would argue that theatre is about actors and audience sharing real time and space. But van Hove insisted on straining human connection by offering bigger and brighter images, challenging us to pay attention to flesh and blood actors. On many occasions the projections prevailed, although occasionally the media enhanced the performers’ humanity.

Immense images of dancers during “Dance in the Gym,” captured by cameras overhead and held by gang members, distracted from Tony and Maria’s love at first sight, even though they were brightly lit down center. Prerecorded images proved equally distracting. The “Tonight” montage is usually performed with actors at different locations suggested by scenic elements. Here, a film montage of photographs and videos chased across the screen in ever-shifting patterns as the gang members danced confrontationally onstage; the filmic montage took precedence over Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography. During the Sharks’ performance of “America,” the performers were also upstaged by shots of Puerto Rico that gave way to New York’s barrio neighborhood. Trump’s border wall even made an...