Revisiting the West Side

West Side Story is magnificently reborn on Broadway and Charles Kaiser attends, rubbing elbows with theater royalty including writer-director Arthur Laurents, Kathleen Turner, and Lauren Bacall.

By Charles Kaiser

The most vibrant musical portrait of 20th-century Manhattan ever written was magnificently reborn last night on the stage of the Palace Theatre as West Side Story once again took Broadway by storm.

This superb new production is directed by the tireless 91-year-old Arthur Laurents, who also wrote the book for this gem from 1957. Almost everything here is better than it was in the original, including the new bilingual songs and dialogue, the spectacular new sets by James Youmans, and even the very slightly tweaked Leonard Bernstein score, which has always been the glowing heart of this creation.

A week ago West Side was already a huge commercial success, with an advance sale of $14 million -- the largest ever for a Broadway revival.

Created by four gay Jewish men -- collaborating with Laurents and Bernstein on the musical were lyricist Stephen Sondheim and choreographer Jerome Robbins -- West Side remains the unsurpassed creation of gay American culture in the 1950s, although its collaborators have always insisted that their understanding of prejudice was more informed by their Jewishness than by their sexuality.

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For more on West Side Story 's importance to gay culture, see Charles Kaiser's appearance on The Colbert Report .

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Name: Paul
Date posted: 3/21/2009 6:36:00 PM
Hometown: New York

Comment:
The media reviews here in New York have been decidedly mixed, but all the people I've talked with who've seen the show have nothing but good things to say about it. Word has it that Sondheim is happy with the show, so if he's happy it must be alright.

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