Changing the Spanish in WSS revival

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.

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".

Updated On: 10/13/12 at 10:01 PM

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Updated On: 10/14/12 at 05:14 PM

Maybe it should be a play...

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On second thought...

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The anachronistic length of those skirts. Oy.

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

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

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."

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Updated On: 10/15/12 at 09:50 AM