Posted: 2/21/20 at 6:44pm
poisonivy2 said: "New Yorker has a review out:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/a-grim-take-on-west-side-story"
On the subject of colorblind casting, this review (which I think is very worthwhile reading) makes this interesting point:
"Meanwhile, the Jets, originally a white gang made up of the sons and grandsons of Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants—“an anthology of what is called ‘American,’ ” Laurents wrote in the script—are a diverse bunch; in fact, the white actor Ben Cook, who was first cast as Riff, was replaced by the talented Jones, who is black, when Cook was injured. With apologies to Cook, that may have been a stroke of luck, since it’s more conceivable that white street kids would pay allegiance to a black leader—there’s that haunted idea of American “cool” again, inextricable from white obsession with African-American culture—than the other way around.
And yet the casting introduces tangled layers of complexity that van Hove has either misunderstood or ignored. The lyrics of the film version of “America”—in which Anita and the Shark women sing of their love of the country’s capitalist conveniences, and the men sing of its brutality and bankrupt racism—remain as current as Twitter discourse, if, mercifully, a lot cleverer. “Life is all right in America,” the women sing, and the men reply, “If you’re all white in America,” but I didn’t hear that line in this production, maybe because it makes less sense for the Sharks to sing it when it no longer applies to their adversaries. Meanwhile, the production has confusingly kept references to both gangs’ immigrant status. “Who asked you to come here?” Riff says to Bernardo; Bernardo’s retort—“Who asked you?”—has a bitter, unintended irony in the context of African-American history."
Updated On: 2/21/20 at 06:44 PM
