Mainly on Directing by Arthur Laurents (read more books .TXT) 📕

highly lauded treatment would make the gangs and their girls seem like chorus boys and girls. David Woolard devised a new approach. The color that individualized each gang was on each costume but in many different ways—some large, some small, even as small as a headband or a scarf around the neck, but the gang alliance was clear. Life imitated art when in Nyack, Jim Youman's hometown, a high-school girl wearing a neck bandana the color of her boyfriend's gang had it yanked off by a member of a rival gang. In less than ten minutes, war broke out with knives and even axes. No killings but several hospitalizations. The immediate cause: color.

At the first meeting of the whole production team, I claimed two things were going to make this West Side Story unique and unlike any other that had ever been done anywhere. First, of course, was that it was going to be bilingual. I didn't realize, however, until auditions, when scenes were read in Spanish, that the difference was going to be even more dramatic than Tom and I had imagined. Latinos are more passionate and less inhibited than gringos or Anglos or whatever hyphenated immigrants you want to label the rest of us. Even read with script in hand, their scenes were on fire, and funny even without understanding the actual words. The Jets were going to have to dig deep to hold their own. That led directly to the second element that was going to make this West Side Story so special.

Beginning with the original production, dancing and singing were always the focus, the centerpiece. Who hasn't seen a production where the dancing or singing or both weren't breathtaking? But who has ever seen a production where the acting was more than passable, let alone good? Why? Because except for Chino and the four adults, the cast was chosen first for their ability as dancers and/or singers, second for their looks, and last, if they could read lines and make some sense. In this production, the ability to act was going to be on a par with the ability to dance and sing, but the emphasis in rehearsal and performance was going to be— heresy!—on acting.

The effect was felt everywhere. I tested the singing of the Jet Song with Cody Green, a brilliant dancer auditioning for Riff, by asking him to sing the lyric, not with fifties musical-comedy charm but with the icy command of a potential killer. He wasn't fazed; there was an actor there. He tried, it worked, and Patrick assured me he could help with the orchestra.

“Krupke” wasn't going to be as easy: comic vaudeville is hard to justify. I had figured out how to get into the song and hoped to work out the rest in rehearsal. “Hope” is the operative word. Staring at the drop of the fence in front of which “Krupke” was going to be performed was the opposite of inspiring. It seemed like musical comedy but I didn't know what it should be and was stymied until David Saint, my associate director, said, “Why don't we lose the drop and play the scene and the song in the main set?” He was referring to the stunning depiction of a harsh and brutal neighborhood, a breeding ground for violence that sets the tone of the production. There was no way “Krupke” could be a vaudeville comedy in that grim world, but half a dozen other ways it could be played came immediately to mind.

Acting gives meaning—to every note and every step as well as to every word. Acting was what made Gypsy so much more than it ever had been. Acting, I hoped, would do the same for West Side Story, even with less opportunity and more obstacles. If the right actors could be found.

The casting demands of West Side Story are greater than those of any musical ever written. Can you dance? Not hip-hop, not just move, but dance, including ballet? Can you sing Bernstein—a range from musical comedy to opera—with a trained voice and vocal cords that weren't abused by the distorted sound and bent notes required for shows like Spring Awakening and Rent and Wicked? (Its disheartening how many talented young singers have abused their vocal cords so badly that unless they get proper training quickly, they probably won't be able to sing at all in a few years.) Can you act? Not indicate, not show and tell what you are feeling, but feel it so strongly inside that the audience will get it? And for this time, are you Latino? Not just dark-haired with high school Spanish but authentically Latino? If not, two sentences into a scene with an authentic Latino reader and a ringer is embarrassingly exposed. Minorities had been misled so many times that when it became clear that we were serious about casting Latinos as Latinos, the word spread throughout the overjoyed Latino community so fast that the casting people were overwhelmed.

I was also determined to get a really young company. The original production hadn't been overly concerned with age. Kenny Leroy, who was an otherwise admirable Bernardo, had to be asked to excise from his program bio that he had been in the original production of Oklahoma! Up close, our Bernardo, George Akram, originally from Venezuela, was a boy, but he had such an intense stillness, so commanding a presence, so quietly burning a sexuality—the girl who read with him kept caressing her chest— that he seemed a man three times his age. But George was not only exceptional, he was an exception. For the leading parts, one after another teenage dancer or singer was unfortunately unbelievable; they not only looked unused as teenagers can but they had no experience in their lives to draw from to play the characters. Their gang-member-in-life equivalents, teenagers though they be, look a used thirty, small wonder with the experience in their brutal lives. “Really young” became a casting casualty; twenty-five and over