“Hair Love,” the animated short film about which I wrote in my last post, won the Oscar for best animated short! Great choice. Truth be told we had not seen most of the full-length films nominated, so I cannot really say too much about the selections made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its 92nd year.
Moving from movies to Broadway shows, we went last Sunday afternoon to see “West Side Story,” which is currently in previews and scheduled to open on February 20th.
I was surprised at just how familiar I was with the music, although I certainly never saw the play on Broadway and I cannot recall having seen the movie version, which won ten academy awards in 1961:
· Academy Award for Best Art Direction – Set Decoration (Color) – Victor A. Gangelin and Boris Leven
· Academy Award for Best Sound – Fred Hynes (Todd-AO SSD), and Gordon E. Sawyer (Samuel Goldwyn SSD)
After seeing the Broadway production, we spent a couple of evenings watching the 1961 film, which Barry had recorded some years ago but we had never watched. The current Broadway production is a rather darker and quite differently staged version than the film and presumably than the original Broadway play. Much of the wonderful music is still there, although notably the song “I Feel Pretty” was not included.
The current Broadway production is most interesting in its combination of live actors in front of a large screen that projects the actors juxtaposed with street scenes of the West Side of New York through the use of a person walking around the stage with a camera. This is an expanded version of the technique that was used in the recent Broadway production of “Network,” which we saw and I wrote about in May of last year. Through use of this technique, you could see the gang members with their tattoos and scars blown up to enormous proportions, depicting them as menacingly aggressive from the start of the show. This is very different from the 1961 film, in which they were portrayed as basically good-hearted “juvenile delinquents.”
One thing we found extremely disconcerting was the number of young children in the audience. This is not one of your typically joyful Broadway musicals by a long shot. There were definitely children in that audience who were far too young to be exposed to the violence embodied in these characters; the current production depicts what was clearly an attempted sexual assault that is quite a bit more explicit than the movie version. Perhaps some of the younger children, who appeared to be no more than six or seven years old, did not even realize what they were watching. But I have to wonder what their parents were thinking and how many of them had at least a few sleepless nights after their Sunday afternoon at at the Broadway Theater.
This production has also been in the news because of a controversy involving the actor who plays Bernardo, Amar Ramasar. Ramasar was dismissed from the New York City Ballet in 2018 after a female dancer filed a civil lawsuit against the company and other defendants alleging that Ramasar and two other male dancers exchanged explicit photos of her and other female dancers without their consent. Protesters have called for “West Side Story” to fire Ramasar over these allegations. In fact, there was a note in the playbill indicating that the role of Bernardo was being played by a different actor, but I do not know whether that was related to this issue.
Have a great weekend!
Love,
Rebecca
