Extra: New York Icons: West Side Story

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

West Side Story, the tragic musical about star-crossed lovers from two rival gangs, was a hit on Broadway in the 1950s and then exploded across the country when it came to the silver screen. At the time, New York City’s demographics and landscape were rapidly changing, and choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, author Arthur Laurents, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wanted an updated Romeo and Juliet that wrestled with what that meant. Who could belong in this new America?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX.
0:07.0	I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.
0:17.0	62 years after it opened on Broadway, West Side Story is everywhere again.
0:22.5	A new movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by Tony Kushner,
0:26.7	just-wrapped production in New York, and will open in theaters next December, a year from now.
0:32.3	And this December, there's a new Broadway revival directed by the Tony Award-winning director, Evo van Hove.
0:41.7	Maybe you yourself were cast in a high school production of West Side Story, or otherwise
0:47.6	remember the story of rival gangs, the white ethnic jets, and the Puerto Rican sharks as
0:53.1	some kind of quaint 50s nostalgia,
0:56.1	like Greece.
0:57.5	But the show actually was a real groundbreaker in musical theater, and the way it has been
1:03.0	received over the years is complicated.
1:05.7	The same Puerto Ricans with whom the musical really strikes a chord, a lot of times it really also hits a nerve with
1:14.0	them. For our latest New York icons feature, producer Jennifer Vanasco brings us the story of how
1:20.9	Westside story was made and why it continues to enthrall and sometimes enrage audiences.
1:29.4	That's coming up, but first, I want to remind you to follow us on Twitter at Studio 360
1:35.6	Show. And now, back to the podcast.
1:39.8	West Side Story was originally East Side Story, as in the Lower East Side, where a generation
1:45.3	of immigrants had settled after arriving from southern and eastern Europe in the early
1:49.1	1900s.
1:50.8	Many of those immigrants were Jewish, like the family of playwright Arthur Lawrence.
1:55.3	He was born Arthur Levine.
	...

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