westsidestory

‘West Side Story,’ Which Won’t Reopen, Will Return $10 Million Grant
The Broadway revival received federal aid through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program. But the show decided not to reopen, and said it would return the money.

By Matt Stevens


Earlier this summer “West Side Story,” the ambitious, avant-garde-tinged revival of the classic musical, got some significant relief: $10 million in federal funding. It was the maximum amount allowed under the new Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, which devoted $16 billion in federal aid to help music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses recover from the pandemic.

But even with that aid in its war chest, the show announced this week that it would not return to Broadway. Asked about the grant on Tuesday, the show said it would give back the money.
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Broadway: Ivo Van Hove’s Dreadful “West Side Story” May Be Returning Despite a Panning by the Times And Picket Lines Out Front Protesting a MeToo’d Actor

by Roger Friedman

I was going to report that Ivo Van Hove’s dreadful, panned version of “West Side Story” doesn’t appear to be coming back.

Announced as an open end run, when the controversial staging opened on February 20, 2020 — after 77 previews — the New York Times’s negative review carried a closing notice for June 2, 2020. There is no other indication anywhere that producer Scott Rudin and his financier, Barry Diller, were closing the show that soon.

But now with Rudin’s temporary but indefinite exile from producing, and Broadway revving up for the fall and winter, “West Side Story” with its video visuals and ugly dancing has gone AWOL. Its star, Isaac Cole Powell, has become a Calvin Klein underwear model.
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Broadway’s new ‘West Side Story’ is at war with itself

Rob Weinert-Kendt

Forget the deadly gang battle between the fictional Jets and Sharks—“West Side Story” is a show at war with itself. This groundbreaking 1957 musical has always been an unstable compound of social realist fable and rapturous dance fantasia, a tale of American violence and dysfunction rendered in operatic flights of song, balletic choreography and patchy melodrama. In a bold new Broadway revival from the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, the show’s divided qualities are heightened and sharpened to sometimes bracing, salutary effect, but also in a way that lays some of the original’s flaws startlingly bare.

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A new production of the beloved musical, “West Side Story” premiered on Broadway Thursday night. Vanessa Hudgens, Alec Baldwin and Liev Schreiber were some of the many stars on the red carpet for opening night. There are major differences between the original 1957 version and this new, grittier version, including the omission of the song “I Feel Pretty” and Jerome Robbins’ signature choreography. There’s also a giant projection screen on stage.

This gutsy new ‘West Side Story’ is unlike any you’ve seen — and it’s exhilarating

By
Peter Marks

NEW YORK — You can teach an old show new kicks.

Look for proof to the bravura audacity of director Ivo van Hove’s movingly gutsy new “West Side Story,” the much anticipated Broadway revisit to the masterwork by the ’50s hive-mind genius of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents.
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‘West Side Story’: Theater Review
Director Ivo Van Hove dares to fiddle with perfection in this modernized but still respectful re-working of Jerome Robbins’ 1957 masterpiece.

By Marilyn Stasio

Whittled down to one hour and forty-five minutes, “West Side Story” – with book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and choreography by Jerome Robbins — has grown exceedingly dark and mislaid some of its moving parts in the new Broadway revival from edgy Belgian director Ivo Van Hove. (Can you bear to lose “I Feel Pretty”?) But the plot of this beloved musical remains intact: We are still witnessing the deadly ethnic-fueled violence of two rival street gangs destroy the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of those immortal young lovers, Maria and Tony.
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Review: ‘West Side Story’ blasts back to Broadway — kinetic, bloody and modern to the core

By Charles McNultyTheater Critic

NEW YORK — During its long gestation in previews, Ivo van Hove’s bold re-imagining of “West Side Story” generated the kind of heated division normally reserved for presidential politics in a year with Donald Trump.
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‘West Side Story’ Stalemate: Bernardo’s Staying. So Are Protesters.
What is the proper punishment for #MeToo-era infractions? Demonstrators have been calling for Amar Ramasar’s removal from the cast because of his role in a photo-sharing scandal at City Ballet.

By Julia Jacobs

A half-hour before the start of “West Side Story,” two dozen protesters outside the Broadway Theater inched closer to the production’s turf.

Blocked by parked cars from their usual spot in the street, they instead occupied the sidewalk alongside ticket holders, many of whom looked quizzically at the demonstrators’ signs and fliers.
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