I’d like
to return for a moment to my post about the prospective West Side Story movie remake by Steven Spielberg, and how I would like to see such a film have the musical’s Puerto Rican/Nuyorican
characters sing and speak to each other in Spanish. To help illustrate my point in my previous post, I embedded the above video from
the 2009 Broadway revival, which did indeed mix Spanish and English, just as I
hope Spielberg’s film (should it come about) will do.
The scene
from the video features the musical’s well-known song “A Boy Like That,” sung
in Spanish as “Un Hombre Asi.” The
scene depicts Tony (Matt Cavanaugh) and Maria (Josephina Scaglione), the Romeo
and Juliet figures, and Maria’s friend Anita (Karen Olivo), the love of Maria’s
brother, Bernardo, whom Tony — in the heat of the moment — killed in a knife
fight the night before.
The mix
of languages in this scene, Spanish and English, makes palpable Maria’s
entrapment between two conflicting worlds. When Anita sings “Un Hombre Asi” to Maria, the viewer more
forcefully grasps that Anita is appealing to Maria’s sense of family and
community. This feeling is much
stronger than it was in all of the strictly Anglophone productions of West
Side Story that
I’ve seen.
And when
Maria finally pushes back against Anita, and shouts — in English — “You should
know better” to her, the moment strikes like a thunderclap: Maria has assertively
chosen a place with the English-speaking Tony (“There’s a place for us”), not
necessarily a place apart from her Nuyorican community, but one that allows a
different, more inclusive identity.
It becomes clear to us that Anita senses Maria growing away from a demarcated Nuyorican identity. As she sinks
onto the bed with her hand covering her face, the audience tangibly gets the
sense that Anita — having just lost Bernardo — is now losing Maria, too. Then, Maria continues to assert her new
identity by singing to Anita in English.
The song that she sings, “I Have a Love,” has perhaps the most beautiful
verses in all of West Side Story, so this is one Puerto Rican-sung number in the musical
that ought to retain its English lyrics.
Finally, when Anita joins Maria in singing the song’s final verse in
English, the gesture forcefully communicates that Maria has changed Anita’s
mind, more forcefully than it would have had the scene been played entirely in
English. Moments like this
illustrate the expressive power that comes when using a mix of multiple
languages in a single work.
With all
of the newfound strengths in this two-tongued approach, I was very dismayed to
learn that the creators of this bilingual production of West Side Story — which used Spanish only very
sparingly to begin with — cut back drastically on the use of the language later
in the musical’s run. According to
Playbill, most
of “A Boy Like That’s” original English dialogue and lyrics were reinstated,
and “I Feel Pretty,” initially sung in the revival as “Mi Siento Hermosa”
(another Spanish-language video that I embedded), reverted to English in its
entirety. Considering “Un Hombre
Asi’s” emotional impact, I can’t see how returning to a (virtually) monolingual
rendition of the musical was a change for the better. I’m left to imagine that the creators of the 2009 revival
were hit with mucho negative feedback from viewers (out-of-towners?) who just didn’t like
to be linguistically challenged by a Broadway musical (on the other hand, the change might have
been prompted by nothing more ominous than disappointing ticket sales).
Whatever
the reason, this now makes it more unlikely that a prospective remake of West
Side Story will
follow the 2009 revival’s polyglot daring. I can keep my fingers crossed, but the chances of Spielberg
making a bilingual film of the musical were slim to begin with. And news of the 2009 revival’s
reversion to English-only adds to the improbability. But I hope that a bilingual audiovisual version of West
Side Story, by
Spielberg or by someone else, is made one day. Maybe, like Tony and Maria, there’s a place for that as
well.
No comments:
Post a Comment