Perspectives across time

West side story in 1961 New York shows us New York in transition. After the war but before the upheaval of the 1970s the hedonism of the 1980s and the optimism of the 1990s. The Dodgers and the Giants are gone the Mets do not yet exist. The World Trade Center Towers will not dominate New York’s skyline for another 12 years. Addition of Puerto Rican characters culture and ideas is very important because 1961 is just before the lifting of immigration quotas based on race. To take the story of Romeo and Juliet and put it in New York in transition allows us to see through the telescope of musical comedy What the stresses of the postwar transition looks like two neighborhoods in families. By making the rivalry between the two families based on raise rather than historical misgivings this is a production for about and during the 1960s.

The 1985 version is fascinating the original language set in Pete Wilson’s California With the Montague and Capulet clans transformed into gang France for the mafia. The setting is very much 1990s California brimming with optimism before to.com and housing bubbles would change the state forever just beginning to experience the neighbors at eight that Pete Wilson is trying to head off in his second term as governor. Obviously adapting swords and daggers Two pistols and revolvers is simply a modernization but the ability to keep the original mail log and pacing and cadence as intended by Shakespeare is remarkable considering that DiCaprio and Danes were so young in 1995.
There are flashes of more overt Catholicism in this version which suggests an audience and director were comfortable with the role of Catholicism in modern American life. The illusions to Catholicism in west side story are there but their carefully disguised as to not alienate a protestant audience.