(Photo by Jose CABEZAS/AFP/Getty Images)
For many young men in urban areas, especially immigrant teens who don’t speak the dominant language, who are picked on in school, and whose parents work two jobs or still live in their home countries, gang membership provides a home away from home, protection, and a passage to manhood.
Most of the murder cases I’ve handled over the past five years have been gang related. From the infamous “Junior” case, where subsets of the same gang fell upon each other, to wars among neighborhood toughs fighting over the block’s marijuana trade — shooting, stabbing, and fighting is, unfortunately, how gangs function.
That’s why when I recently saw the revival of “West Side Story” in previews at the Broadway Theater, I was saddened to realize how little has changed in gang violence since the 1957 play was written. Sure, the Sharks and the Jets don’t exist, but today’s gangs, like the Bloods, Crips, MS13, Trinis, etc., still attract the same crowd -– bored, hostile, young men, roaming the streets
looking for power, kicks, and meaning in their lives.
Although I’ve seen “West Side Story” many times, this most recent version hits harder than any I’ve seen before. Gone is the light-hearted ballad, “I Feel Pretty,” the frilly costumes at the high school dance, and the humorous denseness of Officer Krupke. In their place is hard-core grit, open lust, violence, and police brutality.
The play begins with the Jets walking front and center, punked-out in tattoos and piercings, wife-beater tees and low-slung pants. It looks more like a line-up than a chorus line. The Sharks follow on stage, intermingling with the Jets in slow-motion, sizing up their enemies.
Each nuance of the actors’ steely glances is displayed along a huge wall at the back of the stage as a hand-held video camera sweeps slowly from face to face. The technique, used throughout the play, creates a multidimensional flux of space and time where anything could happen and does, from a sudden rainstorm to the back wall opening to reveal (and partially obscure) further sets within.
The effect at times is vertiginous. Dancers move in front of ever-shifting video of empty streets bordered by scaffolding, barren factories, and police staring down gun barrels at cuffed perps.
I wondered what Leonard Bernstein would have thought of this new, tougher, and less romanticized version.
Although not a lyric or note was changed, by updating the clothes, choreography, and gestures, and adding tattoos and piercings, even G-rated lyrics like “Officer Krupke, krup you!” didn’t seem out of place despite anachronisms like gang members taking selfies or filming police
encounters on cellphones.
It was leaner, faster-paced and more poignant than the original. This is no mere reworking of an old theme, but a hardening of its message: kids and racism run amok, where only a sacrifice -– the death of the kid looking to escape — brings people together.
Gang warfare in urban areas is as strong as ever. With waves of new immigrants, enhanced hostility toward them, insufficient money for public schools, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, I fear the tragedy of “West Side Story” will keep getting replayed long after this incarnation finishes its run.
Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.