Performing Arts

FILE/The Associated Press

Chita Rivera performed in the original Broadway production of West Side Story in 1957.

NEW YORK – More than 50 years after the musical West Side Story had its original Broadway premiere, it is set to return in February in a darker, grittier, bilingual revival, the show's producers said this week.

In an element that its director, Arthur Laurents, says would heighten the passion and authenticity of the show, much of the dialogue will be in Spanish.

"They will speak Spanish where they would naturally," he says in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. "The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don't think many eyes are going to stray to the translation."

Mr. Laurents, the author of the book for West Side Story and the director of the current Broadway revival of Gypsy, whose book he also wrote, has vowed to make this revival a more realistic version of the original, a teenage gang romance musical modeled after Romeo and Juliet and set on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s.

With music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it was first staged on Broadway, to great critical success, in 1957. After playing for 732 performances, it was turned into a film starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in 1961, and later revived in 1964 and 1980.

Mr. Laurents still rankles at the mention of the 1980 revival, which he calls bland, and the film version, about which he says: "Bogus accents, bogus dialect, bogus costumes. I think it's also terribly acted."

Earlier interpretations left the teenage characters appearing too innocent, Mr. Laurents says. "You don't treat these kids as little darlings, but as what they are," he says. "They're all killers, Jets and Sharks. And the piece is really about how love is destroyed by a world of violence and bigotry."

The idea for a 21st-century revival first came up nearly five years ago, says Kevin McCollum, a producer along with Jeffrey Seller and James L. Nederlander.

Then two years ago Mr. Laurents called. "He got me to the apartment and said, 'I've got it,' " Mr. McCollum says. "He really wanted to play with the idea of authenticating the language, and that got us really excited." (He and Mr. Seller also produced In the Heights, a musical peppered with Spanish phrases.)

Mr. Laurents, who turned 91 on Monday, traced the origin of the new revival to his companion of 52 years, Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006.

Mr. Hatcher was a fluent Spanish speaker, and on a visit to Bogota, Colombia, saw a staging of West Side Story in Spanish.

In that version, the language had transformed the show: The Sharks were the heroes, the Jets the villains.

That sparked the idea of incorporating Spanish into a modern revival. "I thought it would be terrific if we could equalize the two gangs somehow," Mr. Laurents says. "But I had a lot of trouble because I was depending on Tom, who is fluent. And then he died."

Not long afterward, two of Mr. Laurents' friends in Buenos Aires, Argentina, told him that they had a West Side Story script entirely in Spanish, on which Mr. Hatcher had made handwritten notations. "It was like he was telling me, 'You must do it,' " Mr. Laurents says.

Julie Bosman,

The New York Times

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