[On March 9th,
Raúl Juliá would
have turned 76. To honor one of the most famous and talented Puerto Rican
artists, this week’s series will feature a handful of Boricua blogs, leading up to a special
weekend post on Puerto Rican statehood!]
On the musical’s
surprising history, and its limits and strengths as a cultural text.
If the original 1947
plan developed by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents had
come to fruition, this post would have to be part of a series on Holocaust
history or Jewish American identities instead. Robbins’ original
concept, as fleshed out in collaboration with those two artists, was for a
musical he called East Side Story, a
reimagining of Romeo and Juliet that
would focus on the forbidden love between a Jewish immigrant girl (a Holocaust
survivor) and an Irish Catholic boy in New York’s Lower East Side, as well as
the parallel communal conflict between the Jewish “Emeralds” and the Catholic “Jets.”
Robbins’ completed a first draft, but the project didn’t go further—until nearly
ten years later, when other work brought the three men back together. By that
time re-emerging Chicano American communities (such as those in New
York’s “Spanish Harlem”) had become more prominent in national media, and
when Laurents
revised the prior book for the version that became West Side Story (1957) he made the heroine Puerto Rican. The rest,
of course, is musical theater history.
The fact that the
heroine’s cultural and ethnic identity shifted so dramatically, relatively late
in the creative process, might suggest that the specifics of her heritage were
not crucial to the musical. Indeed, I would argue that in many ways Maria could
have remained Jewish in the final version without much else changing (the
Holocaust history would of course have been a significant addition). There is
one place in the show that does focus very overtly on Puerto Rican identity,
however: the song “America,”
and the debate it features between Anita (who prefers the US to Puerto Rica)
and Rosalia (who favors the latter). Partly because Anita has a far more
significant role in the musical (as the girlfriend of Maria’s brother and the
Sharks’ leader Bernardo) than Rosalia, and partly because she consistently gets
the last word in the song’s call-and-response form (ie, the closing exchange, “Everyone
there will give big cheer!”/”Everyone there will have moved here!”), the song
largely endorses Anita’s perspective on the island. And it’s a pretty negative perspective,
one that opens with “Puerto Rico … you ugly island” and continues with lines
like “Island of tropic diseases” or “And the babies crying/And the bullets
flying.” Not the most inspiring pop culture portrayal of this American
community.
Yet the song
also includes, in a chorus voiced by the entire group of girls rather than
either individual speaker, an image of precisely that Americanness: “Immigrant
goes to America/Many hellos in America/Nobody knows in America/Puerto Rico’s in
America!” Seen in that light, the choice to make Maria Puerto Rican is a far
more significant one: an acknowledgement of this New York and American
community, one as much a part of the nation’s fabric as those of European
American heritage exemplified by Maria’s lover Tony (Anton); if not, indeed,
more so, since coming from Puerto Rico to the United States does not constitute
an international act of immigration like those undertaken by Tony’s ancestors.
And along those same lines, both the musical and film versions of West Side Story brought prominent Puerto
Rican actresses into mainstream popular culture: Chita Rivera, who played
Anita in the original Broadway version and went on to a long, groundbreaking career
in musical theater; and Rita Moreno, who won an Academy Award for
her Anita and went on to become the first Hispanic performer
to win an Oscar, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy Award. Robbins and company might not
have planned to make their musical into a Puerto Rican and American milestone—but
in some unexpected and key ways it became that nonetheless.
Next Puerto
Rican post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other PR connections you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment