The Jets and the Sharks are returning to Broadway with some new moves as West Side Story is to be revived next year by two of Belgium’s most successful avant-garde performance-makers.
Director Ivo van Hove and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker will collaborate on the musical. Their version of West Side Story, due to open in December 2019, will be the first major revival not to follow Jerome Robbins’ original choreography. The show, which relocates the story of Romeo and Juliet to New York, first opened on Broadway in 1957, with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by them and Arthur Laurents. It was made into an Oscar-winning film four years later.
De Keersmaeker’s exacting dance productions with her company, Rosas, have included perceptive responses to the music of composers including Bach, John Coltrane and Brian Eno. Van Hove is best known for a stripped-back, barefoot production of A View From the Bridge, which transferred from the Young Vic to the West End and Broadway, where it won him a Tony award. He later directed Ben Whishaw in The Crucible in New York.
Van Hove and De Keersmaeker have been keen to collaborate for years. The choreographer told the Hollywood Reporter: “The way Bernstein in West Side Story combined theatre with music, specifically dance music, making a very strong, coherent, sophisticated score, creates a brilliant device to tell the story through dance. The challenge will be to offer a new reading.”
The director said his West Side Story would “bring it into the 21st century”. In a statement, Sondheim – who has called Robbins “the only genius I ever met” – expressed enthusiasm for the new version: “What keeps theatre alive over time is reinterpretation, and when that reinterpretation is as invigorating as his productions of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, it makes for something to look forward to with excitement.”
The Broadway revival will be designed by Jan Versweyveld, whose sleek sets have long defined the look of Van Hove’s productions for the Dutch theatre company Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Their most recent collaborations include the National Theatre’s version of Network, starring Bryan Cranston, which invited some of its audience to watch from a working restaurant on stage.
Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner are also collaborating on a new film version of West Side Story.
