Any time someone chooses to revive a Broadway masterpiece, they take on a big responsibility and risk drawing criticism if it does not live up to expectations or takes an unexpected turn. But then that is part of the thrill of live theatre — taking risks and trying to exhilarate audiences with something new and different. The groundbreaking works of Stephen Sondheim have been undergoing quite a revival on Broadway lately, from Sweeney Todd to Company and now West Side Story. While these musicals are all important works, the latter is a landmark theatre classic that has always electrified audiences with its urban Romeo and Juliet tale. So when it was announced that the show was being reintroduced to the Great White Way after nearly 30 years with two famous songs that would feature lyrics sung in Spanish, many eyebrows were raised, some in intrigue, others in concern.
This energetic incarnation of West Side Story is well-acted, well-choreographed and well-staged. It is actually grittier than previous Broadway versions, most notably during the scene in Doc’s drugstore when Anita comes to tell Tony where Maria will meet him but is assaulted by his gang friends. While the Spanish lyrics have now been excised, they did work during their time in the production, which received a massive standing ovation.
Ugly Love
When scenic designer James Youmans — who has worked with West Side book writer Arthur Laurents for the last decade, most recently on Gypsy — was brought on board, he knew he was dealing with a sacred work. But Laurents did not simply want to recreate the feeling of the original, which was last revived on Broadway in 1980, and Youmans knew that it needed to offer fresh visual twists.
“You can’t really do the show the way it’s always been done because it becomes a period piece if you just do it that way,” explains Youmans. “The notion of translating parts of it into Spanish and having the Puerto Rican characters speak Spanish when they would in real life was really the impetus behind this new version, to do a more even-handed version of the two warring factions and have an all-Latino cast of Sharks.”
Like any respectable theatre veteran, Youmans knew about the show. He likes Oliver Smith’s design work and feels that it was groundbreaking for its era. “But his design was very much playing on Italian Renaissance visual themes and arches and really played up the romantic,” elaborates Youmans. “And really what Arthur wanted was to play that way down, basically to create an environment that was much more oppressive and ugly and had this love story stand out from that. So it was really like starting over. The other thing is there is very little color in the set design.”
Instant Door
Youmans notes that most of the color comes from the costumes and the lighting. “Much of it comes from the lighting because all those walls are really just gray,” he states. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s some color in certain scenes, but a lot of it was creating a more neutral palette that really could take on all these different environments. It worked for all the different scenes, especially when you go to the ‘Dream Ballet’ when you’re in this entirely different world. There’s not enough money or time or space to get rid of the entire set, so you have to deal with all of those different constraints.”
While certain scenes make full use of the stage, such as the opening, “America,” The Rumble, The Dream Ballet and the finale, many of the other scenes do not, often taking place on one side of the stage or in a stripped down set piece in the center. Youmans says that when he approached Laurents about the set for Doc’s drugstore, it was much more fleshed out, “and he stripped it away [to] the door, the counter, the bar…basically just those elements.”
“In fact, one of the problem areas in the original design was the issue of getting in and out of Doc’s, because in the play, unlike the film, ‘Cool’ is essentially performed in Doc’s,” continues Youmans. “In the original design there was more of a full-walled set that basically had to move upstage in order for the dance to take place. One of the hinge points of our design challenge was how to really get in and out of Doc’s much more quickly and effortlessly so that we can basically just drift into that number and then snap back when the number’s over. That’s how I came up with the idea of the door coming [up] through the floor, and we broke the set apart and had elements come on and off. The door in the floor is the thing that makes it all work because it can appear and disappear instantly.”
All the World on Stage
An interesting contrast to the more intimate scenes in places like Maria’s bedroom or Doc’s store basement is the larger, bleak city landscape that looms over the story’s characters. “It’s bleak, it’s omnipresent, and Arthur really wanted the intimacy of the story to come out,” declares Youmans. “What’s unique about it [the play] is that it’s this huge story and this tiny story at the same time. It’s a story about these two lovers and their most intimate experience, and then it’s a story about these enormous warring factions that stand in for these wars all over the world. So to be able to go back and forth between those, to have a design that can encompass both universes at the same time, was the challenge.”
The most impressive set piece in the new West Side Story is “The Rumble” at the end of Act I. The scene is pivotal because Tony stabs Bernardo, unintentionally killing him. From that point, the fates of many of the characters are sealed, including those of star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria. As Youmans notes, the fighting is a choreographed ballet where everything has been planned out, from the punches to the knife-throwing. Youmans really wanted to create a striking backdrop for this climactic sequence, and he did.
“For that scene, the big idea is that the fence comes down in front of everything,” explains Youmans. “That was the concept — we wanted to completely cage them in and use that element as a prop, so they could jump and climb on it. They can also throw the knife wherever they wanted without worrying about it landing in the audience. It always hits the fence and bounces off. But what that was really about was that ‘no escape’ kind of environment.”
The Force of Perspective
Through the fence and behind the characters is a walkway slashing diagonally across the background of the set. Beyond that is an overpass set piece that, even though it is flat, truly looks like it is hanging over everyone. “Obviously it is [done in] forced perspective,” says Youmans. “It has dimension. In fact the piece is built in complete forced perspective. Not only is it receding, but every I-beam is in perspective as well. The unit flies in and does lean forward. There’s a mechanism that allows it to lean forward at 7-½ or 8 degrees — not much. But what it does allow for is that [lighting designer] Howell [Binkley] can then uplight it from below, and you get this real sense of it coming alive. He has all these PAR cans underneath that you can’t see lighting the whole thing.”
In terms of the set construction, Youmans says a lot of it was aluminum and steel framed, while the portals, the legs, were canvas covered. He created angular brick stencils for walls that Scenic Art Studios then used to stencil on a layer of goop approximately a quarter inch thick, something very light and simple that when uplit, picked up a lot of texture.
“One of the things that I wanted to do was allow those windows to come and go, to not always be there in terms of their omnipresence,” says Youmans. “They’re basically light boxes that are behind the muslin — a rear projection material and an LED light box because they’re not physical windows. They emerge out of the wall rather than stick onto the wall. So there are moments when they are lit, and there are a lot of moments where they are not lit at all.”
Scenes and Seams
The biggest challenge for West Side’s scenic designer was to help keep the show running continuously and seamlessly. He observes that the original production from 1960 was put on when set and scene changes occurred in tandem, and that often involved dimming lights and dropping curtains. “Obviously that doesn’t work in today’s environment,” states Youmans. “People don’t even associate the show with that; they associate the show with the movie. So it was about not having to stop for anything and allowing the show to flow seamlessly from scene to scene so the thing doesn’t ever actually stop. Obviously it was Arthur’s direction in how he staged it, but a lot of the challenge was figuring out how to get easily from scene to scene.”
Youmans confirms that one of the biggest challenges in the show comes near the end — the taunting scene in Doc’s drugstore followed by a scene in Doc’s basement — and that Laurents admits that the problem comes from the way it was written. The scene in Doc’s basement — which is short and sweet and leads to the climactic scene outside in the streets — creates a technical challenge, because it bridges a scene upstairs in his drugstore to one out in the street. Youmans originally came up with a number of versions where part of Doc’s set turned around and became the basement or a whole basement unit came on. But they didn’t like them and made a simple transition by bringing a staircase on. That was for the trial run in Washington, D.C., but Youmans was never happy with it and insisted on trying something new while they were in tech in New York.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we bring in the two front [set] headers as far in as they possibly go?’ Brian Lynch, the tech supervisor, didn’t think we could do that,” recalls Youmans. “But we tried it [repeatedly] and finally we ended up with them eight feet off the ground, and it closed the envelope essentially and allowed us to go to another place for that tiny, oppressive scene before it opens back out to the street and that final environment. That scene was one of the hardest things to solve, and we really didn’t solve it until we were in New York.”
The veteran designer says he likes to take directors out of their comfort zones in order to make things work on any given show, and that latter story certainly illustrates his point. Youmans actually has more regional and off-Broadway theatre credits than Broadway credits, and he is bringing that more stripped down sensibility to the Great White Way.
Ultimately Youmans’ scenic design philosophy seems to extend from the way he feels about theatre. “It’s really about the characters, and in our show more than anything else it’s about the music,” he says. “The [West Side] orchestra is pretty astonishing. It is incredibly hard music to do every night, and they are amazing.”
