When Casting Latinx Actors Isn’t Enough
A highly anticipated new production of West Side Story premiered last week on Broadway. Despite promises that this version would bring the 1950s musical into the 21st century, today’s West Side Story has been met with #MeToo protests and harsh criticism about the way the it handles the Puerto Rican experience in modern-day America.
The Belgian director Ivo Van Hove has pitched his West Side Story as a radical and diverse update of the 1957 original that better reflects “the America of today,” as he told The Guardian. That meant casting Latinx actors (the 1961 film adaptation infamously cast Natalie Wood as the Puerto Rican lead, Maria) and using video to intersperse stage scenes with footage of police brutality.
However, crowds gathered on opening night to protest the casting of Amar Ramasar, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, who has been embroiled in a #MeToo controversy. Ramasar and another dancer were accused in 2018 of sharing nude photos of female company members. Also, critics have begun expressing frustration with Van Hove, who, for all his promises to update the show to reflect current realities, adds little to the musical’s original Puerto Rican narrative (which focused on the influx of Puerto Ricans to New York City in the 1950s). “Never mind,” added critic Carina del Valle Schorske (writing for The New York Times), “all that has transpired since then: salsa, hip-hop, the Young Lords, the movement to demilitarize Vieques, Hurricane Maria, #RickyRenuncia, the new ‘gran migración’ not to New York but to points south — especially Orlando, Fla., where the Pulse club massacre happened on Latin Night.”
What these protests and pointed critiques suggest is that this West Side Story suffers from an increasingly common tendency amongst liberals to rely exclusively on representation to do the heavy lifting of social justice. Casting Latinx actors is commendable, but we need their stories, not just their faces.
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