{"id":1458,"date":"2009-03-23T12:24:58","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T19:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/03\/a-true-revival\/"},"modified":"2009-03-23T12:29:14","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T19:29:14","slug":"a-true-revival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/23\/a-true-revival\/","title":{"rendered":"A True Revival"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>TURF WARS<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWest Side Story\u201d and \u201cGod of Carnage\u201d on Broadway.<\/h2>\n

by\u00a0<\/span>John Lahr<\/a><\/span>MARCH 30, 2009<\/span><\/h4>\n

Gangs of New York: Karen Olivo, Josefina Scaglione, and Matt Cavenaugh star in Arthur Laurents\u2019s bold revival.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

West Side Story\u201d (at the Palace, under the sure-handed direction of Arthur Laurents, who wrote the musical\u2019s original book) is so exciting it makes you ache with pleasure. All the defining forces of the American fifties\u2014velocity, mobility, confidence\u2014are condensed into this superb retelling of the Romeo and Juliet legend, which plays out against the background of Latino-versus-Anglo gang violence. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, \u201cWest Side Story\u201d incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century. Everything about the show is streamlined: the fluid jolt of Jerome Robbins\u2019s choreography; the exhilarating syncopation of Leonard Bernstein\u2019s symphonic score; the bravura concision of Stephen Sondheim\u2019s lyrics; the swiftness of Laurents\u2019s storytelling\u2014the book is one of the shortest in the history of the musical. The d\u00e9but of the show, in 1957\u2014a production I saw\u2014also marked the moment when the musical asserted its right to treat just about any subject (murder, rape, bigotry) as grist for popular entertainment. \u201cWest Side Story\u201d is somehow both airborne and transcendent.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>[ click to continue reading at NewYorker.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker TURF WARS \u201cWest Side Story\u201d and \u201cGod of Carnage\u201d on Broadway. by\u00a0John LahrMARCH 30, 2009 Gangs of New York: Karen Olivo, Josefina Scaglione, and Matt Cavenaugh star in Arthur Laurents\u2019s bold revival. West Side Story\u201d (at the Palace, under the sure-handed direction of Arthur Laurents, who wrote the musical\u2019s original book) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}