Springing love from hate in the West Side Story

I was seventeen when I first read Romeo and Juliet. At that age, I ought to have been ripe enough to get sucked into the drama of star-crossed love, but I wasn’t. While I loved the language of Shakespeare, I wasn’t sold to the idea of killing oneself — and so stupidly, at that — over somebody that one didn’t even know existed a mere night ago.

I was eighteen when I first watched Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. The former on VHS and the latter on the big screen, both as a requirement for a Comparative Literature class that surveyed literature as represented in different genres. Zeffirelli’s version convinced me that teenagers could fall so deeply in love, with the innocence and naiveté their age affords them. Luhrmann’s take, on the other hand, with its Sword guns, impressed upon me the gravity of the family feud that pulled the young lovers apart. Still, I found it laughable that one could readily commit suicide over a love affair that lasted a scant one night.

I think I was twenty when I gave my one required Shakespeare class a second try. I had a fabulous teacher — a young, intelligent, sexy woman who wowed the entire class on all levels — who introduced me to another reading of the famous tragedy: that it was a comedy about youth’s folly. True enough, taken as a comedy — a dark comedy — Romeo and Juliet is quite funny.

However, what really stuck with me was the idea of youth’s folly when it comes to “serious and adult” matters like True Love. Love, for all the good it could bring you, and youth, for all the blind faith and courage with which it gifts you, when thrown together into an already volatile mix, produces a heady formula in which the death of an enamored teenager is lamentable, but perfectly plausible.

This was what I appreciated in West Side Story, Broadway’s take on Shakespeare’s work. Or, to be precise, and since I’ve never been to Broadway, much less see a Broadway play, the 1961 film adaptation by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins of Broadway’s version. Featuring instead warring gangs made up of hormone-laced and hatred-induced teenagers finding their place in the tenements of 1950s New York City, West Side Story gives its own song and dance spin on Shakespeare’s tale of love and woe.

Whereas Romeo and Juliet couldn’t possibly be together because their families have been feuding for so long nobody even remembers how it started, Tony and Maria really have the misfortune of both coming from the opposite side of two warring teenage gangs who are fighting for no apparent reason. While Tony is not really an active gang member—in fact, he’s working hard as a delivery boy at Doc’s Drug Store—he’s the best buddy of the “American” Jets’ leader Riff. Maria, on the other hand, is the sister of the Puerto Rican Sharks’ leader Bernardo and is betrothed to his gang mate Chino. Think college love amidst fraternities, and you’ll get part of the picture. Toss in a little of the Filipino diaspora and the trappings of displacement, and perhaps you’ll understand where the Sharks are coming from.

Like Romeo and Juliet, the two meet and fall in love at a dance. Unfortunately, it is at the dance that Riff had earmarked as the venue in which to formally challenge Bernardo to a rumble. In fact, Tony is there in a show of support to Riff. Prodigious birth of love, indeed.

Tony and Maria’s love affair spans the night of the dance to the night of the rumble, where Riff would die in the hands of Bernardo, and Bernardo, in the hands of Tony.

Sometime after that, Tony would go berserk, believing Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita’s lie that Chino had shot Maria dead. Sometime before this, Tony tells Doc that he would willingly go through everything even if it lasted for just one night.

To be continued on Thursday.