It struck them as the perfect framing for the updating of 'Romeo and Juliet' that they had been searching for. The racial element – with the Puerto Rican Sharks taunted by the white Jets – resonated with Bernstein, who had struggled through anti-Semitism as a younger man. The Puerto Rican element also allowed him to introduce a mambo – which gives the score a "hyper-contemporary" feel, said Valiere.The Jewish creators of “West Side Story,” Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, on the opening night of the original Broadway musical, Sept. Sixty years after the first “West Side Story” film was released, another two highly acclaimed Jewish creatives - director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner - have returned to the material to helm a hotly anticipated remake. Yet in the current cultural climate, when audiences are highly sensitive to onscreen depictions of underrepresented groups, new questions have emerged: Were Spielberg and Kushner the right people to attempt a remake of “West Side Story,” or should that task have fallen to Puerto Rican creatives? And there is also a deeper question: Should the show, which some critics and academics have said is fundamentally outdated, even have been remade at all? This new “West Side Story,” which is being released just weeks after Sondheim’s death, retains the general arc of the original musical while making notable changes to the story and presentation, including casting Latino actors to play the Sharks and their significant others. The original show’s transformation from a Jewish story to a Puerto Rican one mirrored the American Jewish community’s own assimilation and shedding of its outsider status in the mid-20th century. By the 1950s, Jews were finding ways to assimilate into white America while new concerns about racialized violence among newer immigrant groups, particularly Latino communities, were bubbling up in the city.
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