West Side Story: A Musical on Power Dynamics, Violence, and American Society.

West Side Story: A Musical on Power Dynamics, Violence, and American Society. 

Created 1969 on the silver screen and later readapted on Broadway in 2019, West Side Story is a tale about two lovers who meet but cannot be together due to involvement with opposing gangs. Through singing, storytelling and incredible choreography, the audience, including myself, goes on a rollercoaster of emotions trying to decide who we should empathize with and root for. This modern-day Romeo and Juliet focuses on the power structures amongst the rival gangs and also between the gangs and the cops. These power structures impact all the daily life between who you can talk to, to who you can support, to who you can love. Lastly, this musical focuses on the impact of senseless violence and ideas of revenge can have on an individual and a community as a whole. This is a topic we have explored in-depth in class with the novel, Dispatches by Michael Herr, Dr. Stranglove, and The Big Lebowski.

West Side Story has a large focus on power either as a community, as an individual, or from your authority. Between every conversation between the Shark, (Latinx immigrants), the Jets (the other gang), and the law enforcement, there is always tension. As Foucault believes, power is omnipresent and impacts all our social interactions starting on a micro level and resulting in the macro. This power originates from a plethora of factors rather than one singular source. In West Side Story, this is from what ethnicity you are, to what gang you affiliate with. We then exercise our power in all social interactions. The power balance shifts when faced with resistance. On the Jet side, Riff and Tony have power from them co-founding the gang. On the Shark side, Bernardo has power because of the same reason. This causes the gangs to act as a unit leading to senseless violence in the name of respect or getting some territory. People also form power because of love. For Anita, it is loving Bernardo. Maria and Tony, it is loving one another. This battle because of love causes large amounts of tension, especially between Maria and Anita, for Tony kills Bernardo for killing Riff. There is a moment of a clash, both utilizing their power from their love. 

Though members of both communities have power against one another and within themselves, Arthur Laurents, Leanard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim wanted to make a point that the real power came from the authority meaning the cops. At the start of the musical, Detective Schrank, the senior cop goes to the Jets to see if they would rat out whos running the Sharks. When they don’t say anything, the cops threaten to beat all of them up. This idea of abusing power is furthered in the song Dear Officer Krumpe, in which the Jets sing about the perception of them from the higher-ups. “Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks, golly Moses naturally were punks.” In the new adaptation I saw, they perform the second half of the song standing in a line with one of their hands up, and the other hand on a phone as if they are recording the cops. On the screen behind, the new creative team decided to put on images and video clips of police brutality. This is all to say, though we are fighting each other, the real enemy and creator of violence have been the cops. They are all living in a society where they have no chance of moving up in the world. This is a very anti-American Dream philosophy. They view the only way to be part of something bigger is by joining a gang. “Oh man, without a gang, you're an orphan. With a gang, you walk in twos, threes, fours. And when your crew is the best, when you're a Jet, you're out in the sun, buddy boy. You're home free home.” (Riff)

This violence, like in Dispatches, is unnecessary. They both fight over land and respect and end up killing each other for revenge. No one had to die in the brawl but because things got heated and escalated because of course, it did, Bernardo ended up killing the Riff, who ended up killing Bernardo. Chino, the person who was supposed to be with Maria, ended up killing Tony in the name of Bernardo. They became murderers for no good reason. This reminds me of sections of Dispatches where we would read about these terrible events unfolding in the Vietnam war, in which it is all about ideology between two parties outside the country, the US and the USSR. Many of the soldiers didn’t need to fight, and when they left they came back different if they came back at all. This is the same as the gangs in West Side Story. Nothing good comes from the violence, only pain and loss. The fighting impacts them forever and changes a person. This is seen in The Big Lebowski with characters such as Walter and Jeffrey Lebowski. The one's alive grief the lives of the dead such as Maria over Tony’s body at the end of the musical. Without violence, maybe these lovers would have ended up together instead of being separated, at first by rules of gang warfare, and next death. Overall, this paints a particularly bleak look at America, one of violence, abusive power structures, and grief. They tell a message that maybe if we changed America to be a more loving accepting place, then the tragedies that occurred would never have unfolded. 

Alec Shiman