The Revivals Of The Fittest

摘要

One compensation of new York City life is that even the unpleasant parts come wrapped in legend. Your commute to Brooklyn might be a drag, but hey, Walt Whitman did it before you, and immortalized it in a poem. For generations, no art form has done more to make the city a place of fables than the Broadway musical. From Rodgers and Hart's "Manhattan" in 1925 to "Christopher Street" in "Wonderful Town" to "Another Hundred People" in "Company," songwriters haven't just reflected their madcap city-they've helped to define it.Now, just when New Yorkers are in the midst of a spiritual flogging-upstaged by Obama's Washington, humbled by Wall Street's collapse, perplexed by real-estate prices that are almost reasonable-the two greatest New York musicals have returned. If staged well, "West Side Story," with its native-born and Puerto Rican gang warfare, distills the violence, frustrated dreams and tragic undertow of this immigrant town. And "Guys and Dolls," with its hustlers and zealous (though badly outnumbered) religious believers, capturesthe ingenuity of New York's street poetry, the hard-edged sense of humor that is constantly demanded of people forced to navigate these sidewalks every day. Both of the revivals take liberties with the material, in hopes of speaking more directly to our vexed moment. Each tells a very different story about the way we live in the nation's artistic capital now.