Not the same old West Side Story

Maria was “a dream role, and I’m really glad I got to play this, but I’m not Puerto Rican.”

“West Side Story,” though a beloved American classic, is often mentioned as an example of the long-running problem in Hollywood and on Broadway of casting white actors for minority roles, and of perpetuating stereotypes of Latinos.

The first Maria on Broadway was Italian-American actress Carol Lawrence. In the 1961 film version, the character of Maria was famously played by Natalie Wood, an American actress of Russian descent. The role’s singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon. Many of the actors in the movie wore dark makeup and used fake Spanish accents — even Rita Moreno, who is Puerto Rican.

On the one hand, both the Broadway hit and film version marked rare and landmark works of American culture that actually featured Latinos, who were otherwise ignored. As one Puerto Rican film scholar said, “The fact that they said the words ‘Puerto Rico’ in a movie and there were Puerto Ricans being portrayed on screen - even if only one was a legitimate Puerto Rican that was born-and-raisedon-the-island, Rita Moreno — we didn’t care.”

The film and Broadway musical also both helped launch the careers of Moreno and Chita Rivera. But many audiences have criticized the portrayal of Latino men exclusively as gang members. (The play, which is inspired loosely by Romeo and Juliet, pits the Latino “Sharks” against their rival gang, the non-Latino “Jets”).

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning creator and star of Hamilton and In the Heights, told The Washington Post in 2009 that for the Latino community, West Side Story has been “our greatest blessing and our greatest curse.”

“As a piece of art, I think it’s just about as good as it gets,” said Miranda, the son of Puerto Ricans. “It also represented our foot in the door as an artistic community on Broadway . ... At the same time, because it’s just about the only representation of Latinos on Broadway and it’s about gangs, that’s where it gets tricky.”

In 2009, a Broadway revival of West Side Story had Miranda translate some of the English lyrics in the show into Spanish, an attempt to infuse more authenticity into Sondheim’s classic lyrics.

There has even been chatter that Steven Spielberg is planning a new screen adaptation of West Side Story. And according to the Hollywood Reporter, Spielberg wants to cast the movie in an “ethnically authentic manner.”