The gift of ‘West Side Story’
The revered musical has brought a deeper kind of education to high school performers
Hearing the horns blast the first notes of Leonard Bernstein’s prologue in Steven Spielberg’s new film adaptation of “West Side Story,” a physical tension rooted itself in my feet, then shot through my body like adrenaline. My heart raced and my breathing became measured, like I was bracing myself for exertion. When the Jets danced their first flying leaps onscreen, I felt myself anticipating the choreography. Muscle memories were triggered; if I were in an MRI machine, parts of my brain would have probably lit up on the monitor with deep-rooted neuronal pathways related to the score and movement I still knew by heart.
Almost 20 years ago, I performed in a production of “West Side Story” at my high school, Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. Being a part of the musical is an experience I share with thousands of other students. According to theatrical licensing company Music Theater International, there have been over 13,000 productions of “West Side Story” in amateur, professional and school theaters, resulting in over 100,000 unique performances since the musical premiered in 1957.
There are obvious reasons why the show continues to be such a popular choice in schools. First, the gang members and lovers at the center of the musical are teenagers, roughly the same ages as high school performers. Its themes are also timeless. “West Side Story” is a masterpiece of the American theater on so many fronts: Bernstein’s score is thrilling, and the high-flying choreography and tense original direction of Jerome Robbins was groundbreaking in its grittiness and emotional intensity when the musical premiered. Playwright Arthur Laurents’ translation of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to mid-century Manhattan gave the centuries-old plot new urgency. And with Stephen Sondheim’s poetic yet vernacular lyrics that distill the passions of teenage love and America’s racial animus into song, it is work that remains current and demands revisiting.
Spoiler alert: I did not become a professional musical theater performer after attending my arts high school. But my experience in “West Side Story” taught me the values of practicing, of rigor and setting goals more ambitious than I thought I could accomplish. This education helped shape me into an informed consumer of the arts — something I hope to inspire everyone who reads my column to be.
“The fact that high schools manage to pull this off all the time is miraculous,” says Alexander Bernstein of the challenging yet rewarding material. Bernstein is the son of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre, as well as the vice president and treasurer of the Leonard Bernstein Office,
which manages licensing, promotion and more for the composer’s body of work. He is also the president of Artful Learning, the educational program within the Bernstein organization that teaches educators how to embed visual and performing arts into the learning process.
Five months after his father’s death in 1990, the younger Bernstein directed a combined middle/ high school production of the musical where he also played the adult character Doc, which he calls one of the great experiences of his life. Sharing stories of his father’s creation of the show with those students, he found himself making connections between “West Side Story” and history, social studies and its literary source material — all of which, he says, inspired him to create Artful Learning. Since its founding in 1992, the program’s model has been employed in 17 schools in nine states, including the Willow Elementary Magnet School in Napa.
“Unless kids are having an emotional connection to their work, they can’t have a compelling education experience,” Patrick Bolek, Artful Learning’s executive director, says of the program’s mission. “We feel that the arts are the pathway to that engagement.”
Artful Learning has used the musical in teachertraining exercises that include creating tableaux of scenes, interpreting lyrics through dance, and writing monologues for the character of Doc. Educators are also encouraged to explore dramatic elements like conflict and relationships through the script and dissect musical concepts like timbre, rhyme and melody.
Bernstein says education was always central to his father’s work as a composer and conductor, part of a “rabbinical streak” that inclined him toward teaching. On the professional side, San Francisco Symphony Music Director Emeritus Michael Tilson Thomas is a notable protege of Leonard Bernstein’s. For the rest of us, Bernstein imparted his musical knowledge beyond the orchestra pit in other ways, including his “Young People’s Concerts” on television and appearances on CBS’ “Omnibus.” Today, through Artful Learning and the