Revisiting (and Revising) West Side Story's Parahistories

Abstract:

This essay returns to the author’s 2012 Theatre Journal article, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949–2009,” to reassess the utility of “parahistory” as a critical or historiographic device to evince how “revisals” of canonical theatrical works might chart, illuminate, and document changes in the historical conditions of creative possibility. The essay then considers three notable productions of the musical that have appeared since the essay’s publication: the 2021 cinematic adaptation by Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner; the 2019 Broadway revival directed by Ivo van Hove; and Carnegie Hall’s 2016 The Somewhere Project. Teasing out how each of these productions underscore both the limits and possibility of “parahistory,” the essay concludes with a consideration of how artists and scholars have used West Side Story as a point of critical and creative departure and ponders how a more expansive notion of parahistories might orient a generative path toward understanding the theatrical canon amidst the contemporary cultural trend toward “the multiverse.”