No Subtitles on Boradway

Since we're less than three weeks away from the due date, last night seemed like a great time to take a night out and go see a big Broadway show. We're both big Bernstein fans, so West Side Story seemed ideal.

I've been interested in seeing the current revival since I heard what they were doing with it. The show's original book writer (dialogue and story), Arthur Laurents, decided to go back and translate big chunks of the dialogue into Spanish. It makes sense: many of the characters are newly arrived Puerto Ricans who, for the most part, wouldn't speak English to each other.

What's more, the story of the musical is so well known and so simple that any audience should be able to follow it, in any language. Plus, Stephen Sondheim has spent most of his career regretting that he gave a young, uneducated girl the lyric, "I feel pretty and witty and gay." It sounds like something out of Cole Porter, not Hell's Kitchen.

So, heading into last night, I was really excited. It's not just the chance to see a show with great music and choreography: it's the chance to sit in an audience that would be at the same disadvantage that I have. There would be no subtitles or surtitles, like the ones at the opera where I first discovered that I couldn't read them. Here, the whole audience would have to listen and translate for themselves... except for the Spanish speakers, of course.

That's why I was a little disappointed to discover, a year after the show first opened, that they've decided to back-track on some of the Spanish. Now, they alternate verses with English and Spanish, so that the audience can hear the English first and understand what's happening. This was probably due to audiences complaining that they didn't understand what was going on. Even last night, with a good amount of linguistic hand-holding, a bunch of younger theatergoers complained that there was "so much Spanish, I didn't know what was going on." It's a little sad.

At the same time, it does validate my refusal to ever watch subtitled films. When people tell me that "you don't need to know what they're saying" in a Fellini film, I ask them to try watching one without subtitles and see if they still think that. Audiences crave dialogue they can understand; emotional expression isn't enough to get you through a story. SO, sure, since I know this show well enough, I didn't need the English; but for a kid who's never seen it before, it might be really frustrating.

I'd still highly recommend the production. It's some of the best dancing I've ever seen, and I can be a pretty harsh critic for a blind guy. I see just well enough to know how much energy, movement, precision, and coordination is happening. Sometimes, I use my little telescope/monocular to watch a couple at a time, and it was worth it here. Of course, the story is gripping, the characters are fun to root for/against, and the orchestra (spread across a pit and two house boxes) was freaking incredible. And, for the most part, the singing was pretty great. I wish they could do it without microphones, but we lost that battle years ago. Oh, and the set was fantastic.

Even if you can't quite see it all, a great musical gives you a lot to experience. The tiny visual details, and even the meaning of the words, are a tiny fraction of the experience.