The Boomer Experience : Back in the Day

  When Steven Spielberg approached the playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner about the possibility of remaking  West Side Story  in 2014, Kushner was initially apprehensive for several reasons.  For one, he had impossibly large shoes to fill: the musical, created in 1957 by artistic titans—director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Steven Sondheim and writer Arthur Laurents—is a revered classic and a pillar of 20th century American art.  At the same time, there are many aspects of the musical that seem severely outdated to a younger, more culturally conscious audience. Many debates have erupted over the years about the musical’s  brownface origins and cartoonish depictions  of its Puerto Rican characters. Last year, the Puerto Rican writer Carina del Valle Schorske called for the musical to be retired in a  New York  Times  piece  titled “Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” To keep reading this article, click here.

  No need to forget the old  West Side Story , but here's another! Sixty years after the big-screen musical first snapped, twirled and mamboed its way into theaters, a new version has arrived, the story of love  almost  finding a way amid a prejudice-fueled blood feud as timely as ever and the music as enduring as it gets. The 1961 original's 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, score by  Leonard Bernstein  and lyrics by  Stephen Sondheim  notwithstanding,  Steven Spielberg 's 2021 release brings the story, if not into the 21st century, then into a more complicated 1950s New York than moviegoers were presented with the first time.  To keep reading this story, click here.

  The songs are timeless, the casting contemporary and dance routines still daring. But for  social   scientists   like us , Steven Spielberg’s  remake of the 1961 hit musical “West Side Story”  – a film about two rival street gangs – is more than a 21st-century face-lift of a Broadway classic. Released in theaters on Dec. 10, 2021, it is an opportunity to consider societal changes in the six decades since Maria and Tony stole the hearts of audiences across the world – particularly in the world of gangs. As scholars who have  studied gang culture , we find that the soul of the street gang hasn’t changed much since the days of the Jets and the Sharks – but the world around them has. Demographics, economics, technology and public policy have reshaped and reshuffled gang life in America. So dramatic are the changes that the romanticized “West Side Story” characterization of gangs is  now a relic of a bygone era . To keep reading this story, click here.

  When Tony Kushner, Steven Spielberg, and actor iris menas reexamined the 64-year-old musical, they found a trans character in plain sight. When Steven Spielberg first approached Tony Kushner about making a new film of  West Side Story , Kushner was wary of the project. “I thought it was kind of crazy,” the playwright, screenwriter, and frequent Spielberg collaborator told me. “It just seemed like a surefire way to make something that was going to fail.” But soon, Kushner found himself, “casually reading bits and pieces of 1957 history.” He became fascinated with the slum clearance projects of the late 1950s and the destruction of Lincoln Square to make way for Lincoln Center. He began thinking about the lives of street kids and Puerto Rican immigrants. Soon, “it got exciting to me.” The original  West Side Story  was indifferently researched and focused far more on the mechanics of its plot than on the real world in which it was set. For much of the rest of his career, lyricist Steph

  Nearly 1,500 previously classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy have finally been released. Here’s what we know so far about the files. To keep reading this article, click here

  Michael Nesmith, who died Friday at his California home of heart failure at age 78, never lost his ambivalence about his best-known musical endeavor: The Monkees. On the one hand, most people know him as a member of that made-for-TV rock ‘n’ roll band during its two-year run on NBC-TV, 1966-1968. On the other hand, he was proudest of the music he made as a struggling folk singer before the TV show, and as a pioneering country-rocker and music-videographer after the show.  Those mixed feelings were obvious the last time I saw him. Michael Nesmith & The First National Band headlined the Country Music Hall of Fame’s CMA Theatre on Sept. 11, 2018. The 19-song set included only a single Monkees song—and that tune, “Papa Gene’s Blues,” dated back to Nesmith’s pre-Monkees folkie career. And yet Nesmith had just done a summer tour with his old bandmate, billed as “The Monkees Present: The Mike Nesmith & Micky Dolenz Show.” Dominated by Monkees songs, the tour proved so successful tha

  Arthur Ashe Jr. always wanted to make a profound change. Before he stepped on a tennis court, he perused encyclopedias and absorbed everything he could about London, France and Australia as a child. His plan was to play in Wimbledon, the French Open and Australian Open, so he needed to be well-versed on not only the tournaments but also the host countries. Johnnie Ashe understood his older brother’s desire better than anyone, but even he found himself blown away by Arthur’s focus when they were younger. After Johnnie cold-clocked a third-grade classmate who called Arthur a sissy for playing tennis, Johnnie asked his brother, “Why tennis?” After all, they were playground kids, so there were other options out there. “Because I want to be the Jackie Robinson of tennis,” a 12-year-old Arthur told Johnnie. To keep reading this article, click here.

  Peter Jackson’s new, nearly eight-hour edit of the 1969 film “The Beatles: Get Back” is getting plenty of attention, along with its fair share of  rave reviews  and  withering criticism . The documentary, cleaned up with the latest technology, counters the usual story of the Beatles’s acrimonious breakup by showing them doing more than squabbling. They collaborate, joke around and wax nostalgic in studios and in their legendary rooftop concert. The film reminds us that at the end of the 1960s, they were still writing innovative music that resonates today. Just five short years before, in 1964, the group was the subject of another powerful film, which tracked a pop revolution in the making. Albert and David Maysles’s “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.”   showed the band not only making music but reshaping the culture. Both documentaries reveal how the Beatles reoriented American music, helped the country shake off the drab conformity of mid-century consensus and, in the proc

  The Broadway show ran for 732 performances. The first film adaptation won 10 Academy Awards. And the fictional love story between a former gang member and the sister of a rival gang’s leader spawned more than a dozen revivals and tours. Now Jerome Robbins’s beloved musical,  “West Side Story,” is on theater screens  once again. The new film, directed by Steven Spielberg, premiered Friday. Often ranked   among the best musicals of all time, “West Side Story” was much less vaunted when it debuted on Broadway in 1957. Audiences and critics were discomfited by the violence and juvenile delinquency portrayed in the show, an adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” that trades rival families for warring street gangs — one Puerto Rican and the other White. “The radioactive fallout from ‘West Side Story’ must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” critic Walter Kerr  wrote in the New York Herald Tribune . Theatergoers were flummoxed that the show not only lacked the frothiness of other music