Existing comment:
"Voodoo" Macbeth and West Side Story:
Ten thousand people jammed the streets around the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem on opening night, April 13, 1936, for the Federal Theatre Project's Macbeth, directed by a 20-year-old named Orson Welles.
The FTP's Negro Unit was designed to provide jobs for black actors and artists during the Depression, as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Shakespeare's play was totally reconceived as the story of a 19th-century Haitian dictator, with witches and African drums, music and brilliant color.
Critics may have been puzzled, but audiences loved the play, which sold out in New York and then went on tour around the US, but only to locations where it could play to non-segregated audiences.
Twenty years later in October 1957, West Side Story burst onto Broadway and once again changed the way Americans looked at Shakespeare and at themselves.
This musical version of Romeo and Juliet by Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim, tackled gang violence and racial prejudice between the Puerto Rican and white communities of New York. Unlike Welles's production which employed black actors, West Side Story used white actors in make-up rather than Puerto-Ricans.
Both productions were controversial because white men had attempted to turn plays by an Anglo-playwright -- Shakespeare -- into lively and compelling vehicles that showcased the talents and the difficulties faced by minority groups in America. But they demanded -- and received -- attention, and opened the door to other possibilities. |