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One of the bet Piano songs we've had all semester. I really dig this one, and though I wasn't as big of a fan of the musical, but the piano on this one was pretty great.

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I'll Cover You (Reprise) - RENT (2008 Broadway Cast)

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One day I would really like to see a Broadway performance of Hunchback. That was a big part of my childhood mainly due to how mature it was for a Disney movie. The talk of lust, burning in hell and all that really made me curious as a kid, and I think it could be done really, really well on Broadway.

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YES MY FAVORITE DISNEY MOVIE FINALLY

So I really dug the broadway performance of it. I would genuinely like to see it one day, though the whole Covid thing doesn't really seem to be supporting that wish. There are so many clips of it on YouTube and much like Cats, the design of the characters and the costumes really got me.

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The Lion King - Circle of Life | Musical Awards Gala 2018

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This one was the best one, by far. Not only because I had my ears defiled by a bagpipe cover of it but, just the lyrics and the classic structure of the song. I've heard it all over the place, and though it is a ballad and isn't as funky, this will most likely be the one to stick with me the most.

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A selection of new images have been released for the all-star Les Misérables concert production, opening at the Sondheim Theatre tonight.

Taye Matthew as Gavroche
© Johan Persson

The cast comprises Michael Ball as Javert, Alfie Boe as Jean Valjean, Carrie Hope Fletcher as Fantine, Matt Lucas as Thénardier, Rob Houchen as Marius, Bradley Jaden as Enjolras, Katy Secombe as Madame Thénardier, Shan Ako as Éponine, Amara Okereke as Cosette and at certain performances John Owen-Jones will again play the role of Jean Valjean.

The Company also includes Kelly Agbowu, Joseph Anthony, Harry Apps, Charlie Burn, Gerard Carey, Earl Carpenter, Richard Carson, Danny Colligan, Rodney Earl Clarke, Matthew Dale, Matt Dempsey, Josefina Gabrielle, Nic Greenshields, Jessie Hart, Holly-Anne Hull, Ebony Jonelle, Connor Jones, Jessica Joslin, Luke McCall, Frances Mayli McCann, Leo Miles, Corrine Priest, Aaron Pryce-Lewis, Jon Robyns, Grainne Renihan and Samuel Wyn-Morris.

Ball, Boe, Fletcher and Lucas will only be able to play a limited number of extended February dates due to previous commitments. Jon Robyns, Bradley Jaden, Gerard Carey and Josefina Gabrielle will appear in the show during this period, as well Dean Chisnall and Nic Greenshields.

Amara Okereke and Alfie Boe
© Johan Persson

The show is penned by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg and is based on the novel by Victor Hugo. It has music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer and original French text by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel with additional material by James Fenton and adaptation by Trevor Nunn and John Caird.

The piece runs at the Sondheim Theatre from 5 December until the end of February.

Bradley Jaden
© Johan Persson

Katy Secombe and Matt Lucas
© Johan Persson

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Photos: First look at the all-star Les Misérables production at the Sondheim Theatre | WhatsOnStage

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A selection of new images have been released for the all-star Les Misérables concert production, opening at the Sondheim Theatre tonight. The cast comprises Michael Ball as Javert, Alfie Boe as Jean Valjean, Carrie Hope Fletcher as Fantine, Matt Lucas as Thénardier, Rob Houchen as Marius, Bradley Jaden as Enjolras, Katy Secombe as Madame Thénardier, Shan Ako as Éponine, Amara Okereke as Cosette and at certain performances John Owen-Jones will again play the role of Jean Valjean.

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Ah.. this one. I liked it, and it kinda of stuck on my mind after watching some of the Broadway videos. I've also heard the name used in about a thousand dirty jokes. Very funky, I dig it.

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The Opening song was okay, it didnt really catch my attention too much. Though one thing that did surprise me was the name. My aunt had a kitten named Gumbie, and though it could be for any other reason, I assume it was after The Old Gumbie Cat.

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The biggest thing I took out of watching the show was just the sheer amount of work it had to take to learn to sing and dance in these costumes. They do look fairly easy to move around in, but having to worry about getting a hair in your mouth while singing seemed to be pretty difficult.

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Once more, my only really exposure to Cats was the nightmare fuel of the latest film. I cant imagine watching it with a straight face and taking it seriously, though when looking back at the Broadway show, I wasn't too deep into it, but god damn I really dug the aesthetic. It was like they tried to do something different on purpose with how colorful it was and though it dealt with literal cats, I think it still fit pretty well.

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Another one I could really appreciate. Really, the Broadway version was more my style, not only in how it was presented but also the singing. I actually kinda felt bad listening to this, hearing Javerts inner thoughts interlaced with the first song, Look Down. It was an emotional scene that did not need the magic of the 2012 movie to be powerful.

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I did not like this one so much in the film. But jeez, this version. This is the kind of stuff I like, it felt like I was listening to a war march mixed with a slave song. "Jesus doesn't care." Was one line that stuck with me, and the fact that all the prisoners give their own tales of their crimes really set the stage for the entire show.

"Look down. Look down. You'll always be a slave."

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Les Misérables (10th Anniversary) - Look down [Lyrics on screen]

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This one mostly got me due to the fact it was Anne Hathaway. I really like her voice and though at parts it seems a bit overdone, I thought this one was emotional and hit every note that it should have for the narrative.

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Les Misérables (2012) - I Dreamed A Dream Scene (1/10) | Movieclips

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Some of the songs were great, though. Again I preferred the BBC story version, but even in the 2012 version, I could make due. Mostly when they weren't dealing with Russel Crowe, though. He was great in Gladiator, not so much in this one. Though the BBC version was not a musical, it still gave me a pretty good idea of the characters.

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Fantine is abandoned with baby Cosette | Les Misérables - BBC

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The epic six-part television adaptation of Victor Hugo's literary classic on MASTERPIECE on PBS has an uber-talented, star-studded cast that fans have fallen in love with! Check out our round-up of who's who in the Les Misérables cast and where you've seen (and loved) them before.

See new episodes of Les Misérables every Sunday from April 14 through May 19, both on-air and online, or binge the entire series with PBS Passport.

1. 1.
Dominic West

West plays the previously imprisoned Jean Valjean, the story's hero - "the best superhero that's ever been written about," according to West - whose journey for redemption and good is anything but easy. West also stars in The Affair (with Mrs. Wilson star Ruth Wilson), and previously in the gritty classic The Wire. He also recently performed alongside Keira Knightley in the feature film Colette, which earned him a British Independent Film Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

2. 2.
David Oyelowo

Oyelowo brings to life the complicated, driven and obsessive Javert, whose sole mission in life, it would seem, is to bring down Jean Valjean in a quest for what he believes is right. "Javert ... was born to criminal parents in prison," said Oyelowo. "He could have gone down the path of criminality himself, but he chooses the path of righteousness... You see a man on his own personal quest for justice."

Oyelowo has previously been nominated for a multiple Golden Globes and Emmy Awards in his career, and is best known for his role as the iconic Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, as Peter Snowden in the 2014 drama Nightingale, and alongside Lupita Nyong'o in Queen of Katwe. Later in 2019, Oyelowo can be found on the big-screen starring alongside Angelina Jolie in the Peter Pan/Alice in Wonderland prequel Come Away.

MASTERPIECE fans will remember Oyelowo in Small Island alongside Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) and Ruth Wilson (Mrs. Wilson).

3. 3.
Lily Collins

Collins stars as the tragic Fantine, abandoned by her lover and left to raise her daughter Cosette, alone in the world. "I personally as an actor have never gone that low," said Collins of playing Fantine's heartbreaking decline. "It was a really powerful experience for me to let go and give it all up to the moment."

Collins previously appeared in the award-winning film The Blind Side alongside Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw and Quinton Aaron. She also starred in Rules Don't Apply which earned her a Golden Globe nomination, the hit romantic comedy Love, Rosie, and To The Bone. Later this year, Collins is also set to star in a number of films, including Tolkien, as J.R.R. Tolkien's wife Edith Bratt; and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile as infamous killer Ted Bundy's girlfriend, Liz Kendall.

4. 4.
Olivia Colman

Olivia Colman's called her character Madame Thénardier "deeply unpleasant in every way" and while she may be as bad as they come, there's no denying that Colman herself is pleasantly fantastic. Her jam-packed resume most recently includes an Oscar win for her role as Queen Anne in the award-winning 2018 film The Favourite alongside Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, as well as her upcoming debut as Queen Elizabeth in the next season of The Crown. She's previously appeared in Broadchurch, The Night Manager and Hot Fuzz, among others.

5. 5.
Adeel Akhtar

Akhtar brings new life to Monsieur Thérnardier, the scavenger, innkeeper, schemer and faux war-hero who, along with his wife, takes in Cosette "out of the kindness of their hearts" and treats her (and eventually their own children) as their own personal staff.

He is particularly excited for audiences to connect with the story in a new way with this adaptation. "When you have a good story, it doesn't matter where it's placed in history as it speaks to a universality of people's emotions and needs," he said. "The stories are about love and kindness and that's always something that any audience is receptive to."

Akhtar previously appeared in The Big Sick, Victoria & Abdul, Utopia and MASTERPIECE's Unforgotten.

6. 6.
Ellie Bamber

Bamber stars as the grown-up, dreamer Cosette, whose life in hiding with Valjean, though a step above her horrific situation with the Thernardiers, is too restrictive for her. She wants to see the world! When she falls in love with Marius, not even revolution can keep them apart. Bamber previously starred in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as Lydia Bennet and in 2018's The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.

7. 7.
Josh O'Connor

O'Connor stars as love-struck law-student and reluctant revolutionary Marius Pontmercy in Les Misérables, but MASTERPIECE fans will instantly recognize him as Lawrence Durrell from The Durrells in Corfu. He also appeared in Florence Foster Jenkins alongside Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, and in the 2017 film God's Own Country.

8. 8.
Erin Kellyman

Kellyman steps into the tragic role of Éponine, whose unrequited love for Marius drives her story. Before her days in 19 th century France, she appeared in the television series Raised by Wolves, and later on the big-screen in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

9. 9.
David Bradley

David Bradley appears as Marius' politically outspoken, Napoleon-hating, but nonetheless loving grandfather Gillenormand in Les Miserables, fleshing out a character previously unknown in previous and musical adaptations of the novel. Bradley's career includes iconic roles in Game of Thrones (as Walder Frey) and the Harry Potter films (as Argus Filch).

Longtime MASTERPIECE fans may recognize Bradley from appearances in Our Mutual Friend, Reckless and The Way We Live Now.

10. 10.
Donald Sumpter

Sumpter plays the role of Mabeuf, the man who reveals the truth to Marius about his father, and who, despite his age, heroically fights alongside those at the barricade. Sumpter's impressive career includes Game of Thrones (as Maester Luwin!), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Doctor Who.

Loyal MASTERPIECE fans may be interested to know that Sumpter appeared in the very first MASTERPIECE production, The First Churchills.

Subscribe to our official companion email newsletter, the Les Misérables Insider, to get cast interviews, behind-the-scenes and historical extras, and more delivered to your inbox, plus MASTERPIECE show updates!

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Les Miserables Cast & Characters: Who's Who

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The epic six-part television adaptation of Victor Hugo's literary classic on MASTERPIECE on PBS has an uber-talented, star-studded cast that fans have fallen in love with! Check out our round-up of who's who in the Les Misérables cast and where you've seen (and loved) them before.

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I do like the story quite a bit, and think the BBC did a better job of representing it than the 2012 film. It seemed to me that the actors just.. shouted their lines when it came to communicating with other characters through dialogue. Overall it was a good watch, and I imagine it was a good book back when it was originally written.

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Ah, Russel Crowes character. Apart from Crowe playing him I thought he was a pretty good character. A dick for sure, but a villain guided by law and order, something that is incredibly intoxicating to those who value power as well. He is the ultimate form of having to chose between his moral code, or being a hypocrite. Great character, and a good, complicated villain.

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I would think that after having so many awful experiences, she would become a bitter, cruel child. Though this does not come to be, and she ends up being the quintessential "protect this character at all costs" character in the show. She eventually becomes a young woman and her story is great, one that even surpasses Valjeans in my opinion. She is smart though, as if she wasn't her adoptive father would have been caught along ago.

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Another strong example of a western female character, she seems to be the ultimate form of a mother, and one that is tragic and doing her best. Even so far as to becoming a prostitute. Its a rough time, though I do think that she plays one of the biggest parts in the entire show. Though I wasn't much of a fan of the most recent film, I think Anne Hathaway portrayed her well.

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First off, Jean Valjean has a cool French name. Second, his time as a prisoner was particularly interesting due to the absolutely horrible things prisoners had to do at the time. He is a strong man and a business owner, essentially part of the western archetype of hero. When he stops the cart and exposes himself I was a bit concerned, but from that point on the story only got better.

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So when reading about, the period of French history that it takes place in is one that I've always found a bit obscure. Everyone always likes to shit on the French for their surrender and compliance with the Nazis in WWII, but they do have quite a bit of amazing history. So, I plan to focus on the characters.

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So to start, the only exposure I have ever had to Les Mis has been in the form of the 2012 film where Russel Crowe belted my ear off within the first ten minutes. I did not really like it, BUT I did have some interest in it due to the time period. Only a few of the songs really caught my ear, due to the fact that the writing is what really interested me.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sarah Brightman, Steve Harley - The Phantom Of The Opera

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Phantom of the Opera - All I Ask of You (ROCK/METAL) cover by Jonathan Young & Malinda K Reese

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In the early 1900s, Parisian journalist Gaston Leroux worked for various French publications. He was a court reporter and theater critic, but he also traveled extensively to cover major events like the 1905 Russian Revolution. One story involved writing about the majestic Palais Garnier, home to the Paris Opera. In 1896, a counterweight to the house's iconic chandelier broke loose, fell through the auditorium ceiling and killed a concierge. There had been gossip for a long time that the opera house was haunted, and Leroux decided to use this premise as the foundation for the great gothic detective novel he'd always wanted to write. Over the course of four months between September 1909 and January 1910, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra was serialized in the French daily newspaper Le Gaulois and was popular enough to warrant an English translation.

The rest, they say, is history.

The Phantom of the Opera is a curious little book. It's a horror crime pulp gothic romance morality tale that's positioned as a true story and partly exists to exalt the beauty of its own setting. In terms of the era's horror novels, it's not exactly an undisputed classic or literary marvel, but it zips along nicely and has a killer premise. A mysterious figure haunts the Paris Opera House and reveals himself to be a scarred genius with an obsessive interest in a young soprano. It's not hard to see why this book would inspire the sheer plethora of adaptations and re-imaginings that have followed in its shadowy footsteps.

The adaptations are almost too numerous to count and cover an array of media, from film and television to theater, music, novels, video games, and even pinball machines. Unlike, say, , Phantom of the Opera is also more heavily defined by a handful of specific adaptations. You could ask ten people what they think of and the chances are they could all name different adaptations, be it the Coppola film, , Hammer Horror, or the Universal classic.

With Phantom, nine times out of 10, their first point of reference will be Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. That in and of itself is a fascinating phenomenon worth exploring, and we'll get to it. How does what is basically a dime-store pulp crime novel of questionable literary quality become not only a horror legend but the vessel for a highly specific kind of romantic antihero? However, it is also worth looking at some of the other adaptations of Leroux's novel. As with all great public domain properties, there are great adaptations, terrible ones, and the kinds that make you wonder what the hell was going on during the production process. This piece won't be all-encompassing, simply because it's unmanageable, but it will focus on the most notable adaptations as well as some hidden gems you may have missed and the chandelier wrecks that you just can't ignore.

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The best, worst and weirdest adaptations of Phantom of the Opera

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In the early 1900s, Parisian journalist Gaston Leroux worked for various French publications. He was a court reporter and theater critic, but he also traveled extensively to cover major events like the 1905 Russian Revolution. One story involved writing about the majestic Palais Garnier, home to the Paris Opera.

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As a writer I tend to over-analyze things too much, and when watching the many different ways of doing the play, I kind of see what people mean about the overacting in the 2004 version. That wouldn't be the first time I've seen this kind of thing in a musical. I really dig the main story, though I can't really nail down a favorite adaptation.

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I have kind of had a crush on Gerard Butler for a long time. As a kid I used to think he was the coolest dude on TV due for his persian killing antics in 300, and the fact that I watched Law Abiding Citizen at about too early of an age. Seeing him in the 2004 film was great, though I don't really think it has the same magic that I've seen in the live on stage shows on YouTube. This one specifically seemed very true to ALW's original design.

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PHANTOM OF THE OPERA LIVE - 1988 TONY AWARDS

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Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman perform live at the 1988 Tony Awards. See more Broadway Phantom & Chess at iOffer.com.

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On aesthetics alone he looks awesome. Though, I've done a bit of looking and though I like ALW's version of it, there is something about The Phantom being deformed on his face that just completely changes the story. Don't get me wrong, I totally dig the half mask and half deformity, though I think it is interesting to think about how much of a different show it would be if he looked like Nosferatu or something like that. In a way, it might paint him as more of a villain. Strange to think about.

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Another good one, and though the Phantom doesn't have a main part in it, I still liked it. Raoul's character is strange no doubt, and the lyrics got me kind of wishing that I wrote them. They weren't just pretty, they meant something to the plot. Any time there is a duet, it is generally something that does well with the audience.

'No more talk of darkness,
Forget these wide-eyed fears'

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Another one that got me. Most of the songs with the Phantom were my favorite, and this one in his lair not only pushed the plot along but was really catchy. I can only imagine how Christine felt about it, geez.

'Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation - Darkness stirs and wakes imagination."

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Even before looking up the film, this is what I listened to. It quickly got my attention mainly because I'm a huge sucker for organ music. I cant find enough of it, especially when it is mixed with percussions. There were a few songs that stuck with me, but this one was in my head for hours.

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Jesus Christ Superstar was one of the best things I've ever seen in college. It's been awhile since I've heard of Phantom of The Opera, though upon watching it again I can really see why people enjoy it. It is kind of maccab and fits that goth girl aesthetic. There were people I went to high school with who were obsessed with it, and thinking about it now, as an edgy teenager I kind of get it.

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And yes, it is a Rock Opera. I really like U2. I know a lot of people shit on them for being well...U2. But, they're been a favorite band of mine for awhile, and a useless little piece of knowledge I've had (THAT I HAVE BEEN WAITING TO USE) is that Bono and The Edge made a Spider-Man musical called Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. And I unapologetically love it. I don't really even like the Marvel franchise that much, but HOW COOL IS THIS! HE LITERALLY SWINGS ONTO THE STAGE BY A ROPE.

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Highlights From "Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark"

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When I was an edgy teenager, I got into a bunch of old horror movies. Forbidden Planet was one of them, mainly due to the idea that a robot could have feelings. Now a days I am terrified of AI, but it used to fascinate me as a kid. I remember stumbling upon Return to Forbidden Planet. It is basically a sequel, layered over with cover songs. It's a big parody of itself, but it is still pretty great and tells a good love story.

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Despite my absolute hatred for Roger Waters, I remember The Wall being something my dad was obsessed with. In all honesty Pink Floyd isn't really good to listen to unless you're sad or high, and I couldn't ever really get into The Wall. I remember the cover of it, the screaming face with the bloody words over it giving me nightmares as a kid, though. Never seen it, probably should for the sake of conversation with my dad.

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I really loved this one when I was a teenager. It was incredibly cringe, and even to this day I look back at it and think "What the fuck was wrong with me." Regardless, it is actually pretty good. I think a bit influence on me was the "Graverobber" and his absolutely phenomenal voice. I wanted to be able to sing like that, and to an extend I can definitely talk like it. Just cant raise my voice without sounding like a child. Zydrate Anatomy was and still is one of the catchiest songs i've ever heard. Its like.. industrial metal mixed with body horror. I think they've begun calling it "Gorepunk."

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Zydrate Anatomy (HD) - Repo! The Genetic Opera

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I remember watching this at my first girlfriends house when I was like, 14. It scared the shit out of me. Not like, scared as in "Oh no I don't wanna be a pie :(" but more "Oh no what is my girlfriend into." I ended up liking it, and have seen it twice since then. Something about Johhny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter together makes me nostalgic.

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To be honest it is more my style of opera. I grew up around Rock n Roll my whole life, and communicating a story through it seems pretty appealing. Being that Jesus Christ Superstar was great, I started looking up other Rock Operas. Some I've heard of, some I used to be obsessed with as a teenager, and some that I just want to forget lol

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Murderess Row Inspires the Musical “Chicago” - Drunk History

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Chicago - Roxie (the Name on Everyone's Lips)

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"Cell Block Tango" - Broadway Backwards 2015

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I don't really have a strong opinion on Chicago. It doesn't really seem like my kind of musical, but at the same time I can see why so many people love it. If not for the 20's aesthetic alone, there would be a good case to be made that this is the story of a woman, or a woman's story. As a man it doesn't really appeal to me quite like Jesus Christ Superstar does, but the overall meaning of destructive fame is one I think everyone can take away from it.

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I think there is a major contrast in Jesus Christ Superstar and Chicago. On one hand, both of them are about destructive fame. Where Jesus and Roxie both openly exploit it, they almost feel like tragic characters. There is an air of feminism to Roxie, and Jesus seems to be in some ways, misguided. Personally I've never been famous and don't ever want to be, so I can kind of see how this all looks on the outside. I think both musicals act as cautionary tales, ones that people really seem to like.

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Great character. Horrible person. She just seems like the kind of person to manipulate her way into anything. I mean, Amos should have left a long time ago so I can't blame him much, but she just strikes me as the kind of person that is incredibly popular, and shouldn't be. Part of me kind of wanted to see her come to a more fitting end, though I suppose a lifetime of suffering in knowing that she will never be famous again seems to suit her. Perhaps it says something about our culture and the people we idolize.

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I'm a big fan of the show Gotham, or anything to do with Batman really. And I swear to God there is a scene where Cell Block Tango is parodied. It took me awhile to remember what its called by holy shit it all makes so much sense now. Professor Pyg, man.

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Cell Block Tango. Basically anything dealing with the women's prison was one of my favorite parts of the musical. It was not only a strange setting, especially for that time period, but also the most interesting part. The way the women killed their husbands, or committed their crimes was very.. interesting. I was a bit scared watching that as a dude, hoping I don't chew gum too loudly, save my spouse doesn't put two bullets in my head. I jest, though. It's a pretty good song.

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All That Jazz opened the musical up pretty strong. I think overall it gave off the theme and the feel of what we were getting into within the first five minutes or so. It gave the musical that same upbeat 1920's feel. One thing that I focused on quite a bit previously was Vaudeville. I love it, it is great, and by far my favorite part of that era.

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Spouse Murder and Informative Murder Porn

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Spouse Murder and Informative Murder Porn

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As a little aside, the aesthetic and a lot of the themes in Chicago play out like some of those Investigation Discovery shows that my mother watches. My Dad and I have taken to calling it Informative Murder Porn, due to it basically being portrayed as such. "How cool would it be if you had an affair with a man and then murdered him and then your husband took the blame but then you went to prison and became a celebrity?" I'm not shitting on it, I'm just saying it sounds like something my mother would absolutely love.

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I gotta say, the aesthetic alone reminds me a lot of that movie Sin City. It is very deep red, deep black, and sexy. I suppose the blood plays well on the whole murder and sex thing. For the subject matter I it makes sense, and draws a bit of comedic light on the fact that in a way, we as a society view crime as a pretty sexy thing.

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I didn't get as much out of the soundtrack as I thought I would, and though all of the voices are great, something about the structure of the music just kind of felt weird to me. So aside from the structure, I thought that it was a pretty good parody of what we consider to be justice. Along with that, it seemed like fame was also a pretty big part of it.

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So it is a bit hard to come off of the high that was Jesus Christ Superstar, but going back and listening to some of the music from Chicago was a good change. I watched it a bit before JCS and though initially, I wasn't very into it, I found a few things about it that were pretty appealing.

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Really interesting stuff, and something I've been following for awhile. Surprise surprise, its a cult.

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A trend in pop culture is a mix of current affairs and anniversaries, and saturating the media landscape is documentary storytelling about cults in popular culture. Last year was the 40th anniversary of Jonestown, and this summer marks 50 years since the Manson Family murders. 2019 saw the trial of NXIVM members, and Netflix's "Wild Wild Country" piqued interest in a peculiar unfolding of events in the 1980s of a group called the Rajneeshpuram. Popular podcasts include a series on Heaven's Gate, along with a host of explorations of cult groups and religious sects, both heterodox and not.

But what differentiates a cult from a religion? Followers see themselves as believers, even disciples-not cult members. Families, law enforcement, media, and other religious leaders, however, rely on the word "cult" to discredit, call out, or accuse these groups. Who has the final word, and what is behind the word itself?

Cult is a term that doesn't refer to religion at all, but is applied to a social movement. People have intuitive feelings about how the word cult should be used, even when an organization or movement meets the criteria of a new religion. Take, for example, Scientology and Mormonism. Both were new religious movements that have evolved into a general understanding or definition of a religion. However, according to Pew Research, non-Mormons in the U.S. are more likely to label Mormonism as a cult.

Scientology and Mormonism have outlived their charismatic leaders. They have openly published their beliefs as scripture. Both religions seek truth by offering its followers a roadmap for their place in the universe, along with a moral code. Those who accept the beliefs and rituals are members of the religion. But many outside consider the movement, and its followers, to be a cult. How have the two been conflated?

"The word 'cult' originally designates a practice of religious veneration and the religious system based around such veneration-for example, the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe," says Robin Clark, a linguistics professor in the School of Arts and Sciences. "However, the word was co-opted in the first half of the 20th century by sociology, and has come to denote a social group with 'socially deviant' beliefs and practices, like a UFO cult."

Cults versus new religions is a matter of perspective, says Ori Tavor, a senior lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, who teaches a class on new religious movements. "New religious movement" is a new term from academic discourse, and is applied to religious movements from the 19th century onwards. "Remember," says Tavor, "that the religious landscape of the U.S. was about freedom of religion. Anyone can create a new religion, and can appeal to the government for new religion status and get protections and recognition from the government."

What they have in common may be reason to conflate the two: a charismatic leader. Buddhism and Christianity are both named after a charismatic leader. Islam, originally called Mohammedanism, is also named after its leader. Religions and cults often follow a leader who claims divine, or at least special, access to different models of knowledge and revelations. Many are martyred. Jesus of Nazareth was famously crucified. Joseph Smith, Mormonism's founder, was lynched, leaving Brigham Young to lead followers west.

End days is another consistent theme in cults and religions, both new and old. Nirvana, heaven, Zion, or outer space are a guiding principle in their scriptures. "In the middle of the 19th century, economic desperation led to new religious movements" explains Tavor. "'Life on earth is awful,' they said, 'the world is going to end.'" In the 19th century, new religious movements were Christian in origin. The 20th century saw a shift as translated Buddhist and Islamic texts from the East became available amidst a new religious landscape.

"People were disillusioned with Christianity, and their parents, and moved to the suburbs and became more secular. In the mid-20th century, people left their birth communities, or lost touch with their original congregations and looked for more modern worship" Tavor says. "A capitalist, consumer society was also growing."

The charismatic leader to tap into the capitalist, consumer society was L. Ron Hubbard.

In the 1950s, Hubbard established the self-help group based on reincarnation of the self, called Dianetics. When Dianetics dropped out of popularity, Hubbard repackaged it as a religious movement, with esoteric writings-for example, you have to become an operating thetan to have access to Hubbard's handwritten texts. "Scientology doesn't follow an old-fashioned model of a congregation," says Tavor.

The mid-to-late 20th century introduced transcendental meditation and Hare Krishnas to the spiritual landscape, catering to a set of believers looking for something spiritual that wasn't Christianity. The Maharishi even used modern terminology-he called his philosophy the "science of happiness."

A large part of what fueled people's distrust in new religious movements was their popularity. "What freaked people out was that these Eastern religions were successful. Look at Rajneeshpuram and its leader, Osho. He was popular in India, then came to the U.S., and because people were exposed to, and afraid of, Hare Krishnas and transcendental meditation, people freaked out about Rajneeshpuram," explains Tavor.

Around this time, deprograming and anti-cult movements sprouted. "The Manchurian Candidate" brought the concept of brainwashing and deprograming to mainstream popular culture, and the conflation of the word cult with fringe movements outside of religion (like doomsday cults, polygamist cults, and terrorist cults) fueled anti-cult movements.

To differentiate the two, Clark proposes a straightforward exercise: Find texts containing the word "cult" and look for the accompanying words in the texts. "If we have a time series of such texts, we should see a shift in the semantic associates, probably starting in the 1930s, to include a variety of nonreligious terms like 'personality,' 'UFO,' 'racist,' and so forth. This would be diagnostic of a semantic change." Tavor narrows the semantic change to a sharp point-Jonestown.

Jim Jones was an anti-segregationist Christian preacher from Indiana who envisioned a mixed-race church. Jones and his followers left Indiana for California in search of a utopian community. While in San Francisco, Jones' friction with lawmakers and pressure from the families of members of the People's Temple looking to free their relatives and their children sent Jones to seek a utopian community in the jungles of Guyana, in South America. When those family members discovered the move overseas, they appealed to the government for intervention. A delegation went to Jonestown-Congressperson Leo Ryan, his aid Jackie Speier, journalists, and cameramen from network news. What started as a fact-finding mission ended with five dead on the tarmac at Port Kaituma airfield, when Ryan and his delegates fled Jonestown along with a handful of defectors. Ryan was shot and killed, along with three members of the press and one defector, and the rest of the delegation were attacked. Back at Jonestown, Jim Jones broadcast his final message: "I've tried my best to give you a good life. In spite of all that I've tried, a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our life impossible. There's no way to detach ourselves from what's happened today." Within hours, everyone drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in mass suicide. Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head.

"That makes Jonestown the quintessential cult. Pictures of the dead bodies were on the cover of Time magazine." says Tavor. "Jonestown is a seminal moment in U.S. history to popularize the term 'cult.'"

In Waco, Texas in 1992, the Branch Davidians were attacked by law enforcement in their compound. They were Adventists, but their community was a polygamous one, and easy to earn the designation as a cult- their beliefs were heterodox to Christianity.

Heaven's Gate gained notoriety in the late 90s as a doomsday cult, committing mass suicide in 1997 to access what they believed would be an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp. End days scripture is Christian in origin-the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelations, is the source. But not all apocalyptic religious movements end in death or waiting for spaceships. Seventh Day Adventists come from a tradition from the 1840s that predicted an apocalypse in 1843, based on calculations from the Book of Daniel. When the world didn't end, the movement disbanded, and its followers reorganized as Seventh Day Adventists.

If one factor can determine the difference between a cult and a religion, according to Tavor, it would be time. Scientology is now recognized by the state as a religion, with tax-exempt status. Mormonism was considered such a deviant form of heterodoxy its founder was lynched. Now the Mormon Church has more than 14 million members worldwide.

"It takes time for a movement to establish itself as a legitimate part of the religious landscape," says Tavor. "A cult doesn't have anything to do with the content of its religious ideology. It is a term to demonize a movement that is controversial. It is considered a threat to mainstream society." NXIVM, for example, is labeled a cult of personality because, like Jonestown, it is a group that has followed a charismatic leader to its detriment.

But sometimes the state determines whether a group is a cult, and not popular culture. Falun Gong, for example, was an extremely popular Chinese religion that was labeled a cult abruptly by the Chinese government when it became so popular that its followers exceeded the number of Communist Party members. Nearly overnight, Falun Gong was designated as a cult, and something to be feared. In the U.S., religious leaders and mainstream culture act as arbiters in designating a cult, and violent acts like suicide, murder, and bodily harm drastically influence whether a group is labeled a cult.

As long as there is orthodoxy, there will be heterodoxy, and there will continue to be gospels of the end of days that could be rooted in science or scripture, people seeking answers, and leaders will emerge who claim to have them. Whether their followers are cult members or parishioners will largely be a matter of time.

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Is it a cult, or a new religious movement? | Penn Today

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A trend in pop culture is a mix of current affairs and anniversaries, and saturating the media landscape is documentary storytelling about cults in popular culture. Last year was the 40th anniversary of Jonestown, and this summer marks 50 years since the Manson Family murders.

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I really liked JCS. It was one of those things that I was an outsider on until this class, and now that I’ve found it I am very glad that I did. It is catchy, thought provoking and all around what I think a rock opera should be. One major thing I took away from it, aside from the music, was the kind of celebration it makes of the dissenters. Judas was the good guy, through and through. Its a story, especially in this context, that I don't see a lot of.

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It kind of begs the question on as to if Christianity is a cult itself. Generally, cults are deemed completely false by the public, though I’m sure the definition is not so set in stone. I don’t really know, I suppose. I grew up in something similar with snakes and tongue-speaking and such, though it wasn’t ever directly harmful to me. Not exactly helpful either, though.

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I don’t think it would be a long shot to say that JCS is about a cult. Jesus is obviously the be-all end-all, and to his credit has done many good things. But Judas, the defector, seems to be the lynchpin to the group's survival. Without Jesus surely it would collapse yeah, but without what Judas speaks, they’re all gonna die. He is a dissenter, something you cant really have in a cult.

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I think the theme of power and success is blatantly obvious in JCS. Maybe it is just my English brain, but a lot of the time when I consume media content like this I like to dig into it and find something a bit more unique than what is portrayed on the surface. I think we can obviously say that it is about the downsides and dangers of power, but how can we relate it to something fun, like mass cultic suicide?

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Why do I like this more than the previous musicals? I really like West Side Story and South Pacific, though something about Jesus Christ Superstar just hits a much more catchy note. Is it because it is just written that way? Do I have a modern sensibility towards music like this? Maybe it is just that this is literally the most famous Rock Opera, and I kind of grew up around rock n roll.

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Back to Folk - And then Funk - And then Rock?

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Back to Folk - And then Funk - And then Rock?

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There was a very strange feeling I got when listening to this for the first time. Though finally at this point I was done pushing carts, I got to this track. It has so many different musical styles to it, from funky bass, to guitar rock and at the start, just outright folk. I for sure don't hate it. I like it, the anger, the howling, just the overall energy. God damn.

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Heaven On Their Minds - Jesus Christ Superstar (piano)

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This is a thing too. The autotune kinda kills it for me, as does the fact that the Carl Anderson version isn't the first result on Google. I don't have a whole lot of interest in this version, to be honest. The badass piano has all but been removed, and though Tim Minchin is great, I can't hear anything but Carl Anderson on this song.

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'Heaven on Their Minds' Tim Minchin | Jesus Christ Superstar

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Look at those tassels. I know nothing about fashion. Literally nothing. But something about the 70's film version of JCS really gets me. The way they dress, the way they flaunt around and dance, there is just something so much more classy about it than the Tim Minchin version. Though, it is for sure from a different time period, I feel like it better fits the compassion to have there over the top, absolutely fucking crazy looking shit like this on the main stage, rather than everyone looking homeless like in the previous link.

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I think you could take quite a bit away from Heaven on their Minds even without knowing the context. Like all good art, it really has multiple meanings, but the one that I got from it was the sheer aversion to idolization. Of course, people make idols of anything they can cling to, even to the extent of Judas doing it at first. But after breaking through from that hivemind cult-think, he sounds and is helpless against the doom that is coming. Judas broke free from that. That is the part that gets me.

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Just something about every bit of this got me. Carl Andersons voice is absolutely phenomenal. This needs to be the definitive version just for how much of a masterpiece it is. The on location shooting mixed with Andersons entire performance as Judas has to be one of the best things I've seen in this class. I can say that nothing has really given me those artistic goosebumps quite like this.

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Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) - Heaven on their Minds (Carl Anderson) ENG Sub - A. Lloyd Webber

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I probably listened to just the piano of this alone about a dozen times while pushing carts at work. Literally just looked up a piano cover and vibed to it. Up until this point in the album, I was not as into the songs. The story had a pretty good grip on me from the songs, though Heaven on their Minds absolutely killed me. I am gonna do a couple of slides about it, because every single bit of this song from the composition to the cinematography is phenomenal. I really liked the original version.. but then..

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Heaven On Their Minds - Jesus Christ Superstar (1970 Version)

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Ah, the second most loved Mary in the original story. Not to digress much, but I really enjoyed the song. It wasn't quite what I was expecting for a rock opera but, it came close. The strumming guitar was almost peaceful sounding and layered over by the drawn out vocals , the song gave me some folky vibes. It worked well for the overall theme of the story, though. Poor Mary.

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The incredibly religious middle school me would have decried this as the work of the devil himself. I suppose being raised in a very religious household will do that, thankfully I grew out of it and can actually enjoy things. After looking it up a bit, apparently, JCS was deemed Sacrilegious by the BBC and was lifted after awhile, though by that point it had sold 7 million copies worldwide.

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So obviously, Superstar was one of the best tracks. It is catchy and almost thought-provoking. The strange, almost apologetic way that Judas sings gives an undertone to the song that I think, broadens its depths. Plus it is incredibly funky, so.

"I am only asking."

"Don't get me wrong."

And by this point even though Judas is dead, we get a pretty clear picture of his mind at work. Just asking questions, that's all.

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So after listening to the soundtrack a few times at work, I really had a few songs stuck in my head. I suppose I did listen to the soundtrack before even watching it, but regardless I think I still got the experience! One thing that stuck out to me was the way the songs were written. I cant precisely tell you why I found them so catchy or why it appealed to me so much, but I can try!

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So whenever I first heard about Jesus Christ Superstar, I immediately thought a song of a similar name. A great song, but one not quite related to JCS. I mean I suppose in a way, Christ is selling something, and so is Depeche Mode. So, it wraps up pretty well. I still have that strange thing in my mind where when I hear about JCS, I instantly think of this song.

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A Broadway opening-night picket of "Miss Saigon" in 1991. Credit... Corky Lee

"Miss Saigon" started with an audacious idea - create a musical that explores the end of the Vietnam War through an ill-fated romance between a virginal Vietnamese bargirl and a hunky American G.I.

It would become much more than that. Over 28 years, "Miss Saigon" has turned into one of the most successful hits in musical theater - as well as one of the most polarizing and most protested.

Now, it's back on Broadway, for the first time since 2001. It is in the same theater, tells the same operatically tragic story, and again features a hovering helicopter.

But the show has changed significantly over the years, and those shifts tell another story - one about how much the controversy over "Miss Saigon" has affected the industry.

"Miss Saigon" opened in London in 1989, with an acclaimed white British actor, Jonathan Pryce, wearing prosthetics to alter the shape of his eyes and makeup to alter the color of his skin as he played the show's leading man, a scheming Eurasian pimp called the Engineer. But by the time the show reached Broadway in 1991, Mr. Pryce had abandoned those practices, and, after he won a Tony Award and left the show, the producers changed their approach - in the years since, they have chosen only actors of Asian heritage to play the Engineer, both on Broadway and on the United States tours.

Not every controversy has been calmed. The show's critics, who tried and failed to stop the initial production and have periodically protested it since, say the production perpetuates an unwelcome view of Asians. Here, in edited excerpts, more than 20 people whose lives have been touched by "Miss Saigon" - as producers and protesters, artists and activists - talk about their views, then and now.

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When "Miss Saigon" first looked to Broadway in 1990, controversy erupted over the fact that a white man was portraying a lead role. Jon Jon Briones, who is Asian, was in the chorus then. Today, he is one of the show's stars.

Claude-Michel Schönberg (composer) One afternoon I was working on the score of "Les Misérables" in Paris, and I opened a magazine, and I saw a picture that really struck me. It was a young girl at the airport (in Vietnam), facing her mother. The mother had been looking for her ex-partner, a G.I., and she wanted to send the girl to the United States for a better future. The mother did exactly the same sacrifice as Cio-Cio-San in "Madama Butterfly," who committed suicide to force the American, Pinkerton, to take their boy with him. So I called Alain, and said, "Imagine the story of 'Butterfly,' happening at the end of the Vietnam War."

Alain Boublil (lyricist) We got quickly to the idea that the misunderstanding between two people reflected the misunderstanding between two countries.

Cameron Mackintosh (producer) This was a very dangerous, but exciting, subject. This was 14 years after a traumatic war that they'd written this, so it wasn't obvious stuff for a musical. I remember saying, this subject matter is like dancing on a razor blade: a brilliant feat if you can pull it off.

Mackintosh I'd seen Jonathan in several performances, including "The Seagull," and then, when Michael Crawford had opened (in "The Phantom of the Opera") in '86 in London, Jonathan rang me out of the blue and said, "Look, I'd like to have a crack at the Phantom." It never got any further than that, but I remembered it. And when we had our first conversations in London with the authors and Nick Hytner (the director), I threw his name in the hopper. The entire audition process, we never saw anyone else.

Marc Oka (member of the original Broadway ensemble) I went to see it in London, and I loved the show - it was a show with Asian people, and I was in the business, so I thought maybe I could be in it. But I was way up in the balcony, so I didn't see him up close. Then I saw an article in a magazine about Jonathan Pryce, and I saw a picture of him in the show, and he was wearing those prosthetics on his eyes to look Asian, and that was the first time I said there was something wrong.

BD Wong (Tony-winning actor) I first heard about the show in a conversation with the playwright David Henry Hwang. He and I were really fresh off of doing this reasonably successful play ("M. Butterfly") in which the whole notion of "Madama Butterfly" is turned on its head. He was reporting, in a kind of amused way, about this show in the West End, with these two guys in yellowface (the Engineer and Thuy, Kim's cousin). We said, surely the show will come to the United States, but the yellowface will never happen here, because that's the kind of thing that only happens in England now.

In August 1990, the producer of "Miss Saigon" announced he was canceling a Broadway production after Actors' Equity said it would refuse permission for Jonathan Pryce to appear in the show. Equity later reversed its position, and the show began performances the following spring.

Wong Much to our surprise, there was an announcement that Jonathan Pryce was coming. So I wrote a letter to the actors' union, which had to approve the visa, even for a star coming over. After decades of Caucasian actors impersonating Asian characters in television, movies and in the theater, with a certain amount of comfort from audiences at large, it finally became absolutely essential for the Asian-American audience community and the Asian-American acting community to say it's too painful for us to watch this anymore - we can't take it any more, it embarrasses us, and it's humiliating.

Rich I'm completely sympathetic, and argue further that Asian-American actors have a particularly raw deal - there are so few opportunities for them compared to other minorities, let alone majorities. But I still feel a director has the right to do what he wants to do.

Tisa Chang (artistic producing director, Pan Asian Repertory Theater) This was not the 1970s, when there was a protest against Lincoln Center for casting "Narrow Road to Deep North" with no Asian actors whatsoever - and it was a play about Japan. This was 1990, and a lot of work had been done already. Our position was not to be inflammatory, but it was a cri de coeur in response to what their team had said, which was that there was no Asian-American actor qualified to play the role. That really stirred the pot.

Boublil It was a bit disturbing for us, because suddenly the subject of the show was not anymore the doomed love story and the mother's ultimate sacrifice, which is what we had written. Suddenly the subject was casting controversy. I remember even some journalist in a magazine who said, "Don't let this show come to this country. It's going to destroy the fabric of the country."

Wong In this really dramatic, theatrical way, Equity voted to deny Jonathan Pryce his visa.

Mackintosh I was just astonished. And it got, as you know, quite sticky. At that point, even though we had the biggest advance in history, I said, look, if the show isn't going to come here with the performances that made it so fantastic in London, I'd rather it didn't move at all. I canceled it.

Wong Equity had a real problem on its hands. The membership was divided. Some people thought it was absurd to make an issue of the race of a person. And the pressure came from other places. There was a lot of op-ed stuff. The mayor of New York (David Dinkins) really wanted the show to come in. A few days later, Equity rescinded its decision. It was profoundly sad. I remember feeling so misunderstood.

Ralph B. Peña (producing artistic director, Ma-Yi Theater Company) I protested, but I thought I should know what I'm protesting against, and also I needed to see what they did, because they had removed Jonathan Pryce's yellowface. So I saw it on Broadway, and it was glorious. And then it hits you - what did I just experience? And then it's awful. But I had never seen a helicopter land on Broadway before, and I was mesmerized by the music and the stagecraft, and also the pride that I felt at seeing Lea nail that role on Broadway. That was something else.

Rich It was a fantastic performance.

Cast members of the Broadway revival of "Miss Saigon" include, from left, Eva Noblezada, Alistair Brammer, Rachelle Ann Go and Jon Jon Briones. Credit... Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times

Raul Aranas (actor in multiple productions) I can safely say I've done over 2,000 performances as the Engineer - I did it for the first national tour, and then they moved me to Broadway, and then Cameron offered me London, and then I pinch-hit on Broadway and did a few venues that were not as large. And after this, I did "The King and I"; I did "Pacific Overtures"; I did "Flower Drum Song"; and I did "Oliver." "Miss Saigon" enabled me to save enough money to have a nest egg, start a family and find a home, and now I'm retired - another thing "Miss Saigon" enabled me to do is have a great pension.

Margaret Ann Gates (actress in multiple productions) I heard that they were looking for actual Asians to be in the show - not people who were face-painting, and I went into the ensemble a month or two after graduating from college. Then they offered me the role of Ellen (an American woman who marries a returning G.I.) in 1998. I was the first Asian to hold the role, and when I started, people were like, "That's not right! Ellen's supposed to be white!", which of course is ridiculous - just because somebody is American doesn't mean she has to be white.

Ethan Thoi (actor in Australian production) I couldn't believe there was a musical about Vietnam, where I was born. I was born in 1973, and my mom had some involvement with a Western guy at that time - her pregnancy was not accepted, and she had to give me away. In 2007, when the show came to Sydney, I was lucky to be in the ensemble. I did the whole national tour (in Australia) - about 14 months - and every night I was crying at the part where she sings, "I'd give my life for you," and crying at the part where the refugees are climbing up the walls, because I was also a refugee, from Vietnam to Australia.

Pun Bandhu (actor active with Asian American Performers Action Coalition) There continue to be protests against "Miss Saigon" across the country, and I think that's because the Asian community is so tired of seeing ourselves portrayed in one way. In many ways, "Miss Saigon" is a colonial story, where none of the Asian characters are portrayed in a positive light - yes, they are victims of a war, but they are also characterized as opportunists, villainous, and, at the center of the story, Kim is written to be very weak.

Oka It turned into a political protest about the portrayal of Asian women on the stage. I remember one night, during the second act, when the Bangkok number happened, protesters were screaming and shouting from the audience, and they were led out.

Salonga I have friends who were on the other side of that controversy, and I do understand what they were fighting for, but you do realize the whole prostitution thing lasts 15 minutes, and the show is 2½ hours long? And you can rally and rail against Asian women as prostitutes, but you can't erase history. This is set in 1975, not in 2017, and this really happened. I'm from Manila, and it still happens. Go to any red-light district, and that's what you see: a girl with desperation in her eyes, wanting to not be doing this, and another girl who is dead on the inside. I don't know of too many shows that allow the audience to see that reality. It's very eye-opening, and can be quite jarring.

Will Chase (actor who played Chris, the G.I., in multiple productions) I used to make fun of it when I was a longhaired percussionist at Oberlin College. Then I did three years in the show. And over the course of doing it, we would have Vietnam vets come talk to the cast. I started to pay attention to it in a different way. One guy said when he got back home he would wake up in the middle of the night with a gun, ready to blow his brains out, night after night, and the show was cathartic for him. He came once a week. Those kinds of stories made me grow up in the show.

Ralph B. Peña One of the songs - the marriage song, I found out later - was gobbledegook, not even real Vietnamese. The new version has changed those lyrics to real Vietnamese words, which is some recognition that they can't get away with what they got away with in 1990.

Marc Thibodeau (longtime "Miss Saigon" publicist) The first week of rehearsals (for the Broadway revival), Alain Boublil met with Christopher Vo, a Vietnamese cast member, who suggested some rewording on the wedding blessing to make it genuine and to make sense. Alain took his suggestion, and it went into the show early in rehearsals and has been part of the show in previews.

From left, Jon Jon Briones, Samuel Li Weintraub and Eva Noblezada in "Miss Saigon." Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Laurence Connor (revival director) My memory of the original is it felt so big and epic and operatic. I wanted to make it real - I wanted to set up a sense of grit within the production.

Rachelle Ann Go (actress playing Gigi in revival) Our first two days of rehearsals in London, we were in a room, watching so many documentaries about the war. It was so heartbreaking.

Eva Noblezada (actress playing Kim inrevival) I'd never seen the show. I didn't know what happened until I read the script when I was cast. I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is epic." I'm a prostitute in this, and it's not glamorous, it's not pretty. It is demeaning. But this happened to real people. And the refugee scene - that's relevant today. Being a victim of war and being a victim of confused leadership - that is relevant today.

Briones I've been doing this on and off for a while - the Asian tour and the American tour and the U.K. tour, and in Germany, where I met my wife - she was playing Ellen. I first encountered "Miss Saigon" in 1988, when they came back to Manila to cast the male ensemble, and I auditioned. I was 22, and left the Philippines for the first time. And now, for me to be playing the Engineer on the biggest stage of all, it's an honor and it's a responsibility. I truly believe that, because of "Miss Saigon," Asian actors are seen in a different light.

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The Battle of 'Miss Saigon': Yellowface, Art and Opportunity (Published 2017)

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Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. "Miss Saigon" started with an audacious idea - create a musical that explores the end of the Vietnam War through an ill-fated romance between a virginal Vietnamese bargirl and a hunky American G.I.

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It almost seemed like in the 1960's most women had short hair. All of the pictures I've seen of women in my family seem to have long dark hair, but maybe that is just my family. So I did some reading on it and found this. I am no big fan of intricate clothing or fashion, but I did kind of like the look of 60's dresses.

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Women's 1960s fashion was an extreme style and attitude from the start of the decade to the end. In the early years, the fashion idol was Jackie Kennedy with her perfect white pearls and tailored suit dresses. By the middle of the decade, supermodel Twiggy had women freeing their minds and bodies into clothing that didn't require any extra thought or effort.

From modest to "there is no such thing as too short," 1960s fashion was in many ways like the 1920s flapper revolution. But it didn't happen overnight.

Skip the history and shop 1960s style clothing:

Women's 1960s Fashion Trends

What clothes were popular in the 1960s? Shift dresses, mini skirts, go go boots, flare pants, jumper dresses, colorful denim, cloche hats, turtleneck shirts, flat shoes, pattern tights, and daisy flower prints. Many of these 60s clothes are back in style now.
Even more 1960s fashion trends were:

Jackie Kennedy, Brigitte Bardot, and Mary Quant were fashion icons.

The Youthquake movement created "Babydoll" clothing.

Short, shapeless shift dresses in bright colors and colorblock patterns became a staple of the Mod look.

Button-down shirts, turtlenecks, and chunky knit sweaters made up casual outfits.

Mini skirts or pencil skirts in plaid were a teenage girl's school outfit.

Jax pants, stirrup pants, bell bottoms, and pantsuits were new trends.

Low heel flats, step in boots, and vinyl shoes made up 60s footwear.

Stockings or tall socks came in all colors.

Pop Art jewelry was collectable.

60s hairstyles could be short and bobbed or long and straight.

Hippie fashion - Blue jeans, ethnic clothing, psychedelic swirls, tie-dye in the mid-late 1960s.

1960s Fashion Icons

Jackie Kennedy's style was clean, simple, and well fitted, with perfectly matched accessories. Janie wore dresses without collars and jackets that buttoned only with one large top button.

On her feet she wore sensible low heeled shoes (although many women still preferred high heels). She was the last celebrity woman to wear hats, a pillbox hat, as a necessary fashion.

Jackie O' put a lot of care into her look, and women both in the USA and abroad copied her style with enthusiasm.

Sadly, after her husband's assassination, Jackie was no longer in the public eye. Women had to find a new 1960s fashion idol to be inspired by.

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Brigitte Bardot was that woman. She was Jackie's opposite. Jackie was put together, simple and modest. Brigitte was tacky, cheap, bold, and even silly. Her 1959 pink gingham wedding dress with white lace trim was so unexpected that gingham and lace quickly became a new trend in the early 60s.

Mary Quant was another 1960s fashion influence. Her style moved away from "grown-up fashion" to playful "youth" driven clothing. Her shift dresses were short, very short, and her prints were bold and colorful "mod" prints. Her fashion as well as her personality set the tone for the rest of the 1960s: "fashion is fun."

It was the whole idea of a return to childhood that drove most of the fashion in the 1960s. Oversized collars, bows, and delicate trim miniaturized women and made them appear smaller.

Shapeless 60s mini dresses de-emphasized a woman's natural form. The flat and boxy look took away women's curves and made them little girls once more.

Kitten heel pumps, Mary Jane strap shoes, and flat sneakers were all childhood shoes returned to the '60s youthquake culture.

It was no coincidence that a young culture had a lot to do with half the American population being under 25 and with European countries having a similarly large youth population, too.

After growing up in the '50s as "little adults," the youth embraced their fond early childhood memories and fashions. By children's fashion, we mean babies and toddlers. The 1960s "babydoll" look was incorporated into dress, hair, and even makeup.

1960s Dresses

The full skirt and tight bodice of the '50s swing dress continued in the early '60s, with a slightly above- or at-the-knee hemline and modest high necklines.

1960s dress colors and patterns were bigger, brighter, and streamlined with simple necklines and short cap sleeves. This full-skirted look didn't leave fashion in the 1960s. Instead, it carried through to the 1970s in a pared down, less fluffy form.

The other style of early 60s dresses was the contoured sheath dress. Like the 50s version, it was knee-length, modest, and simple, but tailored to the hourglass curve of the body. By 1963, the sheath was losing its tight curves (a welcome relief) and relaxing into the shift dress.

The shift dress lacked any sort of tailored waistline, but did pinch in slightly around the ribs and skimmed over the hips to just above the knee. This loose but narrow looking dress was very comfortable and easy to wear. It became the primary women's dress style of the 1960s.

1960s skimmer dresses were a cousin of the shift dress. Skimmers fit straight on the body with a high neckline and (usually) a belt to define the waist, but not shape it. They "skimmed" the body without touching the skin. The hemline also hovered above the knee- how daring!

The 1960s drop waist dress was a 1920s throwback where the skirt circled the low hip and dropped to the knee. It was a bit more fitted than the shift dress, with a gathered or pleated skirt. The drop waist dress seemed to have been favored by mature women who were more used to a tailored fit.

1960s dresses became shorter and shorter. Anything above the knee was a "mini skirt." How short a woman's dress became a sign of how confident she was - not necessarily that she had great legs.

Hem length was directly proportional to how 60s women felt about their own sexual liberation.

1960s short skirts were not meant to attract men for the sake of sexual interest, but instead were a way to attract attention so that a WOMAN could be the one to decide if his attention was wanted. It was sexual power through fashion.

The jumper dress was a Mary Quant invention that captured the youthful, playful side of 1960s fashion. That style immediately made a 20-year-old look 10, a welcome change from the '50s mature fashion. Big bows, large round collars, pastels, and polka dots were all dress details that made women look like a little girl's dolls. The more innocent, the better.

Colors and prints were at first inspired by the pop art and modern art movements, AKA "Mod" culture.

Checkerboard, horizontal stripes, windowpane, polka dots, colorblock, honeycomb, houndstooth and Campbell's soup cans were all placed on short shift dresses with contrasting white cuffs and collars. Black and white was especially MOD.

Psychedelic swirls and prints introduced a trippy edge to clothing that was picked up by the hippies around 1966-1968. Being over the top was never too much. Large paisley swirls, neon flower daisies, and tropical beach prints all made an appearance. Bright yellow, orange, hot pink, and lime green were the favorites. These bold colors and loud patterns were seen on dresses, skirts, tops, and pants.
Shop 1960s style dresses here
There was also a trend of earth tone colors, especially as the 60s decade moved toward the hippie movement. Moss green, earthy browns, mustard yellow, and burnt orange were common colors year-round.

See more examples of vintage 1960s dresses here.

Hippie outfits are popular 60s party costumes. Learn more about who the real 1960s hippies were and what they wore. Shop more 70s style hippie dresses too.

1960s Cocktail, Prom, and Evening Dresses

For swanky 19 60s cocktail parties, the party look of the '60s was the same short shift, tent, and skimmer dress styles in luxury fabrics, mostly in black ... or white.

The two-piece jacket dress was a classic with mature ladies.

For the young, dressy shell tops and cigarette pants were a welcome change from dresses.

In the late '60s, wide-leg jumpsuits became a type of hostess dress, acceptable for evening house parties.

In the 1960s, pastels were worn in the summer and rich jewel tones in fall. Lace was a popular 1960s fabric as well as velvet or a classic light crepe. Most cocktail dresses were undecorated, but some had braid and metallic mesh trim around the necks and hems. "Minimal" was the sixties look to achieve.

For 1960s evenings and prom, the choice was between short or long empire waist dresses.

Usually sleeveless, the longer dresses were shaped like a column with pleats at the back. The top was often a contrasting lace or damask material cinched in with a bow on the front or back.

Short 60s evening dresses looked the same as long dresses, just shorter. Many were tent shaped or A-line instead of the slim column shape.

Learn more about 1960s cocktail party/evening wear/wedding party attire here.

1960s Tops, Sweaters, Coats

1960s women's tops, shirts, blouses, and sweaters all took direction from casual clothing in the 1950s. The primary change was that shirts and sweaters now fit straight on the body, with no emphasis on the bust or waist.

1960s tops could also be worn untucked. Gasp!

Women's 60s tops hung out over pants and skirts and grew longer as the decade advanced. Necklines also grew higher, back to the modest look of the 1930s.

The mock neck blouse or knit shirt was a classic. Sleeveless in summer and typically called shells, the fit was always boxy. They were casual solid tops worn with pants and shorts. Long sleeve black turtlenecks were a uniform of the Beatniks in London, but in the USA horizontal stripes were worn by every young person.

Big roll collars, round Peter Pan collars (often in contrasting white), big bows, and pointed shirt collars called attention to a thin neck and short hair.

Women's 1960s button up shirts took on the look of menswear with round or straight hems, oversized collars, and bold prints.

Bright colors and big prints made colorful statements when paired with a solid color matching pant. Learn more about 1960s blouses, tops, and shirt styles for women.
Shop 1960s tops and shirts here.
1960s knitted sweaters were usually solid colored pullovers or in the boxy cardigan style.

'60s knitwear designs favored texture - thick textured cable knits and wide rib knits were very popular. Many had large fold-out collars and oversized roll necks. Cardigans were usually collarless with some unique print in the early to mid-'60s such as small argyle, checks, chevron, or florals.

Read more about 1960s knitwear and sweaters
Shop 1960s sweaters and cardigans.
For winter wear, a good wool coat was still necessary. 1960s women's coats narrowed down and shortened up to fit over new, thinner, clothes.

Round collars with big buttons, flap pockets, geometric prints, and maybe a belt kept 60s coats looking cute and fun. Outerwear came down to just above the knee so that long, lean legs would continue to be the focal point.

Women's 1960s legs froze in winter. Only a warm pair of stockings, tights or tall socks could save them.

Short jackets in the 60s, especially those made of suede and leather, were popular options for the young and casual girl.

Shiny plastic-like vinyl was even more trendy with the space-age loving mod set.
Shop 1960s coats and jackets.
Most 60s women, however, chose a blazer-type jacket that was dressy enough to be worn with dresses, but also casual enough to be worn with pants on the weekends.

1960s Skirts

Women's 1960s skirts came in knee lengths with classic circle skirts/swing skirts, straight pencil skirts, and box-pleated A-line skirts (school girl style) in the early to mid 60s. Plaid patterns were very popular in the fall and winter, and solid pastels in spring and summer.

The late '60s saw the first shocker - the mini skirt - enter fashion. Mini skirts were 4-6 inches above the knee in box pleats or A-line button front shapes.

Plaids, pleats, corduroy, and heavy knits were perfect for 60s mini skirts. They were worn with tights and tall go go boots by teens and trendy college-age girls.

Mature women didn't wear minis. They went the opposite direction - longer! Button front knee-length skirts, knee-length skorts, and at-the-knee denim skirts were all newer options for 1960s women.

The maxi skirt came about at the end of the 60s decade too. Women and girls of all ages loved them.

Long skirts were gathered at the waist, sometimes with a tie bow, and hung down in a column shape. They took inspiration from prairie dresses and were made in hippie loving calico prints or swirly psychedelic eye poppers. In the evenings, long skirts were quilted or made with shiny taffeta fabrics.
Shop mini skirts, A-line skirts, long maxi skirts, denim skirts, and more.
The 1960s style skirt has returned to fashion this year.

1960s Pants

1960s Jax pants with a very high waist, shaped hip, and slender leg continued to be favorites from the 1950s. Women's 60s pants were usually lined, with side zippers and no waistband.

Women's 1960s pants could be worn with blouses tucked in, but more often had longer tops untucked.

Crop tops were a favorite in 60s summer - never too short, but occasionally long enough to overlap the pants' waistband.

The 1960s stretch pant and stirrup pant took advantage of a new kind of knit fabric.

Easy to sew and wear, the elastic stirrup under the foot kept pants smooth and straight. It didn't matter that the stirrup was visible. When ankle boots came into fashion, suddenly visible stirrups were taboo. Boots must be worn!

All 1960s pants / trousers came down to just above the ankle until the late '60s, when longer pants became the new trend. They also still zipped up the back or side for most of the decade, but moved to the front for trousers and jean styles.

Pants in the 60s were high waisted (circling the belly button) except for the youthful hip hugger styles that appeared in the mid '60s. They were more popular in Europe than America, and very trendy with the Mods and Beatniks.

1960s denim jeans followed the fit and style of slim pants: high waist, tapered leg, ankle crop, and in many more colors than just blue. White was especially trendy. Blue jeans were not as common as you might expect. They somewhat disappeared in the 1960s, only to return with a vengeance in 1969 with a flared boot cut.
Shop 1960s style pants here.
Flare jeans and pants may have started in the 1960s, but didn't go mainstream until 1969 and into the 1970s. There were a few casual flared leg pants designed as early as 1967, but for the most part, flared jeans and bell-bottom pants were not part of the 1960s. Even the hippies wore straight-leg pants in the 1960s. Learn more about 1960s pants, capris, jeans and culottes.

1960s Suits

Women's 60s suits, like the '50s, were dresses (or skirt and top separates) worn with a matching short jacket. They were the most professional choice for looking polished and lady-like.

Mature women liked the tailored suits with pencil skirts and cropped jackets, while young women embraced the knit suit with an open cardigan style jacket or light blazer.

As shocking as a 1960s mini skirt was to society, there was an equal confusion over the new pantsuit. It was a look directly copied from men's suits, but tailored down to feminine proportions.

Some 1960s work offices and establishments forbade women from wearing pantsuits. There was confusion over whether they were an insult to femininity or empowerment for women (which "disrespected men").

While 1960s fashion magazines debated, women flocked to the stores to buy pantsuits. Women were already wearing casual pants everywhere else, so wearing dressy pants seemed only natural.

Jumpsuits were another outfit that emerged in the late 1960s. These ultra wide leg one piece top and bottom overalls came in dramatic prints with big belts to match.

Many 1960s jumpsuits were sleeveless but could be worn over a blouse. They could be worn for lounging around the house or hosting an elegant house party.

They differed from the 1970s jumpsuit with a straight, wide palazzo leg.

Two peice jumpsuit looking sets were a matching tunic top and palazzo pant. Shop 60s and 70s jumpsuits.

1960s Shoes and Stockings

With women's 1960s legs now fully exposed by short hemlines and the youthful girl look on-trend, shoes took a drastic turn from high fashion with high heels to street fashion with low to no heels. Flats were in. Cheap was in. Color was in. Sophistication was out.

Thanks to new materials, notably PVC (Vinyl), women's 60s shoes could be mass-produced for cheap and come in a lot of bright colors to match dresses. The low heel made them easy to walk and live life in.

All the footwear designs of the earlier decades- loafers, Mary Janes, T-straps, monk straps, ballet, saddle shoes, and Oxfords - were designed into a low heeled shoe for the '60s.

Tall and skinny stiletto heels were still an option for evenings in the 1960s. The single strap Mary Jane came back in fashion, as did the slingback with cutouts on the sides.

Even 60s boots had flat heels. Thanks to an interest in all things futuristic looking, tall boots in white or silver became the new black. Everyone wore them.

1960s boots looked great with short dresses and mini skirts.

Tall white boots were called go-go boots, named after night club dancers in LA who wore them. Teens loved them and wore them with mini skirts to school (if they were allowed). Go Go boots are the most iconic shoe of the 1960s.

In the late '60s, suede boots in natural colors dominated fall and winter fashions. Both tall and short boot styles were worn with short shift dresses. Booties could be worn with long pants too.

Most 1960s boots were step in or pull on styles with a side zipper. The lace up boot was coming into style closer to the 1970s.

In the summer, it was the 1960s sandal heel, flip flop, and mule that had women feeling cool in the heat.

1960s summer shoe colors were bright and the straps were either very wide or very skinny.

Women's 60s sandal heels had a closed square toe, whereas casual sandals had a large open toe. Sandals were every woman's new favorite shoe. They could be worn with almost any outfit at any time of day, and not look out of place.

Women's 1960s casual shoes were canvas flat sneakers that we often refer as the brand name "Keds" today.

Keds were either slip-on loafers or lace-up sneakers in bright, happy colors, chosen to coordinate with an outfit. They were cheap, so women could afford to have one in every color. In the spring and summer, they were worn without socks.
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Read more about ALL the 1960s shoe styles here.

1960s Colored tights were worn with short skirts and dresses in a variety of colors and textures: white, black, purple, yellow, green, orange, fishnet, herringbone, ribbed, and lace. Tights covered up ugly knees and didn't cause garter straps like sheer stockings did.

Once pantyhose were perfected, they were the savior of women's legs anywhere. 1960s pantyhose camouflaged hair, bumps, bruises, and wide kneecaps. Even skin tone tights were thick and dark. To go bare-legged with dresses in the '60s was still too immodest. Ironic?

Shop colorful tights and socks inspired by the 1960s.

Tall socks could be worn instead of tights in the sixties. Chunky rib knits with a fold-down cuff were a mainstay for teens and young adults. All primary colors were worn as well as deep textures: waffle, cable knit, ribbed, honeycomb and others.

1960s Jewelry

Colorful women's clothing needed equally colorful 1960s jewelry.

In the early 60s, traditional jewelry continued to favor textured gold, white pastel, and colored pearls. These pretty and safe designs complemented the feminine 1950s style clothing.

The one change to traditional jewelry was the length. Longer pearls and tassel tip necklaces were preferred over the older short styles.

1960s necklaces hung down low on plain front shift dresses but were usually of a matching color so as not to distract from the dress. Round button earrings or small chandelier earrings matched 60s necklaces.

The new youth with their obsession with fake plastics, vinyl, and bold colors favored jewelry inspired by Pop Art.

Geometric shapes made their way onto over-sized dangling earrings.

Large chunky bangles or stacks of thin bracelets jingled up and down bare arms.

Novelty shapes were still popular, but they embraced brighter colors and more comical themes.

The same went for flowers, now made from plastic resins. They were cheerful pastel or primary-colored clusters hanging from 60s necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.
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Learn more about 1960s jewelry styles here.

1960s Hairstyles

Without a hat to call attention to a woman's head, 1960s hairstyles became a new focus for women. The 60s bouffant hairstyle teased hair to new heights... literally.

Guiche curls kissed her cheeks (made possible by a bit of nail polish to keep them pointed to a crisp). All that volume made faces appear smaller and more doll-like.

60s hair length rose from shoulder to chin to cropped above the ears as the decade progressed, only to come crashing down again in the '70s.

See more examples of 1960s hairstyles here.

Headbands were a trendy 60s hair accessory. Simple, wide satin headbands swept hair away from the face.

Hair scarves/bandannas were also trendy in the later half of the decade.

Cloche hats experienced a revival with the mod look. Pillbox hats and flower pot hats were in style with the early 60s looks.

Shop hats, hair accessories, and wigs here.

1960s Makeup

The early 60s makeup saw the exaggerated cat eye and full red lip continue. Eyebrows were shaped into subtle peak instead of a high curve. Pink blush was subtle and almost non-existent.

There were also 1960s makeup styles for the mod look (AKA babydoll face), specialty products for black women, looks for eveningwear, and others.

Powder - Flesh tone.

Blush - Soft rose pink.

Eye Shadow - White-pink, purple, light blue, aqua.

Eye Liner - Dark brown or black, top and bottom lined and extended outwards.

Lipstick - Deep pink, orange-red.

Eyebrows - Shaped into a soft peak.

Learn more about 1960s makeup.

Late 1960s Fashion: The Hippie Look

The late '60s saw a movement of anti-fashion, a political statement that grew so popular it became a mainstream fashion style. Real hippie clothing and hippie fashion were completely different.

Early on in the 1960s movement, festival going hippies wore mainstream fashions such as the shift dress in psychedelic colors of 1966-68. Tye-die was popular in 1968, taking plain white men's undershirts and dyeing them with multiple colors. The more color, the better - and the gaudier the colors, the better!

In 1968-69, the fashion shifted to earth tones, faded denim jeans, embroidered tops and tunics, and handmade accessories such as headbands, friendship bracelets, and hair wraps.

The flower child decoration of patches, embroidery, painting, and peace signs were added by many hippies to make their jeans feel less commercial or to make an anti-war statement.

60s Hippie fashion influenced mainstream designers who turned back to the down to earth, homemade, ethnic arts and crafts styles. Forest green with brown suede, and sunshine yellow with denim blue were signature colors of the ethnic-hippie '60s.

Crochet pieces, suede vests, wood beads, headbands, sandals, and embroidered trim decorated shift dresses or flared jeans. It was a blend of current silhouettes and folk art decoration.

Learn more about 60s hippie fashion influences, history of 60s hippie clothes and check out these 10 hippie outfit ideas.

The 1970s continued the hippie trend into mainstream fashion. The youth-oriented looks turned to the complete opposite - granny style.

Romanticized granny clothes from several generations ago, like pioneer women, returned fashion back to long dresses and sleeves, ruffles, lace trim, small cotton prints, and long hair (worn down this time, not up).

The age of the mini skirt "grew up" and turned into adults, not like their parents but instead like those of generations before, which seemed to have a simple life that hippies idolized.

Continue learning about 1970s fashion here.

More 60s History and Outfit Ideas

Need more help with your 60s outfit? Just ask us anytime!

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1960s fashion history for women. A return to youth, shocking colors, shorter hemlines, pop art and the hippie movement. What did women wear? Answered.

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Apparently a penny from 1964 had some kind of error in it and now is going for 10K on Ebay. The Internet is a great place.

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EXTREMELY RARE penny, 1964 penny errors, 1964's penny

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1964 penny with visible errors. This rare penny from my coin collections.You can see errors easily on the pictures.

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Yesenia Ayala as Anita, with members of the Sharks. Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020.

Yesenia Ayala as Anita, with members of the Sharks. Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

The new "West Side Story" begins with nothingness: a huge black brick wall rising behind a cavernous blank stage. A group of young people enter, walking slowly, surveying the territory. They form a line at the lip of the stage and stare at the audience.

As the orchestra strikes up its first clanging notes, they start moving, but minimally, leaning from left to right. Suddenly their faces are projected behind them on the back wall - which is not a wall at all but a giant screen. A camera placed somewhere in the audience pans slowly across their faces and shoulders - you can see scars, tattoos, piercings, sprays of acne. One boy has a linebacker's physique and wears a wool cap; another is compact, bare-chested underneath a blue satin bomber jacket; a third has stubble above his lip and is dressed in a leather jacket and sweatpants. Their expressions are hard, their eyes bright.

From the right side, a new pack of people enters, stalking the stage with the same contained aggression. They are also dressed in modern streetwear, in shades of red and maroon. One of them approaches someone from the first group and stares him down. The first group, silently, mockingly, turns on its heels, and the new group takes over the edge of the stage. Now their faces appear on the big screen - they, too, are tough and sad, prematurely worn down by life.

These first three minutes announce that if you have any expectations for "West Side Story," they should immediately be discarded. In the original 1957 production, the choreographer Jerome Robbins, who first conceptualized the musical, created a revolutionary prologue. The Jets and the Sharks - the two New York gangs who try to destroy each other - were introduced exclusively through movement. They started with unified finger snaps and then burst into dance: They ran, leapt, kicked, charged, evaded and overtook one another, evoking not only masculine aggression but also the architecture of New York City, its alleys, underpasses, scaffolding, empty lots. They covered the stage with dance like human graffiti.

[This article was the magazine's cover story. Read about the make of the cover.]
Here, Robbins's bounding, almost joyful sense of menace has been replaced by something more inward. There's no snapping - instead there's swaying, slow walking. The complexions of the groups are different, too. The Jets, who consider themselves the true masters of their neighborhood, are not, as they were in the original production and its 1961 film version, all white. The Sharks are of Latino descent (in the movie, many of them were white, and all wore brown makeup). It's not the 1950s anymore but a world, like our own, of images - a place where a face instantly becomes a photograph projected on a screen, an assertion of selfhood. And we are not being entertained - at least not yet. We are being prodded, maybe provoked. What are these people capable of?

This new staging originated several years ago in the mind of the director Ivo van Hove, who runs a major theater in Amsterdam and who has become, in recent years, a Broadway brand name, known for his bloody, irreverent interpretations of classics: "A View From the Bridge" and "The Crucible." His work has been called merciless, brutal and gimmicky but also ingenious, imaginative and true - and he welcomes this divided response. Van Hove had admired "West Side Story" since he saw the movie as a teenager growing up in rural Belgium. In recent years, the play's portrayal of a divided society acquired a new urgency for him, and he decided he wanted to offer his own vision of the classic show.

But a 21st-century production demanded a more complete renovation than had ever been attempted. He had in mind some drastic cuts and the jettisoning of Robbins's beloved choreography. It took some persuading to secure permission from the estates of the original creators (with the exception of Stephen Sondheim, the only one living, who knew van Hove's work and embraced the concept from the beginning). When they finally agreed, van Hove enlisted the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - a rigorous formalist who directs Rosas, a celebrated dance company, but had never made movement for musical theater.

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At 10 a.m. on a chilly morning in early October, Stephen Sondheim, wearing a patient smile, took his seat in a large Flatiron studio amid the cast members of "West Side Story" on the first day of rehearsal. The oldest of the gang members was 25, the youngest was 17, and they were all - in their own particular and mesmerizing ways - beautiful.

Casting "West Side Story" has always been a challenge. You need actors who can handle the high-level dancing and singing but also convincingly play teenagers. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker auditioned more than 1,500 people during 2018 and 2019 in New York, Los Angeles and Miami before they found their 50 cast members, 33 of whom will be making their Broadway debuts. For De Keersmaeker, casting the right dancers was the solution to the temporal riddle she and van Hove had devised. Their production is set approximately now, but the music remains the music of the 1950s, or Leonard Bernstein's brilliant reimagining of it. How could the new choreography be responsive to the music and still feel of-the-moment? De Keersmaeker's answer was dancers who brought "edge and fire and sensibility," people who "have really chosen a life of examining the world through dance." Dancing, she said, is a way of thinking.

The dancers that they assembled - among them a gamin Latina woman with dark, sympathetic eyes and a confident stride (Yesenia Ayala, playing the role of Anita); a short, muscular black woman with a shaved head and a winning, defiant expression (Zuri Noelle Ford, a Jet); a swaggering, acrobatic black man who moved like lightning (Dharon E. Jones, also a Jet) - exuded vigor and raw assurance. They had chosen to cast people of different races to reflect America today. The diverse cast also heightened an absurdity built into the script: "West Side Story" is explicitly about a group of more settled immigrants, who believe themselves to be natives, battling a group of more recent ones.

The mood in the rehearsal room was jubilant, the din of voices punctuated by little whoops of greeting. It was unclear as they were settling down if any of the cast members noticed that one of the creators was sitting among them. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker, both of whom are accustomed to commanding a room, took turns approaching Sondheim, almost diffidently. "Are you having a good time?" Sondheim asked, with friendly, deflationary wit.

"Well," De Keersmaeker said softly, "I just got here."

As De Keersmaeker and van Hove took their places in front of the room, the crowd quieted. They were each dressed elegantly, van Hove in a navy blue dress shirt, his gray hair the fine texture of a boy's; De Keersmaeker in loose blacks, her white hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. There was something comical in the contrast between their cool, inscrutable expressions and the boisterous young Americans who sat before them. Van Hove began to speak - so quietly that it was difficult to hear - and the cast was rapt. Van Hove wears authority lightly, almost as an afterthought; he appears to be communing with the visions in his head.

"West Side Story," he explained, is "brutal, and very rough." Crucially, it's a world without parents. These young people are essentially orphans, forced to live by their wits, and defining their turf is the primary ratification of their existence. Cuts to the original production were being considered - no intermission, jettisoning "I Feel Pretty" (one of the show's most charming songs) - precisely because van Hove wanted the play to move at the speed of adolescent instincts. These characters, he explained, have no time to think about what they're doing. They live in the now: They kill, they suffer, they kill again.

"This is all very heavy," he acknowledged. The script was "masterfully done, almost in a primitive way. It's unpolished. Not refined, so it goes right to your heart and tells the exact story it wants to tell." There were murmurs of assent.

The set (designed by Jan Versweyveld, one of van Hove's main collaborators and his romantic partner) would be stark on its surface but would reveal, as the play went on, certain elaborate tricks, like the projection wall, which played video - sometimes recorded from the stage by the cast members themselves, sometimes sumptuous images shot on location in the Bronx, East Harlem and Puerto Rico. The stage would occasionally fill with fog. "It's difficult to explain," van Hove said softly. "But nature elements are important to me. That New York becomes a mythical city that could also be Shanghai or Buenos Aires. Nature elements will be onstage - it's a little bit scary, but there will be rain."

"Nah, that's cool!" someone from the crowd called out.

Van Hove smiled, a little shyly, a little subversively. "It will be one big flood, like a Kurosawa film, where the earth splits open."

De Keersmaeker spoke next, more tersely. "Needless to say, this is a huge challenge. What makes 'West Side Story' so strong is the way that theater, music and dance come together and fuse together." She admitted to being nervous: "As a European, you feel a little bit like, I'm going to be roasted!"

Whereas van Hove's manner is definite, De Keersmaeker's is searching. When I first met her last summer, at the headquarters of her dance school and company in Brussels, she talked about the difference between their styles. "He's really somebody who has an extremely articulated vision, and he knows how to embody that strategy from the beginning," she explained, whereas for her, the "process itself indicates how the material is going to be developed. I very often start from people, how they are."

When van Hove first approached her in 2016 about joining the project, she didn't reply for three weeks. De Keersmaeker knew that an American audience might not be sympathetic to a revision of Jerome Robbins's cherished choreography - by a Belgian woman, no less. But she shared with Robbins an interest in stylized transformations of everyday movement: in showing the way human beings go from walking to fighting, moving through territory to defending it, how group animus can be contained or unleashed. Robbins observed kids at high school dances in Spanish Harlem in the '50s, borrowing steps from the mambo and the jitterbug. Once De Keersmaeker decided to sign on, she watched YouTube videos of teenagers krumping on street corners in Los Angeles, break-dancing contests, circles of hip-hop dancers in clubs egging on central combatants. There's a frantic energy to this movement, De Keersmaeker explained, a form of expression somewhere between "dancing, fighting and screaming." It captures the way young people relate to the world, absorbing the onslaught of news, assimilating and rearranging the glut of digital imagery on social media, trying on multiple identities. In fall 2017, with five members of her company, she began marrying her geometric, highly formal dance to the conventions of contemporary movement.

But De Keersmaeker also wanted to make something that saluted Robbins's classicism and captured the musical's elemental themes of love and death. The new choreography would draw, as her work always does, on the universal laws of the body, which she started to demonstrate that summer day in her office. As she talked, she got up from her chair and started to move. We lie down when we're vulnerable, wounded, dying, she explained, sinking to the floor, propping herself up on an arm to face me; we lie down when we are engaging in erotic intimacy. She was exploring ideas of the horizontal, rolling and falling and lying down, but also of defying gravity, rising, leaping, propelling the body with knifelike arms. The arms, she explained, are our most immediate tools of expressiveness. They reach and punch and caress, push and point. She extended her arm and finger and said: "Get out of my house!"

De Keersmaeker's way of working is slow, collaborative and nonlinear. She invents a sequence of movements and then asks dancers to go away and improvise, using the basic grammar she has given them and elaborating on it. When they return, she watches them and begins to harvest details they bring her - reducing or adding - until the language becomes a shared one. When she works with her company, this exchange can go on for months, even years. She began this work with the cast in a series of labs the previous winter, and they would continue it throughout the fall. She was getting to know them, beginning to thread their ideas into the work - but the choreography was still revealing itself.

On Broadway, dancers are usually told exactly where to stand, how to space themselves, how to move. In the rehearsal room that first day, De Keersmaeker told the cast that this process would be different. "We're going to start with basic material," she said, modest yet also definitive, "and then make together new material - things we're going to have to find out together."

Van Hove and De Keersmaeker had never worked together before, but they anticipated the uncertainty of joining forces with characteristic composure. "I have to get out of my comfort zone to work with her," van Hove told me. "She has to get out of her comfort zone to work with me."

Their collaboration replicates an important aspect of the original "West Side Story," which sprang from a group of ambitious, restless artists who recognized, in one another, forces of equal and opposite weight. For years, Robbins had been talking to the composer Leonard Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents about a musical based on "Romeo and Juliet" that would seamlessly combine dance, music and storytelling. Discussion of the project began in the late 1940s - they first toyed with a story about Jews and Catholics on the Lower East Side. Over the next several years, as the three were diverted by other projects, none of them entirely lost sight of it. It was a shared fantasy - still inchoate but somehow powerful.

One day in 1955, according to most accounts, Bernstein and Laurents were lounging by a hotel pool in Los Angeles. Bernstein was in town conducting; Laurents was working on a screenplay. The subject turned to the headlines in that day's paper about Chicano gang violence. The two fell to talking. What if they revised their original idea of an East Side story and made it about white and Latino teenagers? Bernstein, who was married to Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean, was immersed in Latin music, and he could immediately hear rhythms and melodies. When they told Robbins of their new idea, he seized on the dance possibilities. Getting away from their own experiences, as descendants of immigrant Jews, and mapping their sense of outsiderdom onto a different set of tribal animosities proved freeing. All three were gay men in various states of acceptance of their sexualities, and a story of forbidden love may have been a way to write clandestinely about their own lives. They set to work.

Soon after a pair of experienced lyricists turned down the project in 1955, Laurents ran into Stephen Sondheim, who was then only 25, at a party and remembered having heard him play a few songs from an unproduced musical shortly before. He invited him to audition for Bernstein. By that point, Bernstein had written lyrics to a number of songs, but he quickly understood that Sondheim was the superior lyricist and was eager to work with him.

All four men had uncompromisingly high standards but different strengths. Laurents, who honed his skills writing radio plays for the Army, was economical, tart and resistant to sentiment. Bernstein married emotional warmth to operatic bravura, and his capacious musical intelligence could synthesize Beethoven, bebop, mambo and Puerto Rican seis. Sondheim had a knack for embedding plot in lyrics and a playful, prickly sense of language. Robbins brought his fearsome perfectionism, his sense of search, his impeccable showman's instinct for contrast and mood.

Working together was not always easy. During the rehearsal period, Bernstein would sometimes retreat across the street to a bar to avoid Robbins after a particularly unpleasant argument (though there are also stories of the two of them together, Robbins with his hand on Bernstein's shoulder as he sat at the piano, revising music measure by measure, as if they shared one intelligence). Robbins was a fierce editor of the material until the very end, scrapping and reworking songs ("Something's Coming" was written just a few weeks before the play debuted) and driving the actors to tears. The four collaborators gradually arrived at a shared vision, discovering what Sondheim later called "a wholeness" - a synthesis of dramatic language, music and dance.

Think of "Maria," one of the most affecting love songs written for the stage. It's so familiar now that it's hard to hear its strangeness, the haunting tritone of the song's first word, "Maria," the very same notes that can be heard in the prologue (what has been called "the shofar"), establishing an atmosphere of threat. The tension in the music is softened by the lyric, which is reverent but also sensual, with Tony invoking Maria's name over and over, as if the word could be made flesh. Or think of "Cool," a song whose breezy slang ("Boy, boy, crazy boy, get cool, boy") pulls against its thrashing melodic line - and also quotes that same tritone - evoking barely contained adolescent aggression that explodes into dance. Or the way "America," an escalating argument between the Puerto Rican men and women about the humiliations and advantages of moving to the United States, culminates in a dance-off.

Throughout October and November, the cast occupied the Gibney rehearsal studios, just above Union Square - large, bare rooms that they filled with gray dance floors, wooden tables arrayed with Purell and breath mints and metal folding chairs that stood in for the set. The rooms hummed with activity. In Studio B, the show's musical director, Alexander Gemignani (a disciple of Sondheim's), would be instructing the cast members on the intricacies of the score, trying to strip them of any inherited notions about these familiar songs. He reminded them that the score is full of jaggedness and dissonance, intervals that make the hair on your neck stand on end. They shouldn't be afraid to sound ugly. In Studio C, De Keersmaeker was teaching the dancers her highly detailed, precise language - "The most extreme external thing reflects the most internal," she instructed a group of Shark women who were learning sequences from "America." "You want to have expressive fingers. You want to have expressive feet so that you get a longer line." They often moved without music, and the atmosphere was intensely focused, even solemn. Van Hove, meanwhile, was close-reading the text with the actors in the main studio space. His script, which was almost always in his hand, was annotated on nearly every line with spidery notes.

One day in mid-October, he was rehearsing the scene that is the audience's first introduction to Tony, the show's Romeo, just after we've met the Jet clan. The "West Side Story" book is famously lean - it's one of the shortest books in Broadway history - and propulsive. There are almost no speeches or reveries (those happen in the song and dance); all the dialogue moves the action forward. The more van Hove read the script, the more it seemed to him dense with theatrical ideas. Van Hove, whose first language is Flemish, brings to English-language texts a guileless irreverence. Daniel Raggett, the production's associate director, told me this quality arises, in part, from the act of translation. "When Ivo does Shakespeare, somehow taking it from the original text and translating it into Dutch, and then when you see it, it goes back to English, suddenly it has this incredible clarity that it doesn't have elsewhere." When native English speakers come to canonical texts, he explained, "there's such a weight of staging ideas, or political significance, or previous productions." There are so many layers to shed; van Hove, it seemed to Raggett, could see right down to the bare words. Scott Rudin, one of the show's producers, also described how van Hove was unbeholden to convention. "He doesn't direct revivals like they're revivals. Because to him, they're not. He has no iconic relationship to any of these shows. They're brand-new to him."

Tony - Isaac Powell, who is 25, dark-browed and lanky, with a carefully contained jitteriness - was standing up on a chair, fixing a sign on Doc's drugstore, where he works. In the show, he has recently left the Jets, which he founded with Riff - then played by Ben Cook, who has curly blond hair, a square jaw, a powerful dancer's back and supplicating blue eyes. Riff remains in charge of the gang and is standing below Tony, trying to persuade him to join the Jets that night at a dance, where they will confront the Sharks.

Isaac Powell, right, who plays Tony in the new Broadway production, with Ben Cook, who played Riff until an injury forced him to leave the production earlier this month.
Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Van Hove approached them with the script, drawing Powell's attention to the words Tony was mocking. Usually this scene is played as a jocular argument, but van Hove didn't read it that way. Remember, van Hove told Powell, it could be that Tony "invented those words, because he was the boss. He's now disavowing his own creation." This would be shocking to Riff, seeing a world that they created together so casually discarded by Tony.

Riff's next line, van Hove suggested, should be full of that disbelief: "What's with you? Four and one-half years, I think I know a man's character. Buddy boy, I am a victim of disappointment in you." Van Hove fixated on that interval of time. It was a detail whose specificity couldn't be accidental. The script is making clear that they are real friends, intimates: They've been living together for years. Riff is desperate to preserve that intimacy; Tony is just as desperate to move away from it.

Powell tried the next line casually, a little condescendingly: "End your suffering, little man. Why don't you pack up your gear and clear out? Go play nice with the Jets." Van Hove asked him to try it again, much more angrily - exploding at Riff out of frustrated ambivalence. He loves Riff, but he's also recognizing that he has outgrown him. Powell tried the line again, almost growling, and gave Cook a hostile little shove, which Cook answered with spontaneous earnestness: "The Jets are the greatest."

"They were," Tony says, petulant but a little softer now.

" Are," Riff insists. "You found something better?"

Van Hove wanted it to be clear how divided Tony feels at this moment, right on the edge of change but still tempted by the comfort of the old friendship. As they went on, the scene moved between seduction, anger and the revelation of Riff's neediness.

They kept running the scene, trying different approaches. Sometimes their faces were so close together they nearly kissed; sometimes the pressure of Tony's ambivalence caused him to shove Riff so hard he almost knocked him off his feet. In the end, they found something subtler - not a homoerotic breakup or compensatory explosions of machismo but a prickly, tender document of a teenage parting, its own small tragedy.

Van Hove began the project with the idea that "West Side Story" was a series of fights - physical fights, ideological fights, gendered fights. But as the weeks of rehearsal went on and he and the actors began to live inside the play, it became clear that it was just as much about fantasies. There's the harsh reality of their lives, which causes them to act impulsively, as if there's no future; but at the same time, there are a lot of dreams. Van Hove told me this one morning in early November, just before he rushed off to rehearsal. "People are dreaming. And they're dreaming to have a perspective in life. To have a love. To have something to care for. To have somebody to care for. To live with someone."

Getting in touch with that oneiric quality helped van Hove arrive at an answer to a question he had been having for months: how to stage the climactic moment when Tony and Maria are finally alone together. The two meet earlier during the dance at the gym and instantly fall in love. The power and tone of their emotion overtake the atmosphere of the play for a while, altering the language of the dialogue and songs, which become sweetly surreal, full of non sequiturs and endearments and celestial metaphors. In the original Broadway production, and then in the movie, Maria is up on her fire escape, and Tony calls to her from below; it's the balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet," symbolizing their distant worlds. But on this bare set, there could be no balcony. So how to show the obstacle between them? One day in November, van Hove, De Keersmaeker and the actors were experimenting with a solution.

In the center of the rehearsal room, Tony, kneeling, implored a standing Maria to join him, "just for a minute." She warned him that her brother, Bernardo, the head of the Sharks, played by the New York City Ballet principal dancer Amar Ramasar, would be back soon. But then she succumbed ("A minute is not enough"), joining him on the floor. Maria, played by Shereen Pimentel, is not an ingénue - she's willful and is often leading Tony rather than the other way around. ("The text is full of traps," van Hove told me. "Maria is in a white dress, a virgin," but if you read the text carefully, he said, she always knows what she wants and expresses it clearly.)

In early November, I visited Sondheim. He sat on a couch on the ground floor of his large Midtown townhouse, nursing a glass of white wine. Two elderly black poodles were sprawled nearby, one of them gently wheezing. When I asked him how he was, he responded that he wasn't so great. He was experiencing a bout of gout. Sondheim is 89, and his walk that day was slow and pained, but he retains a boyishness - a willingness to amuse and be amused.

At first, his answers to my questions were a little curt. How did "West Side Story" achieve its singular tone? "Oh, well, you can't put it into words, really. That's why it's called tone!" How did it achieve such sublime yet accessible beauty? "Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There's no accounting for why a piece has some kind of popular reach or takes a while to catch on. Art, as you know, has its own timetable." Theorizing seemed to pain him, and he appeared relieved, and more responsive, when I began asking about specific lyrical choices.

Sondheim has said before that he isn't fond of some of the lines he wrote. He regretted the showy internal rhymes in "I Feel Pretty" - "it's alarming how charming I feel" - which he later came to see as not believable for Maria, a new immigrant who still doesn't speak fluent English. Same for Tony's line, in "Tonight," "Today the world was just an address." "Excuse me?" Sondheim said, self-mockingly. "That's a writer. That ain't Tony!" Occasionally, he and Bernstein had disagreements. While Bernstein's theatrical instincts were "marvelous," his lyrical ones were less so. Bernstein's "idea of poetic lyric writing is written poetry, or what I call purple prose." Sondheim's own "idea of poetic lyric writing was conversational." It was when he stuck to his guns that he produced his best lines.

It was a lesson he absorbed from the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who was his mentor. He pointed to lyrics from Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!": "Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day." "When it's set to music, that's poetry," he said. "When it's on paper, it's flat prose. That's the difference. And that's a crucial difference." I asked him to tell me a line from "West Side Story" that satisfied him. He answered unhesitatingly: "I just met a girl named Maria." This was lyrical restraint coupled with musical richness. He recalled playing it for Hammerstein and his wife, Dorothy, while he was at work on "West Side Story." When he was finished, Dorothy got up off the couch and kissed him. Sondheim's eyes became a little moist as he told me this. "And I knew why. That's the kind of lyric that belongs in this show, for these characters. That's poetry."

"West Side Story" was Sondheim's first Broadway show. He has written many more and received the theater's highest honors. But it became clear, as we talked, that he was self-critical, still scrutinizing certain choices almost as if he was working them over in his mind. The qualities of beauty and wholeness in "West Side Story" were perhaps not so ineffable as they seemed. They emerged from a series of concrete, pragmatic details: the effect of a note in this measure, the solidity of a line in that song, rethinking and questioning and testing them.

I kept asking Sondheim, in different ways, to characterize why "West Side Story" has such a hold on us. Why does it work so well? Would it stand up to this radical restaging? A little wearied by my insistence, Sondheim finally said: "The thing that holds 'West Side Story' together is the story." It's the reason no revival, no matter how contemporary, can stray too far from the original. Sondheim was careful to make the distinction between story and plot, using the example of "Hamlet": "Story is, this is about a man who can't make up his mind. Plot is, this is a guy who thinks his uncle killed his father. And a good play combines the two."

So what is the story of "West Side Story"? Sondheim thought for a moment. "Let me see if I can put this succinctly," he said, taking a sip of his wine. "It's about a young man who grows up by falling in love, and it kills him."

I complimented him on his haiku-like formulation and asked if he had ever put it that way before.

"No, no."

It's beautiful, I told him.

"O.K., good," he said, clearing his throat a little peremptorily at my expression of sentiment. "If it's clear, that's great."

I mentioned that the idea of clarity had been a leitmotif of our conversation. I was learning something about holding yourself to standards of simplicity and limpidity.

"You can learn about it, but it's always beyond your reach. It's: 'I almost got it there. I almost got it there,' " he said, frowning.

"Yeah, well, you're hard on yourself, obviously."

"Yeah, aren't you?" he answered sharply. Then, with a mirthful New York honk: "Hello? You know a writer who isn't? Name one!"

Moving from the rehearsal studio to the theater is like moving from a cramped apartment to a spacious house. Ideas that work in an intimate room can become hard to decipher on the stage, and you have to recalibrate the acting, the staging, the choreography to fit the new space. When the production set up camp in the 1,700-seat Broadway Theater on Nov. 18, this challenge was compounded by the presence of the video screen that would loom behind the actors throughout the production. Sometimes the characters film one another, so that they are doubled, and the video has the raw, shaky quality of social media. Van Hove and Versweyveld, the set designer, wanted the video to give us intimate access to the characters' lives - we can see, on the big screen, their tears and grimaces and sweat. Other times, the video comments on the lives of the gang members, almost like a documentary film.

This was the case with "Gee, Officer Krupke." Originally conceived as the show's only comic number, the song is performed by the Jets right after they've been hassled, yet again, by Sergeant Krupke and Lieutenant Schrank, two cops in their neighborhood. The music has a vaudeville quality, with horns and trombone zips, and the lyrics are antic, even though they describe being shunted between the justice system, therapists and social workers. In the original, the Jets act out each encounter, putting on ridiculous accents and bonking one another on the head.

Van Hove read the song's comedy as dark truth, and he was staging it as an autobiography of kids who have been abused and neglected. The Jets and the Sharks, he observed, are products of an inhumane system - of immigration laws, of racism, of policing. "Krupke" would become an indictment.

It was van Hove's most heretical revision, because it cut so sharply against the grain of the song's vaudeville style. Van Hove encouraged the actors to sing it with simmering anger, and De Keersmaeker invented adrenalized movement to go with it. As the Jets talk about being judged and dehumanized, they start to move like zombies or animals. They shove one another, derange their faces, pump their fists and chests. They practically spit out the lyrics. Behind them, on the screen, is a video showing young men (not the characters onstage; we're in the wider world) being violently handcuffed, stomped on and threatened with guns by the police.

In late November, they were still deciding about the song's placement in the show. In the original, it was in the second act - and was specifically written as a release valve from the show's tensions. In the film version, it takes place in the first act, before all the killing in the rumble, and in the new production it started off here, too. When Sondheim came to see an early run, he gave notes on "Krupke" to Rudin, who communicated them to van Hove. Sondheim recalled the original intent: It was like the drunk porter scene in "Macbeth," unsparing but funny. If it stayed in the first half of the show, it didn't make sense for it to be so grim.

One late afternoon in late December, I sat in the Broadway Theater with Ricky Ubeda, who plays one of the Shark men. We were watching a group of Sharks rehearse a sequence from "Dance at the Gym," a ferocious dance battle that involves the Sharks and Jets charging at one another, beating each other back through sheer force of virtuosic movement. They were in the process of making changes, which the cast members themselves had demanded. All through the fall and winter, they had been working to master De Keersmaeker's technique, with its strict geometries, athleticism, speed, precision. The movement was forceful, energized, contemporary, but it didn't feel, to the Sharks, as if it successfully captured contemporary Latino young people. Teenagers don't all dance in the same way, and the Sharks should have a different style than the Jets.

Some members of the cast vocalized their unease to Rudin. It wasn't enough to have Latino people onstage playing Latino characters. "You can't just fill a quota," Ubeda, a first-generation Cuban-American from Miami, told me. "You have to allow us to represent actually. If there's any reason to do it again, it's to get it right." In the original script, the Sharks are drawn less sharply than the Jets - they have fewer songs as a group, and the people in the gang are less differentiated. The cast members worried that this imbalance was being repeated.

Two Latino dance consultants - Patricia Delgado, a ballet dancer originally from Miami, and Sergio Trujillo, a Tony Award-winning Broadway choreographer - were called in to help De Keersmaeker, together with the cast, find ways of incorporating more authentically Latino movement. In the theater world, reports about this were greeted with a derisive frisson (one website reported, inaccurately, that Trujillo was being brought in to clean up a mess and that Robbins's choreography was being restored). But what was happening at the theater was at once more pedestrian and more complicated: Real identity politics had entered into the production's theatrical identity politics, creating tensions that had to be resolved through dance.

When I stopped by the theater on Jan. 8, the huge machine of the production whirred. Tiny tweaks (the cutting of lines in the script for pacing and clarity) and large ones (shooting new footage for the "Krupke" video with iPhones, to make it less polished) were narrowing the gap between ambition and its realization. But there were upheavals: Powell had torn his meniscus during a performance and had to have surgery. His understudy, Jordan Dobson, took up the role having rehearsed it only once on the stage. On Jan. 5, Ben Cook, who plays Riff, dislocated his shoulder and had to leave the production. Everyone seemed to be grieving for him. Dharon Jones, who played Action in the Jets, would have to rapidly learn the new role.

Onstage, the Jets were practicing "Krupke" while Gemignani made small changes with the orchestra - accentuating the attack on the refrain between the verses, making the dynamics more explosive, continuing to explore the line between comedy and aggression. There was a lively debate about cow bells versus wood blocks for one of the sharp comedic accents. They tested out three different cow bells, and there was widespread enthusiasm for a medium-size one ("I've never heard so much love for the cow bell," Gemignani said). The Jets were charged up by the new orchestration. They bobbed their heads and shouted: "Yes!" Leaning into the vaudeville quality was giving the song the acrid tone it needed: The answer had been inside the music all along.

The last time I talked to van Hove, he was more relaxed than usual. He had taken a few days off around Christmas, and he came back to the production fresh, with new ideas occurring to him all the time. I asked him which aspects of the show were finished. "Finished?" he said skeptically. "Nothing is finished yet." Months earlier, he likened the process of staging a play to "developing a photograph the old fashioned way, in liquid chemicals" - the image takes time to become visible. It was only at the very end of the process that you could see it clearly. And even then, as they continued to perform it night after night, there would be "infinite variations."

Van Hove once told me that his ambition in restaging "West Side Story" was to get people to really listen to it, to hear what else the text and the music have to tell us that we don't know yet. There's an audacity to this but a kind of awe and respect, too: the conviction that the greatest works of art have inside them many lives. The language and music and dance of "West Side Story" will keep vibrating on their unsettling tritone, generating new meaning, and people who try to stage it 50 years or 100 years from now will seize on it, wrestle with it, demand that it reveal itself again. This production was just one interpretive line in a whole Talmud of "West Side Story." "Theater is a living thing," van Hove said. "You never know what will happen."

Costume design: An D'Huys. Makeup and temporary tattoo design: Andrew Sotomayor. Hair and wig design: Mia M. Neal.

Sasha Weiss is the culture editor for the magazine. Her last article was about the playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac. Philip Montgomery is a photographer who won a 2018 National Magazine Award. An exhibition of his work, which examines the fractured state of America, opens this year in Paris, Berlin and London.

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Inside the wildly ambitious effort to reimagine the class musical for 2020. Yesenia Ayala as Anita, with members of the Sharks. Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times The new "West Side Story" begins with nothingness: a huge black brick wall rising behind a cavernous blank stage.

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I think the overall theme of West Side Story contrasts with one of our last Musicals quite greatly. Oklahoma is a far cry from what West Side Story represents and I think much of that comes from the setting. The inner city against the rural farm life would be one massive factor that more or less contributes to about every difference I can think of in a group of people. Any major difference, anyway. I think that might be one of the greatest struggles to overcome in the 21st century.

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It seems like all of the big stuff, at least in the 60's, came in the later part of the decade. I found this video pretty interesting and overall it summed up my own thoughts on it. So much stuff evolved from the 60's into what we have today and it is infinitely interesting.

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Top 10 Decade Defining Musical Acts: 1960s

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VVA honored the internationally renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp in 2004 with our President's Award for Excellence in the Arts for her big Broadway show Movin' Out , the Vietnam War-themed production done to the tune...

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David Merrick seemed like a pretty interesting guy. I can see why such an awesome name for a musical came from him, and though I havn't watched it I listened to the soundtrack at work and now I really want to watch it.

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There's a moment in West Side Story, the tragic and melodramatic musical that was 1961's biggest box-office hit, where whirling bodies drift out of focus. It's a simple transition between scenes, a way to get from a cluttered Upper West Side tenement apartment to a crowded dancehall. But it also speaks to what really works about West Side Story-the aspects of the movie that transcend historical eras, even as so much of it is hopelessly mired in its own time. In that moment, those bodies transform into shapes made out of light, into pure abstractions. They shows us, in a way, what's thrilling about West Side Story: The power of bodies in motion, the way that watching them can play tricks on our brain. It's what the movie gets right.

There is a lot that West Side Story does not get right. Consider this: One of the best things about West Side Story is the presence of Rita Moreno, who plays the tough but caring girlfriend of Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican gang the Sharks. Moreno was a Puerto Rican woman who was playing a Puerto Rican woman, something that didn't happen often in early-'60s Hollywood. And yet Rita Moreno had to wear brownface. All the white actors who played Puerto Ricans in West Side Story wore dark brown makeup, so Moreno had to wear dark brown makeup, too, so that she could match their skin tone. "It was like mud," Moreno remembered, decades later. And when she tried to complain to the makeup artist, the makeup artist asked if she was racist.

Now, Moreno had been acting in Hollywood movies for more than a decade by the time she was in West Side Story, and she'd barely ever gotten anything bigger than a bit part. She won an Oscar for her work in West Side Story, and she went on to have a great career, though much of it has been onstage or on TV rather than in movies. Right now, Moreno is an 87-year-old EGOT winner, and she'll return in the (possibly ill-advised) West Side Story remake that Steven Spielberg has in pre-production. She is a legend. But for her to be in this hugely popular and well-intentioned movie about why we shouldn't let racism divide us, she had to be slathered in dark-brown makeup. That's pretty fucked up!

West Side Story is an antiquated movie in all sorts of ways, not all of them problematic. Rewatching it recently, I had to spend the opening scene wrapping my mind around the idea that the movie's teenage gang toughs-the ones who snap their fingers in unison, and who leap into florid and balletic dance moves even when they're supposed to be fighting-don't look even remotely intimidating. But they probably didn't look intimidating in 1961, either. Instead, the movie presents a heightened Broadway reality, a world where colors pop right out and where characters will break into elaborate singing routines in even the most tense situations. Authenticity was never the point. That probably goes double for the endearingly silly hepcat dialect, everyone calling everyone else "daddy-o." Those gang kids aren't there to look hard. They're there to dance.

The Broadway version of West Side Story, with music from Leonard Bernstein and lyrics from a 25-year-old Stephen Sondheim, opened four years before the movie, and it was an instant sensation. The idea of attempting to tackle social issues via big-scale musical was still pretty novel, and West Side Story was a hugely elaborate show, with more dancing than anyone had ever seen on Broadway. For the movie version, United Artists hired the director Robert Wise, who had edited Citizen Kane and who had helmed a bunch of smart, well-made movies that fit into a number of different genres. But Wise didn't direct it himself. Instead, he co-directed with Jerome Robbins, the director of the original Broadway play. Wise didn't have any experience with musicals, and Robbins didn't have any experience with movies. The idea was that Robbins would direct the musical numbers, while Wise would direct everything else.

It didn't quite work out that way. Robbins put his cast through hell, shooting tons of takes, to the point where dancers were working through injuries. All those takes cost money, and Robbins got fired midway through shooting. For the rest of the shoot, his assistants took over his duties, though all the choreography was still his. Robbins still got co-directing credit for the movie, and he still won the Best Director Oscar with Wise. ( West Side Story won 10 different Oscars that year, just one shy of the record set by Ben-Hur two years earlier.)

Robbins got results. The dance sequences in West Side Story are just stunning-all these bodies flying around in every direction, defying gravity, landing with absolute precision in their right place. The whole movie looks artificial, but much of it was shot on location in New York, which means those dancers were landing on cement. Even when they're fighting, they're graceful and expressive and acrobatic. The rumble scenes remind me a bit of Hong Kong martial-arts movies-dreamlike battles with their own internal logic.

When West Side Story wants to communicate things, like the characters of Tony and Maria falling in love at first sight, it does it without words. In that instant, Wise and Robbins tell us what they need to tell us with focus tricks and spotlights-stage techniques and film techniques, working together. And it doesn't hurt that the songs are all bangers: Big and heavily-orchestrated numbers like "Jet Song" and "Maria" and "Tonight" and "I Feel Pretty," all still standards decades later. The West Side Story soundtrack was America's biggest-selling album of the year in both 1962 and 1963, which should tell you something.

Musicals, of course, had been big business long before West Side Story. They'd been big business ever since movies had sound. For most of their history, musicals had been about lightness and froth, about the pure joy in seeing what Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly could do with their bodies. But they'd also entered into an era when they tried to tell serious stories. The Rodgers & Hammerstein adaptation South Pacific, the highest-grossing movie of 1958, had told a story about love and war and racism. Otto Preminger's Porgy And Bess, from 1959, was a message movie with a predominantly black cast. But West Side Story went bigger with its ideas, using the power of myth to tell a contemporary story.

West Side Story is, of course, a Shakespearean adaptation, a contemporary retelling of Romeo And Juliet. (It's an inexact retelling, with a less tragic ending and a radically reshaped arc.) But Shakespeare didn't invent the idea of doomed teenage lovers. He was adapting the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult, and maybe that had come from something older, too. It's one of those stories that's woven into our DNA: the depth and purity of young infatuation, set against the heartless societal forces that are endlessly conspiring to tear kids apart and to end their happiness.

West Side Story used that framework to talk about racism, which was a problem then and which remains a problem now. The Jets, the white kids in the neighborhood, don't like the idea of Puerto Ricans coming into their space. They react with pure, unblinkered racism: "Every Puerto Rican's a lousy chicken!" They worry that the Puerto Rican gang is nothing like the others that they've encountered, that the newcomers will fight more savagely. The Sharks, meanwhile, have come to New York and realized that this promised land will always be hostile to anyone who isn't white.

We're supposed to believe that all of them are teenagers, and there are precious few adults in the story: a kindly shopkeeper, a clueless social worker, a few embittered cops. The most prominent cop hates all of them. He taunts the Puerto Ricans: "It's a free country, and I ain't got the right. But I got a badge. What do you got?" But when the white kids won't help him out, he explodes at them, too, calling them and their families "tinhorn immigrant scum." (The Jets, we learn, were the invaders not too long ago.) Everyone is struggling for land and for pride, and nobody has any ideas on how they could all just share the city peacefully. And the movie never makes this seem like their fault. Instead, they're all victims of larger societal forces at work. They're desperate to hold onto what little they have, even though that fight might doom all of them. When things turn tragic, that kindly shopkeeper tells a Jet, "You make this world lousy." He responds, "We didn't make it, Doc." They're both right.

Against this unforgiving backdrop, Tony, a former Jet who's left the gang life behind, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks' leader. They're happy for a few brief, shining moments before it all turns to shit. The movie ends with Tony dead in the street, and it's a mythic conclusion, the only one that could've ever happened. The whole story plays out with a grim inevitability.

But for West Side Story to work as something other than beautiful spectacle, we have to buy the idea that Tony and Maria really are in love. That's a problem. Natalie Wood, who plays Maria, had already been nominated for an Oscar for Rebel Without A Cause, and earlier in 1961, she'd been grandly sympathetic in Elia Kazan's Splendor In The Grass, the movie that won her the West Side Story role. She's the closest thing to a movie star in a cast that's full of unknowns, many of them from the stage. Wood projects warmth and sweetness. But her character has no real depth, and she often seems to make decisions because of plot requirements rather than human feelings. I can't get past, for instance, how she takes mere seconds to forgive Tony, a man she's known for a couple of days, for straight-up murdering her brother. And it doesn't help that Wood, who was Russian-American, does the entire role in an exaggerated and ridiculous Puerto Rican accent. Wood didn't do her own singing in the movie, either, and neither did most of the principal cast.

(A morbid aside: Wood drowned in 1981, when she was 43. She's the only major member of the young West Side Story cast who isn't still alive. Wood's death, initially ruled an accident, was always suspicious, and it's remained a subject of some fascination. Last year, her husband-the actor Robert Wagner, who was in the movie that'll be the subject of this column's next edition-was named a person of interest in Wood's death.)

Wood reportedly didn't get along with Richard Beymer, the actor who played Tony. And the two really don't have much chemistry in the movie. Beymer just isn't up to the task of carrying the movie. He's a blandly appealing '50s-style leading man, and he can't summon the passion or the intensity necessary for the role. Wise originally wanted Elvis Presley to play Tony, and even though Elvis was never anyone's idea of a great actor, he was a world-historically charismatic and magnetic figure. The movie would've been immeasurably better with him in the lead. (Col. Tom Parker, Elvis' manager and one of the great villains in pop-culture history, shot down that idea.)

A mind-boggling array of future stars were also up for the role: Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds. Later on, Beymer admitted that he hadn't really known what he was doing, and he remade himself as a character actor. Decades later, Beymer and Russ Tamblyn, who plays Jets leader Riff, would turn up in . Beymer was Ben Horne, while Tamblyn was Dr. Lawrence Jacoby. Presumably, David Lynch loves West Side Story.

So the love story at the movie's heart is a big blank. And since it's a product of 1961, the movie's anti-racism message is deeply clumsy, as broad and hamhanded as anything that Hollywood has cranked out since. It's not just the accents and the brownface (which were everywhere in early-'60s movies, even in something as beloved as 1962's Lawrence Of Arabia). It's little things like Anita saying that she hopes Puerto Rico sinks beneath the ocean-something that I can't imagine any Puerto Rican New Yorker saying, even in jest. Stuff like that has not aged well. And there are other time-capsule moments that are just fascinating: a threat of gang rape implied through a dance sequence, a tough young woman who absolutely glows with pride when a gang leader calls her "buddy boy." Moments like those would be a bigger deal if they happened in movies today. Maybe it's better that they just fly past, unexamined, letting us puzzle them out as we will.

But nobody rewatches West Side Story for the political message. Instead, the movie is still worth remembering today for its overwhelming physical power-for the way those bodies blur into light.

The contender: I don't expect to write about a whole lot of foreign-language art-house classics in this column, but Federico Fellini's lush and episodic was the #6 highest-grossing movie in America that year. The movie tells a few loosely interconnected stories about a suave and permanently horny gossip columnist who seems aspirationally glamorous at the beginning and tragically pathetic at the end.

It's probably safe to assume that La Dolce Vita owed a ton of its U.S. success to prurient interest. Because of the Motion Picture Production Code, American movies could only barely imply sex, while Fellini could show Marcello Mastroianni hopelessly lusting after the Swedish pinup Anita Ekberg. But La Dolce Vita is also a hell of an achievement. You could take practically any frame of Fellini's crisp, shadowy black-and-white imagery and hang it on a museum wall. And in its three-hour expanse, La Dolce Vita is just as much a spectacle as Hollywood epics like The Guns Of Navarone or El Cid, to name two other big 1961 hits. For that matter, La Dolce Vita is as much a spectacle as West Side Story.

Next time: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, and a whole lot of other famous people show their faces in the vast World War II epic The Longest Day.

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Not all of West Side Story has aged gracefully, but its spectacular dancing sure has

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There's a moment in West Side Story, the tragic and melodramatic musical that was 1961's biggest box-office hit, where whirling bodies drift out of focus. It's a simple transition between scenes, a way to get from a cluttered Upper West Side tenement apartment to a crowded dancehall.

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Shitty and wish it wasn't, but it was. But I still like the film regardless.

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Think I'm Gonna Talk About West Side Story More

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Think I'm Gonna Talk About West Side Story More

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So something that I noticed when watching the film is that it seems like both gangs, as different as they were, felt trapped in their own situations. Maybe that goes back to what I was saying about being a teenager in the 60's, albeit the boys were lucky to not be in Vietnam, they weren't exactly lucky to be in the situation they were in. They're so similar, it's a shame they hated each other so much.

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One of the most interesting things to read about. I consider it pretty solid, though a lot of my straight friends aren't entirely on board with it. The Kinsey stuff is a good read because it isn't entirely black and white on sexuality. Rather, it is a bit more nuanced, something that I really think is needed in a lot of discussions about sexuality.

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The end of the decade was one of the best times for music. Mostly, my kind of music. Rock n Roll was a thing and though Black Sabbath would come around and make metal a few years later, The Beatles and Chuck Berry were two of the biggest influences for the genre. The White Album, one of my favorite Beatles records and one of the most underrated, has to have the heaviest song I've ever heard in that time period, and is probably the first thing I think of when I think of the 60's. That, and Vietnam.

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I haven't seen it or heard of it, though to be honest I could actually see a remake being not that bad. It doesn't have TOO many touchy subjects and overall it is fairly merry, at least when compared to the carefully choreographed musical murder in WSS. I wouldn't mind watching it, what is the worst that could happen?

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Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode (Live 1958)

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I think one of the most interesting things about The Music Man is the way that it portrays youth. Whereas in WSS, the youth are the protagonists, the youth in The Music Man are more or less characters to put the plot forward. Though that isn't a bad thing and I really liked it, some of the aversion to them becoming musicians is a bit funny. Especially for the time period.

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The first song I learned how to play on Piano was "Aint That A Shame" by Fats Domino. I am not a piano player. Every year or so I learn a song or two, but I like to think I'm more of a writer than a musician. A lizard could play this. But when I was a kid there was nothing quite as fun as slamming the C and G keys while my cousin played drums and sang. I have fond memories of my grandparents really loving it.

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Alright, yeah. Elvis was great. He was cool, yeah. Okay. He wasn't The King of Rock N Roll. I have the same god damn argument with my uncle about it about every single Christmas. Elvis started in country and though he played guitar, had the looks, and was the Icon, he was ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE NEAR AS GREAT AS CHUCK BERRY. I don't argue about a lot of stuff, but I swear to God I could get down to Johnny B. Goode and palaver about Elvis being a chump compared to Berry all day. Music is one of the few things I am passionate about and holy shit if Chuck Berry gets sidestepped to Elvis one more time I'm gonna lose my mind. The best thing Elvis ever did was inspire Evil Elvis, Glen Danzig.

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Imagine.

Assassinations, a space race, men walking on the moon, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights marches, segregation, integration, The Beetles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Animals, the Dave Clark Five, Credence Clearwater Revival, muscle cars,  protests, and nuclear bomb scares.

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Growing Up in the 1960s

By Karen Osburn, Archivist

The 1960s were a decade that encompassed some of the worst and best events of my young age. Born in 1952, the 1960s covered my life from the ages of 8 to 18. In that time I went from playing with toys to being interested in boys. Growing up in the 1960s, we saw assassinations, a space race, men walking on the moon, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights marches, segregation, integration, The Beetles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Animals, the Dave Clark Five, Credence Clearwater Revival, muscle cars, protests, and nuclear bomb scares. I went from third grade to the start of my senior year in high school in the 1960s. We had Bomb Shelters, duck for cover drills, and I got to vote!

I read Mad Magazine, Robert Heinlein, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew and the Black Stallion to name a few pieces of "literature."

As a teenager in the 1960s, there was probably a lot less drama going on in my life than I thought there was at the time. Not having enough life experience to know what events were really serious and which ones only seemed that way; all most everything in my life in my life took on an importance disproportionate to reality. Not growing up in Geneva I can only guess at some of the local events that impacted people's lives in the 1960s, but the National events were big enough to have an emotional response for most of us.

President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963 and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in June 1968 only a couple of months after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Medgar Wiley Evers, Civil Rights Activist, was assassinated in June 1963 about five months before John Kennedy was killed in November. In 1969 roughly 400,000 people attended the Woodstock Music Festival. The Vietnam War which started in 1955 finally saw regular U. S. Combat troops deployed in 1965. All these events, the music, and the television shows wove a bond around Americans, even teenagers.

In my high school in the 1960s we were finally able to convince the administration that it would be alright for girls to wear slacks to school, slacks mind you, not jeans. I think the reason the Principal gave in was that slacks were more modest than the mini-skirt style most of us wore. The boys in our school didn't like it (I can't imagine why) and let us know it in no uncertain terms. High school in the 1960s still taught Home-Economics only to girls and Shop only to boys. There was only one girl on the cross country team in my senior year and since she was better than some of the boys they were not happy about that either. I think our school district must have been a bit ahead of their time in letting her participate since Title IX didn't go into effect until 1972.

The 1960s saw the rise of the shopping malls. I remember seeing Midtown Plaza in Rochester for the first time about 1966 and being so awed that my friend (a year older and more sophisticated than I) suggested that I close my mouth before I drew attention to myself. Now I walk around Eastview Mall and miss the "old" days of lively downtowns.

So what was Geneva like in the 1960s? I checked the 1965 Geneva City Directories and discovered a few things about our city of then 19,910. The directories listed 4 Veterinarians, 4 Architects, 18 Lawyers, 4 Bakeries, 18 Barbershops and 36 Beauty Parlors, 4 banks with Christmas Clubs, 30 Cafes and 17 Taverns, 27 Churches, 5 Funeral Homes and 5 Convalescent Homes, 26 Groceries, 13 Manufacturers, 16 Fraternal Organizations, 12 Labor Organizations, 7 Patriotic Organizations, 6 Religious Organizations, 10 Welfare Organizations, 10 Playgrounds and 29 Physicians and Surgeons.

The 1965 Seneca Saga Yearbook for Geneva High School shows eager young men and women, the men wearing suits and ties and the women wearing light colored sweaters with a mock turtleneck or jewel neckline and a string of pearls. The skirts are just below the knee in length and pleated, a-line or full. Eyeglasses are cat's-eye shape for women and the "Clark Kent" style for men. (Five years later the skirts would all be way above the knee or down to the ankle, glasses would start to have wire frames, and both the men's and women's hair would be much longer).

After school social life might include Girl's Bowling Club, Math Club, Monitors Club, Biology Club, Art Club, Auditors Club, Stage Crew, Conservation Club, Ushers Club, Russian Study, Advanced Russian Study, National Honor Society, Leaders Club, Varsity Club, Girls Track (remember there was no Title IX), Future Homemakers of America, Future Teachers of America, Future Farmers of America, Knitting Club, Senior Chefs, Junior Chefs, Human Rights Seminar, Public Speaking, Spanish Club, French Club, Classical Club, Ceramics, Photo Service, Audio-Visual, Ski Club, Glee Club, Majorettes, Stage Band, Jazz Orchestra, Concert Band, Varsity Chorus, Co-Ed Bowling, and Girls Hockey. The sports teams are listed separately and women were not on the sports teams. Girls are in the sports activities, not on teams. The sports section even has a rifle team and there is a photo of a woman shooting a rifle, but I can't figure out if she is a member of the club. Her name is not listed.

I will be writing more about the 1960s in my blog each month as our winter fund-raiser will have a 1960s theme. For now, I just want to have you think about the 1960s and how you relate to them.

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Growing Up in the 1960s - Geneva Historical Society

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By Karen Osburn, Archivist The 1960s were a decade that encompassed some of the worst and best events of my young age. Born in 1952, the 1960s covered my life from the ages of 8 to 18. In that time I went from playing with toys to being interested in boys.

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It seems like a big theme during this time focused around a couple that shouldn't be together. One has to take into considering - were teenagers feeling like this at the time? I would say yeah, though being that it was the 1960's I have no fucking clue how teenagers were feeling. The weight of tradition must have been intense back then, and not having the social freedoms we have today would have made my head explode.

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So I watched The Music Man. And though I did not like it as much as WSS, I still got a kick out of some of the songs. Particularly "Ya Got Trouble." It wasn't a bad watch, but regardless, here are some of the dumb thoughts that went through my head during it.

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Strangely enough, I have another class this semester called about the history of American mass media. We were discussing something similar a few weeks back and a very interesting point was raised. Despite making up a good portion of musical theatre and media, why are Jews still often represented within their own stereotype? I don't particularly have an answer for it, though it should be a sign that Anti-Semitism is still alive and well.