We Need to Talk About “West Side Story”

Christian Lewis
8 min readMar 2, 2020

The problems of Ivo van Hove’s “West Side Story” are almost too numerous to fit into a single piece, but I am going to try. There has already been quite a bit written on this revival, so instead of a traditional review this is going to be more of a semi-organized set of thoughts about some problematic aspects — things that I feel need to be talked about and addressed more. Consider this my cahiers de doléances, my list…

Christian Lewis

Theater Critic. Vassar College alum, current PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.