Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band will play ‘West Side Story Reimagined’ at McCarter Theatre Center

The Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band will play “West Side Story Reimagined” at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, Oct. 4.

“West Side Story” was Leonard Bernstein’s gift to the Latin culture he discovered and loved, and Bobby Sanabria has regifted that musical to celebrate the Latino culture in which he grew up and lived.

Playing with his 20-piece Multiverse Big Band, percussionist and educator Sanabria will perform a Latin jazz instrumental version of the musical at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, Oct. 4 — one of the rare performances of this reimagining.

Although “West Side Story” is considered a landmark musical and was a critical and popular success during its 1957 Broadway run and as a Hollywood film, its journey to the stage was not at all certain. Originally titled “East Side Story,” its retelling of “Romeo and Juliet” featured a culture clash between the worlds of an Irish-American young man and a Jewish young woman. Even as the story moved crosstown and underwent changes to its creative team, producers rejected it as too depressing for the Great White Way.

In addition, the play was an unprecedented challenge for performers, who had to sing complicated melodies and endure the tough demands of Jerome Robbins’ choreography. But it opened to immediate raves, with reviewers recognizing its revolutionary approach to Broadway.

BOBBY SANABRIA

Its recreation as a movie in 1961 won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and brought it to a much wider audience. Sanabria recalled seeing the film years later, getting dressed up as an 11-year-old to go with his family to the grand Loew’s Paradise movie palace in The Bronx. Sanabria said that amid the 4,000 seats and the Baroque Italian garden atmospherics, “I saw myself in the movie.

“I had no preconceived notion, because all I knew was that Rita Moreno was there, and everybody that was Puerto Rican was proud of that. Me and my sister, who was two years younger than me, we were watching the movie and at some points we cried.”

While some objected to the film’s portrayal of Puerto Ricans as belonging to gangs, Sanabria said the gang culture in the film reflected the realities he knew growing up in The Bronx. He said that many of the Latinos in the film were portrayed having ambition and dignity, such as when Bernardo extends his hand to ask Anita to dance, doing so in an elegant, old-fashioned way.

“I remember my parents smiling when they saw that. My mother whispered to my father, ‘he’s a gentleman,’ ” Sanabria said.

Sanabria noted that though Bernstein was known for his work in the classical music world, he was familiar with Latin culture. His wife Felicia was born in Costa Rica and raised in Chile and his children grew up speaking Spanish. Bernstein himself enjoyed going to The Palladium to hear mambo bands such as Tito Puente’s. “The way (Bernstein) combined orchestral music, chamber ensemble music, lyric opera, jazz and Latin music and even Broadway show music, all in one cohesive whole, was just amazing.”

BOBBY SANABRIA

The origin of Sanabria’s vocal-less, Latin jazz version of “West Side Story” goes back more than 10 years, when he composed an adaptation of the gym scene for a student production at The Manhattan School of Music. He then decided to tackle reimagining the entire musical.

The “West Side” project is just one of the many times that Sanabria has used music to lift up Latin culture to a wider audience. As a student at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, Sanabria was stunned that almost all the students and staff knew nothing about Latin music. He was soon holding impromptu classes in his dorm room, playing Latin records and teaching about the music he grew up on.

Sanabria gave “West Side Story” more of a pan-Latin palette so it includes Puerto Rican bomba and plena. In his version of “Maria” (listen below), he brought in elements of the West African Yoruban culture that are the foundation of much of Caribbean music. Tony and Maria here are representatives of the Santería deities Chango, associated with thunder and dance, and the beautiful Ochun, representing fertility and fresh water.

“West Side Reimagined” premiered at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan in 2017, with proceeds going to help victims of Hurricane Maria. It was recorded there as a live album — which was named Album of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association — then performed only a handful of times.

At the McCarter performance, more than one thousand photos by the Seis del Sur photojournalist collective will show the lives of Latin and African American people in New York.

“These photographs speak not only to the Puerto Rican community, they speak to everyone here,” Sanabria said. “Especially now with this incredible anti-immigration sentiment happening in the country, this story is even more profound, and the pictures are even more profound, than ever. People still don’t realize that Puerto Ricans, we’re migrants. We’re not immigrants, because we’re U.S. citizens by birth.”

Bernstein’s beloved work “is very profound in many ways,” Sanabria said. “I think it’s America’s greatest musical, and still the hardest music that has ever been written for the Broadway theater.”

The Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band will play “West Side Story Reimagined” at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, Oct. 4 at 7:30 p.m. After the performance, Sanabria will participate in a discussion with Jamie Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter and the author of the 2018 book, “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.” Visit mccarter.org.

For more on Sanabria, visit bobbysanabria.com.

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