is an associate professor of theatre and performance studies at University of Maryland, the author of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater, published by University of Michigan Press in 2023, co-editor of Shakespeare and Latinidad, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021, and she created LatinxShakespeares.Org. She is a past Folger fellowship recipient.
West Side Story: A new take on Romeo and Juliet, 60 years later
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Carla Della Gatta
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a layering of theatrical devices, a Hollywood riff on both a famous musical and a Shakespearean story for 21st-century audiences.
Carla Della Gatta writes about Baz Luhrmann’s movie Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, which became an indelible version for Gen X, Gen Y, and even Gen Z. In homage to West Side Story, it Latin-izes the…
Sixty years old this week, the 1961 movie West Side Story, based on the acclaimed Broadway musical inspired by Romeo and Juliet, also became a de facto representation of US Latinx in musicals for many years.
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