Blog Entry # 3 West Side Story

Well, it would seem that most of us are up and running and the blogroll seems to be almost perfect.  Mr. Stewart gave some very nice compliments to some of your entries in his email to me.  Congrats!

The discussion has come up in class about perceptions concerning certain Spanish speaking nationalities and I am going to spring-board off of that for our third entry.  Here is a website that has a wealth of {all things related to Spanish} with podcasts and I found this posting about the re-make of West Side Story on Broadway.  This particular re-make is almost all in Spanish.  The blog also contains a video that speaks to cultural insensitivity and stereotyping. 

Have we come a long way...or not?

Read the following exerpt and then click on the link to finish the reading and watch the 7 minute video.  “Sometimes I don’t know which is thicker…your skull or your accent.” – Rita Moreno in West Side Story
One of Broadway’s most well-known musicals is about to get a makeover, this time in Spanish.  If you’ve never heard of West Side Story it’s basically a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in 1950′s New York City. In this day and age of so much creative recycling and remakes, it’s rather surprising that it took somebody this long to realize that redoing West Side Story in Spanish would be a great idea. The “somebody” in this case is Arthur Laurents, the man who who wrote the book for Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s musical.

Your assignment is to watch this 7-8 minute video West Side Story  and blog about your reaction to the video clip and the comments leading up to the video clip.  Try to relate your comments to 2011 and what you see happening today.  Do you find yourself influenced by what you see in the movies, utube and on music videos?  Do you have a different standard for a population in general and another for the friends you have and the people you know?  If you are a native speaker  (or from a home where Spanish is spoken frequently) I would like you to blog about this from your point of view.  Your blog entry should be a minimum of one paragraph (5 - 7 sentences) in English.