West ____ Story

 

First off, I'm a sucker for musicals when they're done well. Certainly, one inspiration for this short film was West Side Story (which is itself an adaptation), one of the most acclaimed American musicals, both on stage and film. And you can see that whether it's Jets against Sharks or Jews against Arabs, both stories have been recycled in two very effective ways to bring Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to contemporary audiences. Now where West Side Story follows R&J as a drama, West Bank Story does so as a comedy. Why not poke fun at stereotypes every once in a while? I'm not talking about poking fun at the people that fall under the stereotypes, but the stereotypes themselves. I mean, that what incites the conflict in any of these stories, whether during their particular chronology or beforehand. A perceived wrong is done by one group to another, then blanket accusations and assumptions are made, and before long you get perfect strangers hating each other for no reason execpt that they fall under a label. It's not like we're any better at refraining from making blanket generalizations than the characters in the stories. I think that it's beneficial to keep this story fresh as time goes on; it's a good reminder of what we are, but also of what we could be.