As such, it comes with a different set of expectations. It’s an entirely different animal, part of the spine of popular American theater. But West Side Story already has an audience, and then some. Off-Broadway, he’s tackled thorny works by O’Neill, Shakespeare, Cassavetes, and Sophocles-material that would collectively seem to welcome new generations of interpreters, to champion and even introduce it to audiences encountering it for the first time. What made these productions distinctive but also well-attended was a kind of sizzling, contemporary energy that seemed to burn away any dust that had settled on the original texts. He won a Tony for A View From the Bridge in 2016, and Broadway’s Network and The Crucible were high-profile, popular and critical successes. Van Hove has already felt the New York theater world’s embrace. I’ve always wanted my work to be seen, without giving in to expectations.” “My mission from a very young age,” he says, has been “to make work that is personal, urgent, extreme, unique, but for as large an audience as possible. The fact that the show is opening in a 1,761-seat house (one of the largest on Broadway) doesn’t seem to faze him.
“Be open to what you don’t know yet,” he has always told himself, an imperative that demands he remain flexible and willing to experiment until the last possible moment. There was still one scene he wanted to try something new with that day. For the amount of pressure he must have been feeling-this rehearsal was the last in which changes would be allowed-van Hove exuded an air of chill, preternatural calm.
“I’ve never been afraid of failing,” Ivo van Hove said recently at the Broadway Theatre, before a rehearsal of what may be the director’s riskiest endeavor to date: an eagerly-anticipated, Jerome Robbins–free revival of West Side Story, set to open this Thursday on Broadway.
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