WHEN WEST SIDE STORY opened on Broadway more than 60 years ago, it shocked critics with its savage depiction of racially motivated teenage gang violence on the streets of New York City—even as Leonard Bernstein’s ravishing jazz- and Latin-inflected symphonic score, Stephen Sondheim’s virtuosic lyrics, and Jerome Robbins’s hormonally kinetic dances beguiled audiences, who fell in love with librettist Arthur Laurents’s retelling of Romeo and Juliet. In the intervening decades, this once-groundbreaking musical has been enshrined as a classic, its gritty surface burnished to a nostalgic glow. As a result, West Side Story can seem to contemporary audiences, in many ways, as much of an artifact of a vanished era as, say, The Music Man, the show that beat it out for best musical at the 1958 Tony Awards.

Enter Ivo van Hove, the brilliant Belgian bad boy of experimental theater who, with his radically reconceived takes on such Arthur Miller classics as The Crucible and A View From the Bridge, has become a Broadway hit-maker. He and the Belgian doyenne of modern dance, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, are bringing a new, hotly anticipated vision of West Side Story to Broadway for the first time in a decade.

“When I listened to it again, when I read it again, I discovered this very brutal world, a divided world where people search for unity by exclusion of the other—the person who is not like you,” van Hove says. “It seemed as if it were written yesterday. So that’s our aspiration: to make a West Side Story for the 21st century.”

Though van Hove is known for gleefully dismantling conventional notions of familiar works, he has a deep reverence for West Side Story and its creators, and he’s aware that audiences will come with built-in expectations. “The biggest challenge,” he says, “will be to seduce them to follow our way of telling this story.” To that end, he’s employing a device that will be familiar to fans of his work, notably last season’s stage adaptation of Network: video (courtesy of Luke Halls, projected onto Jan Versweyveld’s sets), which will be used to bring action from the streets, as well as the wider world, into the theater.