‘Peace and quiet and open air’: Performing weathering in New York screen musicals of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article sets out a methodology for performance meteorology by analysing the weather in the urban pastoral imagery of diegetic and non-diegetic ‘open-air performances’ in three screen musicals set in New York City: Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of In the Heights and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s adaptation of Tick, Tick… BOOM!. Together, these films depict the aerial environment of New York as the context for open-air performances, generating distinct representations of how the weather conditions life in the cultural home of musical theatre. The New York performers and performances represented in these pieces cultivate their identities with the weather, as do the creatives who represent them. They indicate the growing climate anxieties that came to substrate the COVID-19 pandemic, when the premium on access to the open air was brought into renewed focus. Crucially, these iterations of West Side Story, In the Heights and Tick, Tick… BOOM! do more than use the medium of film to record how bodies respond to the weather. They capture the cultural zeitgeist of the New York climate at a crucial juncture between environmental and social history. Beyond the record that they will long provide of the prevailing sense of the city’s climate as culture, they attest to adaptive practices of weathering the city in their expressions of performance in the open air.