A Revived West Side Story

Yesterday we went to see the new West Side Story movie, a Stephen Spielberg extravaganza. It turned out to be very good. The reviews were mixed, but once I watched the film, it became clear to me that most of the skeptics had agendas. I should begin by noting that I hadn't been a huge admirer of the 1961 Richard Beymer-Natalie Wood movie, for which George Chakiris and Rita Moreno won Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscars. This was in part because I saw the show, in 1957: it was my first Broadway musical.

Suffice it to say that I have always loved the show. After all, the duo of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, the latter writing his first Broadway lyrics, was a dream team. And then bring in the amazing Jerome Robbins to make it a major dance show. Carol Lawrence, the original Maria, was a star for a time, but the only performer in the show who went on to have a long-lasting and major Broadway career is Chita Rivera, now in her 80s. Larry Kert, who played Tony, had one more big show--Company--and remained the answer to a quiz question.

I thought of Chita Rivera because "America" remains the huge brassy production number of the show and Ariana DeBose was a terrific Anita. The song features the best dancing that takes place on a huge public street space. The dancing in the rest of the pic is also excellent and exciting, in the way the show was. Both leads--Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler--have good voices, not that one ever minded Natalie Wood's being dubbed. The one performer from 1961 who was better than anyone else in his role as Riff, the Jets leader, was the late Russ Tamblyn, hired, I learned recently, for the movie because he could do a back flip.

What makes this production different is how Spielberg takes advantage of not only "opening up" the show but really maximizing what the film medium can do. The shots focusing in and out of scenes as well as the great sets and locations--it looked from the credits that many street shots were done in Newark and Paterson, N.J.--provide the backdrop for the action and the dancing.

Rita Moreno was involved in this movie in major ways: the part of Doc, who has the drugstore and candy shot and soda fountain where the Jets hang out, was changed to Valentina, his widow, who runs the joint now.  Her acting and her singing--this time she gets to sing "Sometime, Somewhere" in a soft voice, and it worked. Of course, at 90, she's not in a position to lead "America" as she did in the 1961 movie. But now she's listed as the lead executive producer as well.

Much has been made by critics of the casting, which features Puerto Rican and Hispanic actors as the Sharks and their girls. I don't think in the '50s and '60s we were aware that many white actors played these roles in "brownface". Certainly a good improvement and in today's milieu, doubtless a mandated one. However, the plentiful use of Spanish, while realistic,  could have benefited from subtitles as the picture is presumably intended for a general audience in the U.S. 

The writers and others who participated in a New York Times panel discussion of the film lauded the use of Spanish without subtitles. To me, that just shows how out of touch the "woke" New York cultural world is with the real world, and they probably don't care if it turns off the mass of Americans who don't speak Spanish.

A major accomplishment of the film is the re-imagining by Garrett Peck of the choreography originally created by Jerome Robbins. The Robbins name appears in the credits with the others responsible for the original show--Bernstein, Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents, the stage veteran who did the book. Robbins and now his estate demanded that every production of West Side Story contain the "entire production created, directed, and choreographed by"...him. Appearing in that one spot was perfectly done. Peck's work was superb, definitely equal to Robbins's original: accepting the dance medium for the gangs remains a leap of comprehension for viewers, but it comes off as natural, or as natural as it can seem.

When interviewed when the film opened, Sondheim, who at that date was the sole survivor of the original four creators, hardly surprising since he was so much younger and it was his first show--he died about a month ago, aged 93--said that he now thought "I Feel Pretty" was the one song he didn't feel fit. Its placement in the film appeared entirely right to me.

All in all, the new West Side Story comes off as an excellent rendition of the piece. My usual skepticism of any remake proved totally unjustified in this instance. Conceptions of what movies can be has grown and deepened in the 60-plus years since the old movie was shot, not to mention the show. I felt that this movie has more in common with the original Broadway production, which brought many innovations to the stage: a musical with a tragic ending, for one thing, and a musical about gang violence, albeit based on the timeless Romeo and Juliet.

 

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