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"West Side Story" was the kind of musical people thought was good for them, a pious expression of admirable but unrealistic liberal sentiments, and certainly its street gangs at war -- one Puerto Rican, one the descendants of European immigrants -- seem touchingly innocent compared to contemporary reality.

I hadn't seen it since it was released in 1961, nor had I much wanted to, although I've seen "Singin' in the Rain," " Swing Time ," " Top Hat ," " My Fair Lady " and " An American in Paris " countless times during those years. My muted enthusiasm is shared. Although "West Side Story" placed No. 41 in the American Film Institute's list of the greatest films of all time, the less industry-oriented voters at the Internet Movie Database don't even have it in the top 250.

Still, the new two-disc restored edition of the movie inspired me to look at it again, and I think there are great things in the movie, especially some of the songs of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim , the powerful performances by Rita Moreno and George Chakiris, and above all Jerome Robbins' choreography. It is a great movie ... in parts. Mainstream critics loved it in 1961. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times thought its message "should be heard by thoughtful people -- sympathetic people -- all over the land."

What is the message? Doc, the little Jewish candy store owner, expresses it to warring street gangs: "You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?" It's a strong moment, and Ned Glass' Doc is one of the most authentic characters in the film, but really: Has a racist ever walked into a movie and been converted by a line of dialogue? Isn't this movie preaching to the choir?

The scenario by Arthur Laurents is famously inspired by Shakespeare's " Romeo and Juliet ," although it shies away from the complete tragedy of the original by fudging the ending. It is not a cosmic misunderstanding but angry gunfire that kills Tony, and Maria doesn't die at all; she snatches the gun and threatens to shoot herself, but drops it -- perhaps because suicide would have been too heavy a load for the movie to carry. Then as now, there is a powerful bias in show business toward happy endings.

Such lapses seemed crucial to the best critics reviewing the movie. Although Stanley Kauffmann named "West Side Story" "the best film musical ever made" when it came out in 1961, the rest of his review seemed to undermine that claim; he said it lacks a towering conclusion, is useless and facile as sociology, and the hint of a reconciliation between the two gangs at the end is "utter falseness." Pauline Kael's review scorched the earth: The movie was "frenzied hokum," the dialogue was "painfully old-fashioned and mawkish," the dancing was "simpering, sickly romantic ballet," and the "machine-tooled" Natalie Wood was "so perfectly banal she destroys all thoughts of love."

Kael is guilty of overkill. Kauffmann is closer to the mark, especially when he disagrees with Kael about the dancing. Robbins, one of the most original choreographers in Broadway history, at first refused to work on the film unless he could direct it. Producer Walter Mirisch wanted a steady Hollywood hand, and chose Robert Wise , the editor of " Citizen Kane " and a studio veteran. Robbins agreed to direct the dancing, and Wise would direct the drama. And then the problem became that Robbins simply could not stop directing the dancing: "He didn't know how to say 'cut,'" one of the dancers remembers in a documentary about the making of the film. Robbins ran up so much overtime he was eventually fired, but his assistants stayed, and all the choreography is his.

Certainly the dance scenes, so robust, athletic and exhilarating, play differently after you've seen the doc. Robbins rehearsed for three months before the shooting began, then revised everything on the locations, sometimes many times. His choreography was so demanding that no scene was ever filmed all the way through, and dancers in the "Cool" number say they never before and never again worked harder on anything. There were injuries, collapses, setbacks.

Look at a brief scene where a gang runs toward a very high chain-link fence, scales it bare-handed, and drops down inside a playground. That's a job for one stuntman, not a dozen dancers, and we can only guess how many takes it took to make it look effortless and in sync with the music.

As for the music itself: Usually, says Rita Moreno, dancers work in counts of fours, or sixes, or eights. "Then along comes Leonard Bernstein with his 5/4 time, his 6/8 time, his 25/6 time. It was just crazy. It's very difficult to dance to that kind of music, because it doesn't make dancer sense." And yet Robbins' perfectionism and Bernstein's unconventional rhy-thms created a genuinely new kind of movie dancing, and it can be said that if street gangs did dance, they would dance something like the Jets and the Sharks in this movie, and not like a Broadway chorus line.

The movie was made fresh on the heels of the enormous Broadway success of the musical, and filmed partly on location in New York (it opens on the present site of Lincoln Center), partly on sound stages. There was controversy over the casting of Natalie Wood as Maria (she was not Puerto Rican, her voice was dubbed by Marnie Nixon, she was only a fair dancer) and some indifference to Richard Beymer, whose Tony played more like a leading man than a gang leader. They didn't get along in real life, we learn, but Wood does project warmth and passion in their scenes together, and a beauty and sweetness that would be with her all through her career.

What shows up Wood and Beymer is the work of Moreno and Chakiris, as the Puerto Rican lovers Anita and Bernardo. Little wonder they won supporting Oscars and the leads did not. Moreno can sing, can dance, and exudes a passion that brings special life to her scenes. For me, the most powerful moments in the movie come when Anita visits Doc's candy store to bring a message of love from Maria to Tony -- and is insulted, shoved around and almost raped by the Jets. That leads her, in anger, to abandon her romantic message and shout out that Maria is dead -- setting the engine of Shakespeare's last act into motion in a way that makes perfect dramatic sense. To study the way she plays in that scene is to understand what Wood's performance is lacking.

Kael is right about the dialogue. It's mostly pedestrian and uninspired; it gets the job done and moves the plot along, but lacks not only the eloquence and poetry of Shakespeare, but even the power that a 20th century playwright like O'Neill or Williams would have brought to it. Compare the balcony scene in "West Side Story" with the one filmed six years later by Franco Zeffirelli in "Romeo and Juliet," and you will find that it is possible to make a box-office hit while still using great language.

What I loved during "West Side Story," and why I recommend it, is the dancing itself. The opening finger-snapping sequence is one of the best uses of dance in movie history. It came about because Robbins, reading the screenplay, asked, "What are they dancing about ?"

The writer Laurents agreed: "You couldn't have a story about murder, violence, prejudice, attempted rape, and do it in a traditional musical style." So he outlined the prologue, without dialogue, allowing Robbins to establish the street gangs, show their pecking order, celebrate their swagger in the street, demonstrate their physical grace, and establish their hostility -- all in a ballet scored by Bernstein with music, finger-snapping and anger.

The prologue sets up the muscular physical impact of all of the dancing, and Robbins is gifted at moving his gangs as units while still making every dancer seem like an individual. Each gang member has his own style, his own motivation, and yet as the camera goes for high angles and very low ones, the whole seems to come together. I was reminded of the physical choreography in another 1961 movie, Kurosawa's " Yojimbo ," in which a band of samurai move quickly and swiftly through action with a snakelike coordination.

So the dancing is remarkable, and several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards, and there are moments of startling power and truth. "West Side Story" remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno's fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there's no telling what might have resulted. The movie began with a brave vision, and it is best when you sense that vision surviving the process by which it was turned into safe entertainment.

A two-disc special edition of "West Side Story" has been released on DVD by MGM. Ebert's Great Movie reviews of "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), "Swing Time" (1936) and "Romeo and Juliet" (1968) are also available.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story Is an Undeniable Triumph

The film is a genuinely thoughtful update on a classic.

Steven Spielberg has been making films that feel like musicals for his entire career. No, the fearsome shark of Jaws and dinosaurs of Jurassic Park didn’t belt out a tune, and heroes like Indiana Jones and Tintin weren’t dancing through their set pieces, but they might as well have been. Spielberg is an expert at the careful choreography of camera blocking; his gift for legibly communicating complicated sequences of movement on a massive scale is second to none. So the announcement that he was finally tackling a full-blown musical was perfectly logical—a challenge he’d clearly be able to rise to.

Spielberg set himself an even greater challenge by remaking West Side Story , a landmark show that has already been transformed into a Best Picture winner. Movie musicals are uncommon enough as it is, and they rarely get remade. But the 1961 West Side Story , directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, is still so visually dynamic that some of its frames are burned into our collective cultural memory. Sixty years on, is there room for expansion or reinterpretation? I shouldn’t have worried: Spielberg’s West Side Story is a charismatic showcase for everything he does best on the big screen, and a genuinely thoughtful update, making gentle and incisive rearrangements to justify its brassy sashay back into cinemas.

This West Side Story is written by Tony Kushner, who collaborated with Spielberg on the worthy, brooding historical dramas Munich and Lincoln , both of which successfully translated knotty biographies of moral decision making into great mass entertainment. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed musical update of Romeo and Juliet is not quite as complicated source material, but Kushner’s challenge here was more delicate. He needed to find a way to tweak, without completely revamping a story that some critics find hopelessly outdated , a saga of gangland warfare on Manhattan’s Upper West Side between the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks that mixes knife fights with balletic twirls.

Read: The 10 best films of 2021

He succeeded masterfully. In the film’s opening, Kushner further contextualizes the West Side turf that the Jets and Sharks are warring over: The neighborhood was paved to build Lincoln Center, as part of a wider push for “urban renewal” that erased whole neighborhoods and ways of life. He’s underlining the futility of the gang feud but also the desperation driving it—this land is being betrayed by the city, but it’s still of colossal importance to its residents. The Jets, led by the sparky, furious Riff (Mike Faist), are delinquent kids clinging to their status as natives to lend their lives some meaning; the Sharks, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez), are introduced by proudly singing “La Borinqueña” (Puerto Rico’s official anthem) at the cops, before Riff can even begin the opening bars of the defiant “Jet Song.”

The entire film is shot through with a little more realism (and a whole lot more location shooting) than Wise and Robbins’s original, eschewing the bold Technicolor and classic choreography of that work. It also, crucially, has an ensemble of Latino actors playing the Sharks, as opposed to the original’s slew of white actors in many of those roles. This remake is vibrant and lively—unafraid of its status as a musical. The brawls and knife fights might have more menacing heft to them, but Riff and company still twirl and jump through the streets when they cause trouble, this time thanks to the choreographer Justin Peck’s wonderfully expressive dance numbers. Most important, Spielberg has the care and patience to present dance numbers properly, favoring long, wide shots instead of the depressing recent trend of close-ups that interrupt the action incessantly.

Spielberg’s attention to visual detail means he can build up the grandeur of each major sequence (“America,” “I Feel Pretty,” and the much beloved multipart dance at the gym being clear standouts). He’s just as finely tuned to the smaller emotions of the narrative as well. When the semiretired Jet Tony (Ansel Elgort) wanders into the action and instantly falls for Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), Spielberg makes their teenage affair crackle with as much energy as a dance number featuring dozens of extras. Tony and Maria’s declaration-of-love scene, with her on a balcony and him climbing a fire escape to sing “Tonight” to her, has honest urgency to it, with Tony pressing his face up against a metal grate just to get close before he starts scaling the building.

Read: Why West Side Story abandoned its queer narrative

Elgort, playing the musical’s stiffest part, is fine—good at embodying the crooning, more velvety side of Tony’s personality, but a little flimsy when it comes to the big, tragic emotions of the film’s final act. Zegler, a relative unknown whom Spielberg plucked from the internet, gives the kind of jaw-dropping, instant-superstar performance that comes once a generation in Hollywood, radiating charm and intelligence and turning Maria into more than a lovestruck innocent. In the showy supporting roles, Alvarez is excellent as Bernardo and Ariana DeBose even better as his fiancée, Anita, while Faist’s sinewy, charged work as Riff is a real revelation.

In a further clever little update, the kindly pharmacist from the original, Doc, has been replaced by a character named Valentina, played by Rita Moreno (who played Anita in the 1961 film). The casting is sentimental, a throwback, but one that Kushner works to his advantage, making the story’s vital voice of wisdom a Puerto Rican actor—but also someone tinged by the joy and tragedy of the original film. It exemplifies the tricky balancing act Spielberg has accomplished with such surprising grace, paying due homage and respect to a classic while producing something fresh.

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Listen to David Sims discuss West Side Story on an episode of The Atlantic ’s culture podcast The Review :

An Out and Out Plea for Racial Tolerance: West Side Story, Civil Rights, and Immigration Politics

Essay by carol j. oja.

By Carnegie Hall

There’s a place for us Somewhere a place for us Peace and quiet and open air Wait for us Somewhere.

Image by Bruce Davidson: Hampton, Virginia, 1962. ___ West Side Story grew out of an intense collaboration on the part of its creative team, each of whom had a strong record of advocating for racial justice through performance. Leonard Bernstein, the show’s composer, and Jerome Robbins, its choreographer and director, had been collaborators since their very first Broadway show, On the Town of 1944. In that early production, they took progressive steps in choosing the cast and representing racial issues on stage: they integrated the dance chorus, defying racial taboos of the day by having white women hold hands with black men, and they hired a Japanese American dancer for a starring role. As a result, they put before the public a vision of a mixed-race citizenry, doing so at a time when the entertainment industry and the country at large were rigorously segregated. Their staging choices also pushed back against the rampant vilification of Japanese Americans in the U.S. during World War II. As time passed, both Bernstein and Robbins continued to address race. In Bernstein’s case, he consistently defied racial barriers by featuring black performers, including on his nationally televised "Young People’s Concerts" with the New York Philharmonic, which began in 1958. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for West Side Story , had previously confronted racial injustice in Home of the Brave , a play and film from the 1940's that featured a mixed-race cast. Stephen Sondheim, who wrote West Side Story ’s lyrics, was a twenty-something when the show was being developed – too young to have established a track record of any sort.

Image by Bruce Davidson: Leonard Bernstein rehearsing for a Young People's Concert. (1959) ___ West Side Story aimed for the same kind of here-and-now aesthetic, as I have termed it in Bernstein Meets Broadway , that defined On the Town . Yet it was edgier and angrier – more aggressively contemporary. The show was set in New York City in the 1950s, and it intentionally exposed a gritty side of urban life, almost as though it aspired to be a mockumentary – or fictionalized documentary. The show’s warring gangs represented immigrant groups at different stages of assimilation. The "Sharks" were newly arrived Puerto Ricans, derided for their difference, and the "Jets," who were identified as "Polacks" in the show, had arrived in the U.S. a generation or so earlier and had a cocky sense of being insiders – an ethnic version of nouveau riche . Arthur Laurents later called the Jets "thugs" and "killers." The mutual hatred of these gangs encased the show’s now-famous remake of Romeo and Juliet , producing a doomed love story in which the sexual and spiritual attraction of two teenagers initially transcends the ethnic difference between them but ultimately is annihilated by hatred. By violating ethnic taboos, Maria and Tony were guilty of miscegenation, a common term at the time for mixed-race marriages. As of 1957, miscegenation remained against the law in many states, and another ten years were to pass before Loving v. Virginia, a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned all such discriminatory legislation. West Side Story built on a history of Broadway musicals that confronted racism. Perhaps its most closely related predecessor was South Pacific of 1949, one of the core shows of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Miscegenation runs through both of South Pacific’s main plot lines. The French colonial planter Emile de Becque falls in love with Nellie, an American military nurse raised in the South, and he is exposed for having children with a Pacific Islander. Nellie at first rejects him because of those relationships, but eventually she becomes tolerant and accepting. A secondary plot unfolds between Cable, a white Princeton-educated lieutenant in the U.S. military, and Liat, a Pacific Islander, who are also violating racial codes through their sexual attraction. "You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught," a number sung by Cable, issues a lecture on racism, declaring that it is not intrinsic to humans but rather is socially constructed. The creative team of West Side Story made their Civil Rights’ agenda quite clear. In his personal copy of Romeo and Juliet , now housed at the Library of Congress, Bernstein wrote that West Side Story was "an out and out plea for racial tolerance." Decades later, in the final volume of his memoir, Arthur Laurents recalled that the show "was about how love can survive in a world of bigotry and violence."

Leonard Bernstein’s copy of Romeo and Juliet with handwritten notes, including the remark “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.” ___ West Side Story premiered in a volatile stretch of American racial history. In 1954 the Supreme Court declared the widespread practice of segregating public schools to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, and in 1955 Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the "colored" section of a bus, provoking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Civil Rights Movement gained momentum steadily, with major events happening in close proximity to West Side Story ’s opening. On August 30, 1957, just short of a month before the show’s premiere, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina launched a filibuster in the Senate that lasted over 24 hours. His goal was to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first in a string of legislative initiatives that eventually led to the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite Thurmond’s determined effort, the 1957 legislation was signed into law, as school desegregation took center stage. As a result, the unplanned back-to-back coincidence of the debut of West Side Story with the forced desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School meant that the two were covered simultaneously in the press. On September 27, 1957, when West Side Story received a glowing review in the New York Times , the Little Rock crisis appeared on the front page. The same was true of Time magazine, with its issue of October 7, 1957, featuring Little Rock on the cover and a review of West Side Story on the inside. Today, we have lost a sense of the systematic thoroughness of racial segregation, even in a liberal northern urban center like New York City, and professional performance was as racially determined as other spheres of employment and public activity. Yet in the 1950s historic changes were taking place. To cite a few key moments: the African American contralto Marian Anderson made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in January 1955, becoming the first black singer to be featured by the company. That same year, the African American dancer Arthur Mitchell premiered with New York City Ballet, and in 1958 the Alvin Ailey Dance Company was founded. The inaugural production of West Side Story played a role in integrating the theatrical world, at the same time as its casting demographics fell short by today’s standards. Chita Rivera (the original Anita) and Jamie Sánchez (the original Chino) were both of Puerto Rican descent, and Donald McKayle, the dance captain, was African American. The Sharks’ Girls included the African American actress Elizabeth Taylor (a separate person from the famed white movie celebrity) and Carmen Gutierrez, who was Latina. Perhaps most famously, the African American soprano Reri Grist played the role of Consuelo, another of the Sharks’ girls. Grist was the first performer to sing "Somewhere," and the fact that a black singer inaugurated that utopian song deserves to be underscored. For Grist, a trained opera singer with an extraordinary voice, the show launched her career, yet she faced the cruel limits of segregation in the United States. A feature article about her from Ebony, a popular magazine targeted to black readers, appeared in March 1965 and criticized the Metropolitan Opera for its longstanding racial exclusions, maintaining that Grist had been denied an opportunity there on the basis of race. Grist moved to Germany, enjoying a successful career in European opera houses. Yet as time has passed, casting decisions for West Side Story that appeared progressive within the context of racial politics in 1957 have since been judged as tokenism, and the show has been resoundingly criticized for stereotyping Latina/os. In the original production of West Side Story , many Latina/o characters were played by whites who darkened their complexions with make-up. Carol Lawrence took the role of Maria, representing the most striking case. Another prominent instance was Ken Le Roy, who played Bernardo, the brother of Maria. The 2009 Broadway revival, directed by Arthur Laurents, sought to address these inequities. Lin-Manuel Miranda translated some of the lyrics for Puerto Rican characters into Spanish, which made a substantive difference in representing ethnicity respectfully. Miranda has since achieved extraordinary success on Broadway with his show Hamilton ; in 2009, when West Side Story ’s revival debuted, he was known as composer of the Tony-Award-winning In the Heights . In the revival Josefina Scaglione, an actress born in Argentina, played the role of Maria, and Karen Olivo, of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, took the role of Anita, for which she won a Tony Award.

Article in the New York Times, August 1, 1957. ___ Another central component of West Side Story ’s here-and-now aesthetic focused on gang violence, which captured headlines in the 1950s while a major wave of Puerto Rican immigration to New York City was taking place. At a peak in 1953, 75,000 Puerto Ricans left the island. They tended to favor a couple of New York City neighborhoods, with the heaviest concentration in East Harlem and the second largest stretching from West 122nd Street to West 155th on the edge of Washington Heights. As these demographic changes unfolded, newspapers chronicled a rash of teen violence. "Five youths displaying their prowess before a gang of fifteen girls critically wounded a boy on the West Side last night," reported the New York Times on March 6, 1956. "Four youths were arrested last night in the aftermath of a teenage gang fight in Washington Heights in which one youngster was fatally stabbed," declared another article on August 1, 1957.

Image by Bruce Davidson: "Playing stickball on Seventeenth Street and Eighth Avenue" from Brooklyn Gang (1959) ___ In searching for realistic ways to depict the dances of these kids, Jerome Robbins essentially undertook urban fieldwork, including a trip to watch a high school dance in Puerto Rican Harlem. "They do dances that I’ve never seen before, evolving their own style and approach," Robbins wrote to his friend, the dancer Tanaquil LeClercq, in February 1957 while at work on West Side Story . With The King and I of 1951, Robbins had already choreographed a show that depicted the exotic, and he also had a history of conducting on-site research to observe body movement and contemporary social dance. This aspect of his work stretched back to early collaborations with Bernstein in the ballet Fancy Free and the show On the Town , where Robbins observed how sailors carried their bodies on the streets of wartime New York City; he also incorporated movements from the Lindy hop and other popular swing dances of the 1940s. With West Side Story , Robbins’s technique of forbidding the Jets and Sharks to fraternize at rehearsals, which has since become legendary, offered yet another tool for provoking an edgy realism.

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand, It’s just our bringin’ up-ke That gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses – natcherly we’re punks! Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset; We’ve never had the love that ev’ry child oughta get. We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good!

Gee, Officer Krupke, We’re down on our knees, ’Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease. Gee, Officer Krupke, What are we to do? Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you!

Image by Bruce Davidson: View of Statue of Liberty with the photographer's reflection, New York City, 1958

Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard University. Her recent book, Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (Oxford University Press, 2014), won the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. Cover image by Bruce Davidson: Led by Martin Luther King Jr., a group of civil rights demonstrators marches from Selma to Montgomery to fight for black suffrage, Alabama, 1965 Images used with permission from their respective copyright holders, including Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos, The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc., The New York Times, and TIME.

The Black Angel of History

Carnegie hall, astrosankofa, leonard bernstein’s carnegie hall debut, afrofuturism in black music, carnegie hall’s production of west side story, virtual tour of leonard bernstein: a life lived for music, the somewhere project: celebrating community and creativity, marin alsop's memories of her studies with leonard bernstein, 1950s gangs of new york, music at sing sing correctional facility.

EMPIRE ESSAY: West Side Story Review

16 Sep 2011

145 minutes

EMPIRE ESSAY: West Side Story

In 1957, playwright Arthur Laurents collaborated with Bernstein, Sondheim and choreographer Jerome Robbins on West Side Story, a show that followed The Boys From Syracuse and Kiss Me Kate in wrestling a Shakespeare plot into a Broadway musical.

Laurent set Romeo And Juliet against a New York gang war straight out of the headlines. His Montagues are the Jets, the ‘American’ gang - though a few tossed-off insults suggest they’re mostly Polish with token Irish and Italian members.

Certainly, the gangs they’ve already beaten (the Harps and the Emeralds) sound Irish. In place of the Capulets, West Side Story brings on the Sharks, sharp and resentful lads recently arrived from Puerto Rico, hotly eager to match any force thrown against them.

The lovers are Maria, innocent sister of Shark leader Bernardo, and Tony, co-founder of the Jets but lately drifting into the straight life - given how keen Riff is to get Tony back in the gang, it’s not difficult to perceive a gay subtext - and the duels of Shakespeare become gang ‘rumbles’ with switchblades.

United Artists, evidently keen on cutting in on MGM’s position as the natural home of Broadway musicals, bought up the rights and got the film out in 1961. It won the Best Picture Oscar and nine additional statuettes, including an unprecedented shared award for direction plus supporting actor and actress nods for George Chakiris (Bernardo, though he had played Riff on stage) and Rita Moreno (as Bernardo’s girl, Anita).

Like most Best Picture Oscar winners, it’s too big a production to be perfect and its greatness floats in with a fair amount of lesser stuff. Neither Richard Beymer (Tony) nor Natalie Wood (Maria) could handle the songs, so their singing voices come from Jimmy Bryant and Marni Nixon.

Both castings are compromises: Tony was offered to Elvis Presley, but Colonel Tom Parker, with typical disregard for his client’s career opportunities, turned it down, relegating The King to nonsensical children’s films. Could Tupelo’s finest have played a New Yorker? If his Southern twang were controlled, Presley would have been a lot more convincing in the fight scenes. Wood, in nut-brown make-up and thick accent, is an appealing if not remotely Hispanic Maria.

A possible reason for the Colonel’s rejection is that Tony doesn’t even get the best numbers. And West Side Story has more hit songs in it than Chicago, Les Miserables and the entire Andrew Lloyd Webber back-catalogue rolled up together. Gee, Officer Krupke!, banned by the BBC for its mentions of drug use (ìDear kindly judge, Your Honour, my parents treat me rough, with all their marijuana, they won’t give me a puffî) and sexual ambiguity (“My sister wears a moustache, my brother wears a dress, goodness gracious that’s why I’m a mess”), is blazing satire, vintage 1957.

I Feel Pretty, although sung by Nixon, allows Wood to be funny for a stretch rather than a saintly killjoy. If you wonder why the Academy handed out Oscars to Chakiris (a one-way ticket to Palookaville) and Moreno (the most explosive performer in the film), look no further than the standout song, America.

On stage, this was a smaller number, with Anita’s friends arguing with a conservative Puerto Rican girl. In the film, by matching the integrationist girls (“Free to be anything you choose”) with the resentful boys (“Free to wait tables and shine shoes”), the conflict is more even, and we get a blazing musical battle at once celebration and indictment. A classic musical scene in a classic musical film.

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West Side Story review – Spielberg’s triumphantly hyperreal remake

Stunning recreations of the original film’s New York retain the songs and the dancing in a re-telling that will leave you gasping

S teven Spielberg’s West Side Story 2.0 is an ecstatic act of ancestor-worship: a vividly dreamed, cunningly modified and visually staggering revival. No one but Spielberg could have brought it off, creating a movie in which Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics blaze out with fierce new clarity. Spielberg retains María’s narcissistic I Feel Pretty, transplanted from the bridal workshop to a fancy department store where she’s working as a cleaner. This was the number whose Cowardian skittishness Sondheim himself had second thoughts about. But its confection is entirely palatable.

Spielberg has worked with screenwriter Tony Kushner to change the original book by Arthur Laurents, tilting the emphases and giving new stretches of unsubtitled Spanish dialogue and keeping much of the visual idiom of Jerome Robbins’s stylised choreography. This new West Side Story isn’t updated historically yet neither is it a shot-for-shot remake. But daringly, and maybe almost defiantly, it reproduces the original period ambience with stunning digital fabrications of late-50s New York whose authentic detail co-exists with an unashamed theatricality. On the big screen the effect is hyperreal, as if you have somehow hallucinated your way back 70 years on to both the musical stage for the Broadway opening night and also the city streets outside. I couldn’t watch without gasping those opening “prologue” sequences, in which the camera drifts over the slum-clearance wreckage of Manhattan’s postwar Upper West Side, as if in a sci-fi mystery, with strangely familiar musical phrases echoing up from below ground.

The original story was famously based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but with one very important difference. The Jets and the Sharks, unlike the Montagues and Capulets, are not “both alike in dignity”: the Jets are white, with a structural advantage over their Puerto Rican enemies, and this production, with consistent Latino casting for the Sharks, points up the white cops’ tribal similarity to the Jets, in a kind of co-belligerent neutrality. Corey Stoll plays Lieutenant Schrank and Brian D’Arcy James is the sweaty, resentful Officer Krupke.

The scene is the rubble of the Upper West Side in 1958 where decaying tenements are being bulldozed for the fancy new Lincoln Center. Ansel Elgort plays Tony, a young white man and ex-Jets member who this movie imagines to be just out of prison for an act of violence which has scared him away from getting involved in gang warfare. Now he’s staying at Doc’s drugstore: or rather his landlady is the widow of the late Doc, Valentina, marvellously played by Rita Moreno, who was Anita in the original 1961 version. This was an Anglo-Latino love match, the future that Tony and María should have had.

Tony’s best buddy is Jets’ leader Riff, played by Mike Faist, whose sharp face has the wizened, coarsened look of someone much older, and Riff desperately wants to enlist Tony for a new planned rumble with the Puerto Rican Sharks who are encroaching on their territory in growing numbers, and this new movie lets us see that queasy subtext of Protestant distaste for Catholic growth-rate. The Sharks’ leader Bernardo (David Alvarez) has a fiery relationship with his girlfriend Anita (an exuberant, smart Ariana DeBose) and oppressively protective of his sister Maria: a gentle, wistful performance from newcomer Rachel Zegler. Tony and Maria meet and fall for each other at a local dance and their transgressive affair for a microsecond shows everyone the possibility of a modern, non-sectarian future – but ends in violence. And in fact, the tragedy of errors that concludes the drama is more plausibly plotted than anything Shakespeare wrote.

Elgort and Zegler are a more real pair than Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in the original: but they have the same fundamental innocence and quaint pre-pop, pre-youth-culture 60s unworldliness. West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

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West Side Story (1961 film)

By robert wise, west side story (1961 film) essay questions.

What is the tension in the film between the youth world and the adult world?

Adults barely feature in the plot of the film, and it often feels as though the two gangs are inhabiting an empty city where they run the entire social order. When adults do show up, they scold the young people for being so negligent and reckless. Lieutenant Schrank is always telling the Sharks and the Jets to try and get along, but he has one of the most racist attitudes towards the Sharks of anyone. When Doc scolds the Jets after they attack Anita, Action reminds Doc that they did not make the world they have inherited. In subtle ways, the film shows that the youths at the center of the narrative are as much victims of the ways they were brought up, and products of a broken world, as they are perpetrators of crimes.

How does the dancing help reveal the emotional aspect of the story?

West Side Story seamlessly blends music, dance, and narrative in a way that makes the elevated dance numbers seem like organic extensions of the narrative rather than heightened breaks. This is evident from the very beginning of the film, when the Jets begin walking down the street, gradually breaking into balletic movement. The dancing serves to contrast high art with gritty realism, but it also shows the ways that the characters have emotions that are bubbling up inside them and are too strong to contain. The Jets dance down the street because they are eager for a fight and they want to feel like they have some power in the world. The expressiveness of the dancing shows this. Later, dancing highlights the differences between the Sharks and the Jets, as the two gangs dance on either side of the gym. Then, in a number like "Cool," dancing again shows the ways that the Jets are trying to keep their hot-headed emotions under wraps, to quell their overwhelming feelings.

What is the role of loyalty in West Side Story ?

Loyalty functions in multiple ways within West Side Story : loyalty to one's race, loyalty to one's friends, and loyalty to oneself. Both Tony and Maria experience internal and external conflict when they sacrifice being loyal to their races in order to be loyal to each other and their feelings of love. Loyalty is fluid in this movie. During the rumble, Tony is loyal to Riff and the Jets after Bernardo kills Riff, then chooses to be loyal to Maria, going to her and planning to run away.

What elements of the plot of West Side Story are most similar to its source material, Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet ?

The central premise, for one thing, is almost identical to that of Romeo and Juliet. Two young lovers from dueling "families" find themselves falling in love, much to the chagrin of their respective clans. The difference in this musical is that instead of Capulets versus Montagues, the story concerns Sharks (Puerto Ricans) versus Jets (whites) clashing in a gang war over the run of the neighborhood. Many of the characters are stand-ins for characters from the original, with Riff standing in for Mercutio, and Bernardo for Tybalt. Even the misunderstanding at the end bears some resemblance to the ending of the Shakespeare, in which Romeo kills himself after mistakenly thinking that Juliet is actually dead.

What were Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' respective roles as directors of the film?

At the time of filming, Robert Wise had never directed a musical, and the original stage musical of West Side Story had been such a labor of love for choreographer Jerome Robbins that it seemed natural to have them both take the helm. Wise was charged with directing the narrative scenes, while Robbins covered the musical numbers, which clearly have his choreographic and visionary touch.

West Side Story (1961 film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for West Side Story (1961 film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What are some major differences between the Jets and Sharks from the old movie (1961) and the new one (2021)?

Sorry, I actually have not seen the new version yet but check this out:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/evelinamedina/west-side-story-1961-2021-steven-spielberg

west side story (1961)

Sorry, I saw this film so long ago. I don't recall the opening.

What reason does the play give for the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks?

B. the jets consider the area their home and dislike the sharks entering their territory.

Study Guide for West Side Story (1961 film)

West Side Story (1961 film) study guide contains a biography of Robert Wise, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About West Side Story (1961 film)
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Essays for West Side Story (1961 film)

West Side Story (1961 film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of West Side Story (1961 film) by Robert Wise.

• Futile Fights: A Comparison of the Power Struggles in 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'West Side Story'

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Essays on West Side Story

West Side Story is a classic musical that has captivated audiences for decades with its timeless themes of love, prejudice, and the struggle for acceptance. With its powerful storytelling and memorable music, it has become an iconic piece of American culture. As a result, there are countless topics that can be explored in an essay about West Side Story, from its historical context to its impact on popular culture. In this article, we will provide a long list of West Side Story essay topics to help inspire and guide students in their writing.

The Importance of the Topic

West Side Story has remained relevant and significant since its debut in 1957, as it continues to address pressing issues such as racial tension, gang violence, and the complexities of love and relationships. By exploring the various themes and elements of West Side Story, students can gain a deeper understanding of the musical's cultural significance and its lasting impact on the world of theater and beyond. Additionally, writing an essay about West Side Story provides an opportunity for students to analyze and interpret the artistic and social aspects of the musical, enhancing their critical thinking skills and fostering a deeper appreciation for the arts.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When selecting a topic for an essay on West Side Story, it is important to consider the specific aspects of the musical that interest you the most. Do you want to explore the historical context of the story, the development of the characters, or the musical's impact on society? Consider your own interests and strengths as a writer, and choose a topic that allows you to delve into the themes and elements of West Side Story that resonate with you personally. Additionally, it can be helpful to conduct research and read other essays on West Side Story to gain inspiration and insight into potential topics. Ultimately, choose a topic that you are passionate about and that will allow you to engage deeply with the material.

Long list of West Side Story Essay Topics

• The portrayal of race and ethnicity in West Side Story
• The significance of the setting in West Side Story
• The role of gender and sexuality in West Side Story
• The use of music and dance in West Side Story
• The character development of Tony and Maria in West Side Story
• The impact of West Side Story on popular culture
• The historical context of West Side Story and its relevance today
• The representation of gang violence in West Side Story
• The cultural and social implications of the Jets and Sharks rivalry
• The enduring legacy of West Side Story in the world of theater

West Side Story offers a wealth of compelling and thought-provoking topics for students to explore in their essays. Whether delving into the musical's historical context, its impact on society, or the development of its characters, there are numerous avenues for analysis and interpretation. By selecting a topic that resonates with them personally, students can engage deeply with the material and produce a meaningful and insightful essay on this timeless and influential musical.

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J. Robbins and R. Wise Musical’s View of The Failure of Adults to Accomplish Their Responsibilities as Illustrated in Their West Side Story

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5 West Side Story (1961)

Difference, power, and discrimination in west side story.

By Jolene Vallejo

West Side Story is a modern reinvented Romeo and Juliet story told through the streets of New York in 1961 as a musical. In this (at the time) modern-day star-crossed lovers story, two young teens from rival gangs fall in love while the two groups fight over turf. In this tale, we see the rivalry between two different races, Americans and Puerto Ricans. This is what fascinated me about the film, not only it being a musical with outstanding performances, but the inclusion of another race playing main roles within the film. Although this film does show the equal inclusion of  Puerto Ricans and Americans, there is an inaccurate representation and clear stereotyping that occurs through the use of visual effects, cinematography, and sound and details in clothing or surroundings that discriminates against Latinos.

First, the film uses stereotypes to depict Puerto Ricans as foreign others and shows off the issues of migration and discrimination at the time. During the release of the film, there was a major migration of Puerto Ricans coming to America and this film helped present that but in a way that it also inaccurately represented them. The issues in the film were extremely relevant to what was happening at the time and Hollywood played a big role in how characters were seen on screen in West Side Story. Because Latin people were from other countries, they were often seen as dangerous and different from Americans. Therefore, many if not all, Latin characters were portrayed as violent and tough characters or hopelessly in love. In addition, they were also treated as poorly and made fun of such as the medium-long shot above of the Jets making whistling sounds at one of the Sharks like he was a pet or a dog for example. Puerto Rican writer, Carmen del Valle Schorske, has also recognized these issues as she states “My mother taught me to resist the cartoonish stereotypes of macho teenage gangsters and hysterical lovers in “West Side Story” in The New York Times (Schorske). The migration of Puerto Ricans may have influenced the film’s upbringing but the representation isn’t much of an accurate one and has only brought issues of discrimination, difference, and power upon the Puerto Rican community.

Difference is encoded in the film using mise-en-scene to differentiate the Jets and the Sharks who are different races, but also, the roles of the characters play distinguishes difference. It’s always very important to pay attention to details in film and in West Side Story details are used to show the difference between the rival gangs. Starting with looking into the meaning behind the names of each gang as they hold underlying connotations. The Jets for example, can be associated with flying objects and “something that makes advancements in power and mobility”(Martinez and Ue) while the Sharks can refer to the dangerous underwater creature as a symbolism for the dangerous or violent Latin stereotype. Difference is also explored when looking at the pieces of clothing both gangs wear. This is notable throughout the film, but in one scene particularly I’d like to point out is the dance scene where both gangs are at the hall for a dance. In this long shot pictured above, the editing helps present the Jets and the Sharks together but with a clear difference in both sides of the shot. The Jets are all wearing lighter clothing pieces consisting of similar colors and the Sharks are seen wearing darker groups of colors. The mise-en-scene here helps encode the clear distinction of these migrant people coming to America from the American people who are trying to protect their turf.

Power in West Side Story is an issue communicated through both race and gender. Race is encoded in the musical and plays a role in determining power. The stereotyping of Puerto Ricans occurs by displaying the characters as exotic dangerous creatures. Between the two gangs, who are both groups of troublemakers, the Sharks are the ones being characterized as more dangerous. Also, throughout the film, most musical numbers are performed by the white American characters and the Puerto Ricans in the film do not have as many musical numbers. Additionally, going into the topic of gender, masculinity is one of the themes that demonstrates men as a dominant figure despite Maria also being a lead role. There are scenes where dialogue is spoken and diminishes the female character. For example, a scene where Bernardo tells Anita that “back home women know their place” and this goes to show what Bernardo thought a woman’s place was. This is also seen with the Jets’ interactions with the character, Anybody’s, a tomboy who is trying to be one of the guys but she is constantly rejected by the gang and told to go away. Megan Bolander Woller states “Wells’s observations also highlight the liminal quality of this tomboy; she does not truly fit into any part of this world.”(Woller). The power of race and gender together is also used in some shots such as the one above. A medium close-up of Maria is seen with a shallow focus to blur out the background in order to accentuate Maria’s importance, but in the same scene, none of that was done for Anita’s character. This can be because of Natalie Wood’s performance as the lead but also being the American actress between herself and Rita Moreno, who was a Puerto Rican actress. Both women faced masculinity as the overall power but between the two females, race overcomes as seen in the cinematography. Race and gender are both powerful topics under power especially in a film such as West Side Story.

The Latin community has faced discrimination in Hollywood for many years and West Side Story ’s clear and obvious imprecision in the film provides underlying stereotyping such as the use of colors. To begin, there is controversy surrounding the casting of the leading roles due to the actors playing Latin lead roles were not authentic. At the time, Hollywood still used brownface to change a white actor’s appearance to be another ethnicity, such as the lead role Maria who was played by the non-Latina Natalie Wood. Not only was this inaccurate casting but they also wore darker shades of makeup to make them look darker to portray Puerto Ricans. For being a film based on struggling Puerto Ricans it lacked the authenticity of, for example, Latin leading roles. Rita Moreno, an actual Puerto Rican actress, who played Anita also had to darken her skin color to fit the skin color typecast for Latinos. Lastly, the color red is used throughout the film multiple times to represent the danger and violence Latinos possess. In the scene before the big dance, Maria twirls around in the dress shop and colors start surrounding Maria because “Maria is made to pass through a rainbow instead of moving directly into red is also telling of the film’s anxiety surrounding this color” (Davine). The colors that were used in this scene with Maria were rainbow colors and a shade of red, which according to Davine is a color feared in this film for its violent underlying meanings. This dissolve effect transitions her image from one scene to the next and is very well done. The cinematography choice of zoom and medium-long shot slowly transforms Maria’s dancing figure into a group of dancing individuals.

The difference, power, and discrimination issues analyzed have not aged well. These continue to be topics of issue in many Hollywood works and revivals of the Broadway show. Today the musical has been reinvented quite a few times on stage and in the new film coming soon, with attempts to rid the musical of its clear gender and racial stereotyping. Manisha Aggarwal Schifellite writes in The Harvard Gazette , “ West Side Story has left a big cultural footprint, so there is value in reclaiming the story and depicting it as accurately as possible,” said technical producer Amanda Gonzalez-Piloto” (Schifellite). In this rendition of West Side Story by Harvard students, they are looking to make the play as accurate as possible. This production focuses on educating students on the history and culture of each character in order to accurately represent them. This is important especially when the film is dealing with actual difference, power, and discrimination issues relevant to that time, yet, overdramatizing or representing groups in an inadequate manner.

West Side Story is an important piece of film history not only because it is a musical classic with outstanding performances, but its cultural representation and use to display the issues going on during the 1960s. I chose West Side Story because I have always enjoyed musicals, and watching the musical numbers is always really fascinating to me. Such as the beginning where the Jets and the Sharks break into a ballet dance to depict a rivalry between two gangs. I was always captivated by these performances but as I got older I started to understand the film more, especially these past weeks as I analyzed the film deeper and noticed all these extra small details within the film. I chose West Side Story for its attempt at being a cultural film that many have loved over the years but at the same time has received backlash for its representation of another race. It is significant to me because it is nice to see Latin representation on screen, despite its inaccuracy. Furthermore, I thought it was appropriate to choose a film where the issues administered through the film’s plot remain relevant to the Latin community to this day.

All in all, this modern take on Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story has become a classic throughout the years but remains an inaccurate depiction of the Latin community. While this is a reinvented Romeo and Juliet story, we look at the not only two lovers from different worlds but a battle of rivalry between two gangs. The clear distinction between the two gangs in the film ranges from the clothes they wear to the stereotypes of each group. Difference, power, and discrimination are three powerful topics dealt with in one film. These issues show up within the Puerto Rican representation but also female representation, Puerto Rican or not. The visual editing and cinematography help play into how these issues are encoded on screen for viewers to decode the underlying meanings of specific details.

Aggarwal-Schifellite, Manisha. “’West Side Story’ Explores Racial, Ethnic, Political Complications.” Harvard Gazette, Harvard Gazette, 12 Nov. 2019, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/west-side-story-explores-racial-ethnic-political-complications/.

Bolander Waller, Megan. “A PLACE FOR WEST SIDE STORY (1961): GENDER, RACE, AND TRAGEDY IN HOLLYWOOD‟S ADAPTATION.” CiteSeerX, 2010, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.185.4649.

Davine, Lauren. “‘Could We Not Dye It Red at Least?’: Color and Race in West Side Story.” 2016, web-a-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.libweb.linnbenton.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=7f083aeb-945f-4740-88e8-1c1a33ff3c51%40sdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=118224541&db=a9h.

Martinez, Michelle, and Tom Ue. “West Side Story (1961).” Race in American Film: Voices and Visions That Shaped a Nation, edited by Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, vol. 3, Greenwood, 2017, pp. 905-908. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX7357300337/GVRL?u=lbcc&sid=GVRL&xid=6b486873. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.

Valle, Carina De. “Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/opinion/west-side-story-broadway.html.

Difference, Power, and Discrimination in Film and Media: Student Essays Copyright © by Students at Linn-Benton Community College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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1. Examine the role of women in West Side Story in the context of gang violence.

• How do attitudes toward women contribute to violence in West Side Story ? ( topic sentence )
• Consider Bernardo’s reason for bringing Maria to America, his reaction to seeing Tony kiss her at the dance, the Jets’ attack on Anita, Chino’s reason for going after Tony, and other gender-related incidents that propel the action toward the outcome.
• What is the relationship, if any, between the objectification of women and violent behavior in West Side Story ?

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Review: Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” Remake Is Worse Than the Original

By Richard Brody

A rich and famous artist spends a hundred million dollars to revive a corpse with the blood of young people. The creature is still alive, but barely, and the infusion leaves it deader than when it started. This is not the plot of the latest horror film from A24 but the unfortunate tale of Steven Spielberg ’s efforts to remake “West Side Story,” the movie musical about love and ethnic rivalry among New York City gangs. With the screenwriter Tony Kushner, Spielberg has attempted to fix the dubious aspects of the 1961 film, including its cavalier depiction of Puerto Rican characters and its stereotypes of a hardscrabble New York. But, instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology, along with slight dramatic rearrangements. They’ve made ill-conceived additions and misguided revisions. In the process, they’ve managed to subtract doubly from the original.

Like the first film, Spielberg’s is set around 1960 in San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square, at the time when much of the area was being demolished. A swooping opening shot in the remake shows a rubble-strewn landscape dominated by a billboard announcing “ slum clearance ”—to make way for a gleaming new complex called Lincoln Center. The ethnic tensions between the neighborhood’s white and Puerto Rican residents are rooted in a battle over their shrinking terrain. Whereas once the area was sufficient for both sides, there’s now only room for one. (There’s no hint of the fact that San Juan Hill was, in fact, a predominantly Black neighborhood.) The filmmakers’ attempt to pin down a cause for the Jets-Sharks rivalry reflects their more general shift, in the new film, toward facile psychologizing. In the original, directed by Robert Wise, the Jets are more than just defenders of white interests; they are full-service bullies who harass white kids, too. For all of its faults, the original film doesn’t rationalize aggression—or racism—away or reduce its characters to single motives.

The original Tony, for instance, wants to avoid a fight because he has a job and wants a better future than the one that seems to await his layabout friends in the Jets. There’s no single awakening that led him to want out of gang life. His decisions seem to follow the complex yet inchoate impulses of his character. By contrast, the Tony of Spielberg’s film is a convict who has spent a year in Sing Sing because of a fight in which he nearly killed another young man. He avoids the Jets because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his parole. When Riff tries to persuade him to take part in the “rumble” with the Sharks anyway, Tony explains that he’d spent his time in prison examining himself ruefully and resolving to live differently. Whatever Spielberg and Kushner may have had in mind, what they deliver with this simplistic backstory is an endorsement of incarceration: the movie makes clear that Tony came out of prison a better person than he went in.

Maria has a fuller life in New York than she did in the 1961 film. In the original, she has recently arrived from Puerto Rico for an arranged marriage to Chino. In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.

Indeed, Spielberg’s film radically, woefully transforms the one scene in the original that conveys a sense of Maria and Tony’s family histories, and it does so with a sanctimoniousness that might have embarrassed studio filmmakers even then. In the original film, Maria works with Anita at a local bridal shop owned by a Puerto Rican woman, and Tony comes to visit her there, after hours. In a playfully comedic sequence, they use mannequins to playact meeting each other’s families, until their banter gives graceful rise to a mock marriage ceremony. In Spielberg’s film, Maria works at the department store Gimbels as a cleaner on the night crew, and the graceful irony of the humble bridal-shop wedding has been traded for a solemn faux union in the expressly religious setting of the Cloisters, at an altar in front of a stained-glass window. In another nod to the beneficial effects of his incarceration, Tony explains to Maria that he saw the Cloisters for the first time from the window of the bus that was taking him to prison.

Rita Moreno, the original movie’s Anita, has famously returned for Spielberg’s, playing the widow of Doc, the owner of the candy store and pharmacy that serves as the Jets’ hangout. More Moreno is a winning formula for any movie, but even here Spielberg relies on her presence to justify his superficial and reductive choices. Valentina and the late Doc are portrayed as the primordial mixed marriage of the neighborhood, and Tony lives in the basement of the store—after his release from prison, Valentina gave him both a job and a place to live. Now that Tony has met Maria, he tells Valentina that he wants to “be like Doc,” his role model of masculine virtue. In planning a life with Maria, he isn’t merely following the romantic dictates of his heart but also enacting a social archetype.

Both the casting and the direction of the actors in Spielberg’s film are strangely paradoxical. Natalie Wood, of course, had no business playing Maria in the original film, and her irrepressible presence couldn’t salvage the dismally narrow role. In Spielberg’s film, Maria is played by Rachel Zegler, a young actress whose mother is Colombian. Unlike Wood, whose singing voice was dubbed by that of Marni Nixon, Zegler performs her own songs, with a voice both powerful and delicate. Yet Spielberg directs her to act like a Disney princess, with oversimplified facial and vocal expressions reflecting a single unambiguous emotion at a time. Ansel Elgort, as Tony, has a boyish bewilderment in his eyes, and, if Spielberg were interested in Tony’s life rather than his checklist of motives, that quality could have been used to great effect. But Elgort is also seven years older than Zegler, and his bearing toward her is nearly avuncular. There’s no chemistry, no sense of a meeting of equals.

There wasn’t much of a spark between Wood and Richard Beymer (the original Tony), and Wise wasn’t exactly the most audaciously original of Hollywood filmmakers. But he nonetheless found some inspired work-arounds to conjure passion onscreen. For starters, the dance at the gym where Tony and Maria meet is far sexier than anything in Spielberg’s film. In Wise’s version, the very walls of the gym are hot with passion, painted a furious red, and the dancing itself, unlike that in Spielberg’s film, is blatantly erotic. When Tony and Maria see each other at the dance in the original, the entire gym goes out of focus, leaving them with a surrealistic kind of tunnel vision for each other. Then the gym darkens into a mystical night space and the music shifts, and the entire setting goes swooningly romantic with the force of their love. In the new film, their meeting is just a face-to-face behind the bleachers.

The change is emblematic of Spielberg’s failure, because it isn’t only visual imagination and fantasy that he can’t match. The best things in his version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing. There is no police lieutenant’s open insulting of white kids, or openly racist and threatening rant against Puerto Ricans, who respond by whistling, sardonically, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The ending of the original, with its restraint and simplicity, has been weighed down with extra details and grandiosity. The remake counteracts even the basic empathies of the original. It includes a particularly vigorous version of the number “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in which the Jets mock the casual diagnoses and homilies applied to them and other so-called juvenile delinquents. But the 1961 movie offers no easy answers to their troubled lives; it agrees with the song, if only by omission. Spielberg, by contrast, delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film. He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes. Instead, he enumerates topics and solutions dutifully and earnestly, creating a hermetic coherence seemingly rooted not in the positive shaping of drama but in the quest for plausible deniability in the court of critical opinion.

The story of the original “West Side Story” is that of white Jewish artists (Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins, later joined by Stephen Sondheim ) who planned to make a musical play about Jewish and Irish gangs and then, worrying that they were heading for cliché , shifted their focus to people they knew nothing about. The result was a big stage and screen hit that has always been diminished by the blind spots of its script and its casting. Spielberg didn’t open up the story to involve new ideas and experiences, nor did he reckon with the cultural and political forces that gave rise to “West Side Story” in the first place. In a year that has also seen the release of “ Tick, Tick . . . Boom ,” a meta-musical about the composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson, one wonders about the meta-film of “West Side Story.” Perhaps the behind-the-scenes tale of its creation and its compromises was the audacious new musical that the moment was ripe for. Dismayingly, Spielberg didn’t have the courage or the insight to imagine it.

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Black characters in the film.

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Home / Essay Samples / Entertainment / West Side Story / Analysis Of The Songs In West Side Story

Analysis Of The Songs In West Side Story

• Category: Music , Entertainment
• Topic: Song Analysis , West Side Story

Pages: 4 (1855 words)

Views: 1677

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Works Cited

• Deer, J., Dal Vera, R. (2016) Acting in musical theatre: a comprehensive course, 2nd edn. London; New York: Routledge.
• Cohen, A., Rosenhaus, S.L. (2006) Writing musical theatre, Palgrave Macmillan.
• Deer, J. (2014) Directing in musical theatre: an essential guide, New York: Routledge.
• West Side Story. 2020. Frequently Asked Questions [Online]. Available from: https://www.westsidestory.com/faqs [accessed 26 October 2020]

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