“There’s a place for us,
A time and place for us.”
The musical West Side Story pits a tragic tale of forbidden love against a grander satire of socioeconomics, racial politics, generational divide, and personal identity. It’s a timeless story, the source inspiration, Romeo and Juliet, itself an adaptation of classic tales dating back as far as history is able to recall. The universality of these core aspects of humanity will never waver so long as we inevitably remain in an imperfect world without harmony, always aching to finally arrive at that time and place, that “Somewhere” we hope will wait for us.
The cinematic legacy of the 1961 screen adaptation of West Side Story remains in a class of its own. The beloved film, adapted from the 1957 stage production, won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, which cemented its place as one of the greatest movie musicals ever made. Exactly 60 years later, a new film adaptation has emerged for a new generation of movie-goers, helmed by one of America’s greatest directors of the past half-century, Steven Spielberg. The musical’s original creators – director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, librettist Arthur Laurents, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim – collaborate within the conventions of musical theatre to express a story about love trying to rise above hatred through the communicative forms of text and lyrics, music, and dance.
West Side Story (1961)
The original Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins film opens with a sequence of melodic whistles over a black screen before presenting an extended musical overture over the visuals of graphic designer, Saul Bass: vertical lines stretching and shrinking in front of a shifting color background. These first few minutes serve as an introduction to the film’s melodic statements, allowing our minds and bodies to recalibrate to the cinematic language of light and sound. We then find ourselves gliding over an aerial tour of New York City before zooming in to a dance brawl between two rival street gangs, the white American “Jets” and the Puerto Rican “Sharks” – represented through the use of movement and physical gesture, evolving into the brilliant choreography of Jerome Robbins and finally into all-out violence. All this in the near-wordless “Prologue” that establishes setting, character, and the rules of this musical world.
In all of the film’s musical moments, the frame of the camera is treated like a theatrical proscenium, with vocals often delivered directly into the lens. The cinematography is always musically motivated: rhythmic and actively listening like a good scene partner, the camera playing the scene with the actor, allowing the audience a more intimate relationship through selective perspective than what can be accomplished by watching a play onstage through a singular vantage point. All of the choreography is specifically placed within the frame, composed for each angle, rather than having a camera that selectively moves around already existing choreography. The camera subsequently becomes an active participant in the choreography, moving with and against the dancers while managing to always keep a cinematic connection that is recognizable, yet emotionally electric.
When star-crossed lovers, Tony and Maria, first meet, the ensemble of dancers move upstage away from the camera and begin to blur away, forcing the audience to focus on just the two lovers, as each of them sees only the other. This editorial masking technique happens again in their first full duet, “Tonight,” where abstract color and light composited around our forbidden lovers allows them to leave the physical world of their story, where they’re separated by the iron bars of a fire escape, to be transported to some new place entirely: this impalpable “Somewhere” they are only able dream of and ultimately never reach.
This escapist form of transformation is something that can only happen in a musical, with all great ones understanding that its form is inherently about those who seek to live beyond the realities of their present everyday life. There’s nothing in the sensorial world of this West Side Story that isn’t essential. That’s what makes this adaptation so theatrical: everything created from nothing is there because the artists placed it in this world to support the telling of this story. Shot primarily on soundstages, the complete cinematic world is heightened as no exact place has existed before or will ever again once the screen has faded to black, leaving us with an ephemeral musical dream that we may still revel in 60 years later. However, as cinematically spectacular as the original film remains, its ambiguous story and casting missteps leave us with a film that is imperfect. One that is capable of being improved upon.
Enter Steven Spielberg.
West Side Story (2021)
The fundamental idea of remaking a cinema classic is one that is deservedly met with great skepticism. Why try to improve upon something that so many already consider perfect? However, the world is constantly moving forward and our ideas about racial politics and socioeconomics in America have evolved. While the core of these issues has remained the same, the way they can be explored and discussed, and from whom they should ultimately be presented, has earned the new adaptation the opportunity to amend some of the wrongdoings of the first film. Where the 1961 film presents perhaps the greatest use of the musical theatre form in cinema, Steven Spielberg’s vision of Tony Kushner’s screenplay is able to bring a much greater depth to everything the original text was already exploring, now through the perspective of a society that has progressed in many ways and remained broken in others.
Kushner’s screenplay makes some rudimentary structure changes to the story, but also adds a much-needed specificity to the story’s setting, individual character paths, and the overarching ideas the film touches on. Character actions that used to feel arbitrary now possess clearer motivation while new historical details add greater context to the sometimes-vague source material. The film is much more explicit about its character’s racial prejudices, as they become even more territorial about ownership of space. The gangs fight over “turf,” as the Jets lay claim to streets they’ve occupied for a longer amount of time than the Sharks, despite never owning them to begin with as they themselves are originally of European ancestry. Possessed by anti-immigration ideology, the Jets feel threatened that Puerto Ricans will steal their jobs and homes while the Sharks are conflicted in their national identity as they assert their rights as Americans. These racial tensions exist in conversation with a larger political divide that permeates much of American life today.
Instead of beginning with the notorious Jerome Robbins dance battle, the new film opens with a symbolic skirmish ignited by the Jets, who show up with paint cans to vandalize a mural of the Puerto Rican flag. The Jet’s hatred is more directly pointed in this new film and consequently the Shark’s pride in their Puerto Rican blood is similarly amplified, an early a capella rendition of the Puerto Rican anthem “La Borinqueña,” is one of the most powerful additions to the story. Spanish is prominently featured throughout the film, creating a tension between the Shark’s native language and the English that they all are working to improve to varying degrees of willingness. Spielberg leaves the Spanish without subtitles so as to not cater to exclusively English-speaking audience members by prioritizing their experience and “othering” the Spanish language. While no crucial pieces of exposition are missed, the Spanish dialogue allows the Sharks a slight advantage as they can communicate solely amongst themselves despite the constant disapproval of the white police authorities commanding them to “speak English” and “be American.” This addition also gives Tony the opportunity to learn Spanish throughout the film, demonstrating his love as he works to be closer to Maria. Even if he has a choice where the Sharks don’t, it’s a charming way to make their love feel more nurtured compared to the suspension of disbelief usually necessary to believe in a “love at first sight” story.
The most essential revision from the original film is the casting of Latinx actors with a variety of skin tones in the Puerto Rican roles, whereas the original featured a majority of non-Latinx actors in a uniform darkened makeup while performing false accents. Even Rita Moreno, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Anita, was made to darken her skin despite being one of the only cast members who was actually Puerto Rican. As offensive then as it would be today, there is an evident sensitivity present in the new film which attempts to correct the harmful decisions that have always been tied to the legacy of West Side Story. Six decades after her career-defining performance, Rita Moreno returns in the new film to support updating that legacy as a new character, Valentina, a reimagined version of the original character Doc, who runs a drugstore that is considered neutral ground between the gangs. Despite her Puerto Rican background, Valentina is given an unspoken pass by the Jets because she was married to a white man, therefore they choose to ignore that aspect of who she truly is. This is just one of several instances where the film also touches on racial passing.
The new film further defines the character of Anybodys, a wannabe Jet, who is referred to by using “she/her” pronouns while also physically presenting like a tomboy. The original film includes a moment of tension between the two gangs where all of the women are forced to leave the bar, including Anybodys, who is clearly aggravated by the gender they are being recognized as. Spielberg puts a greater focus on Anybodys within the dynamic of the Jets, further showing them as “a character who is a man born in a female’s body,” according to Arthur Laurents’ estate, by casting Iris Menas who is non-binary actor. However, as much effort has been put into casting with accurate representation, the new film isn’t entirely free of issues as sexual assault allegations were made against actor Ansel Elgort in the summer of 2020, after production of West Side Story had been completed. While his presence is more than unfortunate, it shouldn’t be at the expense of the beautiful work from the rest of the company.
All of the positive casting and narrative alterations match Spielberg’s choice to sacrifice much of the theatricality present in the original film to instead focus on a grounded reality that’s heightened by a stylized realism and a reverent sincerity that still allows his musical world to feel as if it exists in its own time and place. Instead of the graphic design overture, Spielberg’s overture is heard over a long aerial shot across blocks of partially demolished tenement buildings, a project that would displace over 7,000 lower-class families in order to build what we now know as Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The rubble that remains serves as a visual playground for many moments of Spielberg’s staging while also providing a further backdrop for civil unrest. Unlike the original film’s reliance on soundstages, the new film has a greater sense of scope by incorporating other recognizable parts of New York City into its action. Instead of the Sharks gathering on a rooftop, the new “America” takes to the streets and incorporates a much larger community with more perspectives while managing to still keep Bernardo and Anita at the forefront of their opposing arguments. The new film has a much stronger sense of place than the original without losing the intimacy of the simplicity found by holding a close up of two people singing in love. Conversely, it also has a greater life-threatening tension because we are shown the potential for graphic violence right from that first brawl. As the plot barrels towards its ultimate “Rumble,” we fear the outcome even though we may already know it.
Screenwriter Tony Kushner does a miraculous job of shaping the book to seamlessly transition dialogue into song without calling attention to itself, especially considering that Spielberg’s grittier realism mostly continues through the song world. However, there are still subtle moments of fantastical musical storytelling, often through the use of lighting. When the star-crossed lovers first meet in this film, Maria turns a corner and is backlit by fixtures of stage lighting that illuminate just for her, giving a touch of musical fantasy even if not to the same degree as the original. A similar moment occurs in “Maria” when Tony is crossing a building exterior at night and several flood lights brighten with a musical cue, helping his desire to soar. Neon storefront lights frame Valentina’s view of the world outside her store while chain link fencing and fire escape balconies still form symbolic visual barriers between Tony and Maria. Janusz Kamiński’s camera is always compositionally unique from the way many modern films are shot as he maintains an old-school Hollywood sentiment that’s not afraid to pull our focus in ways that may alert us to the presence of a changing perspective. Shooting on 35mm film – the color it produces, the texture of the image, the way that light hits the celluloid – carries its own magic that helps us buy into the musical world even in Spielberg’s harsher version of it.
What the 2021 film sometimes lacks in pure “movie magic” euphoria, it makes up for by telling a story that is richer in depth, more nuanced in its details, and very emotionally resonant within the context of the time we live in. Watching a Steven Spielberg movie, you can clearly see the love for the form and his deliberate choices in allowing the audience to feel with fervor through his sounds and images; his “Somewhere” no longer only about the star-crossed lovers and instead open to the wider scope of all characters in the film who ache for a sense of place in harmony. He is a conductor of emotion, designating him as a filmmaker who, in some perfect way, has always been intrinsically theatrical.
These are two timeless films separated by 60 years that both make us laugh, and cry, and feel everything in between all the same. After all, what is storytelling if not the way we retell them? What forever remains are the notes of Bernstein’s music and words of Sondheim’s lyric that grant these earnest expressions of love their full immortality.
“Good night, good night,
Sleep well and when you dream,
Dream of me
Tonight.”
