Spielberg’s West Side Story

Steven Spielberg’s new film of West Side Story has been greeted for the most part with enthusiastic reviews that nevertheless sound a curious note of confusion and misapprehension. Questioning why we need another film at all, many reviewers label it a “remake” and refer to the first film, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, released in 1961, as the “original.” Can these reviewers be unaware West Side Story has always had a vigorous life prior to and apart from the movies? West Side Story began life in 1949 when Jerome Robbins thought a new kind of musical could be fashioned from reimagining Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in New York City, the Capulets and Montagues eventually becoming the Jets and Sharks, white and Puerto Rican teenage gangs at war with each another. Robbins brought in Arthur Laurents to write the book (Broadway parlance for the play with dialogue), Leonard Bernstein the music, and Stephen Sondheim the lyrics, Robbins himself as director and choreographer. If there is an “original” West Side Story, this book, this music, these lyrics, and the choreography are it. Every production, whether on stage, film, or record, is only a version of the work itself.

Introduced to West Side Story at age ten when his father brought home the original Broadway cast album, Spielberg had the songs memorized by the time he saw the film four years later. While he loved it and considers it a masterpiece, it left him nurturing a desire to make a version of his own. When desire met opportunity several decades later, he turned to the original sources, enlisting the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), with whom he had collaborated on Munich and Lincoln, to fashion a new screenplay from Laurents’s book. Kushner added new scenes, repurposed others, fleshed out the characters with back stories, and created one wholly new character—Valentina, the widow of Doc, who owned the drug store where Tony works—so there would be a role for the ’61 movie’s Anita, Rita Moreno, perhaps more indelibly associated with West Side Story in the public mind than anyone else. Kushner expanded the Hispanic side of the drama, advancing the time frame from 1957 to 1959, the year the black and Puerto Rican San Juan Hill community of west side Manhattan was demolished to make room for the Lincoln Center arts complex, thus sounding themes Spielberg requested of poverty, urban renewal, gentrification, and the destruction of ethnic neighborhoods. 

Both director and writer went about this with such respect for Laurents’s original that, almost miraculously, the new film is still recognizably West Side Story, even as it’s a richer, more complex experience. Bursting with color and vitality, electric with energy and movement, it’s at once the fiercest, grittiest, most hard-edged and realistic production I’ve ever seen and, paradoxically, the most lyrical, poetic, and romantic. And because Spielberg cast it with actors, mostly unknowns, who look and sound as if they’re actual teenagers close to but not quite adults—Rachel Zegler, the Maria, was cast before she turned 18—this is the most vibrantly youthful West Side Story in my considerable experience of the work.

Spielberg and Kushner also retained some of the Wise-Robbins changes. As in the ‘61 film, the argument in “America” is between the women and their Shark boyfriends, to incalculably sharper wit and focus than in the book, where it’s women only. In his ’61 screenplay, Ernest Lehman transposed “Cool” and “Office Krupke,” the former relocated after the rumble, the latter before, a change Sondheim especially liked (so do I): the hijinks of “Krupke” making no sense after the rumble, the frenzied panic of “Cool” exactly on point after the gang leaders’ deaths. Kushner kept “Krupke” in first act but returned “Cool” there as well, whereupon he wholly reimagined the scene that surrounds it, brilliantly solving every structural, dramatic, and tonal problem the book’s placement caused. Like the ’61 version, this one jettisons the second act “Ballet,” a dream-cum-fantasy sequence where “Somewhere” is sung by a disembodied voice placed in the orchestra. Wise-Robbins made the song into a duet for Tony and Maria; Spielberg-Kushner assign it to Moreno, who sings it over a meditative montage. While this deprives the main couple of a musical expression of their anguished attempts at hope, Moreno’s performance, soft-voiced, at times whispery, is almost unbearably poignant, the lyrics pointing equally toward Valentina and Doc, also a mixed couple, as toward the young lovers.   

West Side Story was both groundbreaking and mold-shattering in the unprecedented role Bernstein assigned the orchestra. “Prologue,” “The Dance at the Gym,” “The Rumble,” and the Act II “Ballet” are for orchestra alone or mostly so. “Cool” is a song, but over half of it is instrumental (a fugue, no less) and, like “Quintet” and “America,” is clearly orchestra driven; the orchestra is also an equal partner in the rest of the songs. In terms of inspiration, complexity, and the soaring skill and musicianship required, Bernstein’s score is the most difficult and demanding ever written for a musical. Little wonder John Williams advised Spielberg to engage Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic, and enlist David Newman, a highly accomplished film composer himself (of over a hundred scores, several award winning), to arrange the music where needed for added scenes (his new setting of “Somewhere” exquisite). 

Dudamel too was introduced to West Side Story at a very young age, grasps the idiom cold, and conducts the score as if to the manner born (hardly surprising considering the Latin American sources Bernstein drew upon). There’s not a better played or more excitingly performed West Side Story than what is on this album (available on CD, streaming, and vinyl), the recording taken directly from the film soundtrack (not re-recorded for album release, as is typical of soundtracks), with fantastically clean, detailed, transparent, and dynamic sonics, brilliant yet without glare or blare. Voices and instruments are true to timbre, and in the quieter, more lyrical passages, like the “Balcony Scene,” “One Hand, One Heart,” and the “Finale,” playing and recording are so beautiful as to disarm criticism.

Dudamel finds the right tempo, mood, tone, and attitude for every number. In “The Dance at the Gym” he generates scorching heat, by turns carnal and aggressive, until the meeting scene’s pas de deux, a lilting “Cha-Cha,” here so rhymthmically on point it’s sweet without a hint of the cloying. Speaking of aggression, in the “Prologue,” the one big number recorded in Hollywood, where Dudamel’s own orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was pressed into service, together they nail the combination of the Jets’ swagger and hostility, and for once, all the guitar parts are actually audible. And in “The Rumble,” more any other conductor on record he flinches not a blink before the uncompromising violence Bernstein wrote into the score.

As for the singing, in addition to looking right, every major cast member had to be able to act and sing. No longer having to endure dubbed-in singing makes for an obvious improvement in the filmic experience, but it also reaps huge rewards in the listening-only experience. For the last several weeks I’ve been comparing West Side Story recordings (see sidebar). The opera singers in the composer’s recording obviously sound wrong (however beautiful), but even when conductors use singers with voices of appropriate scale and lightness, they often still sound like singers impersonating the characters and sometimes smack of the opera house (not least, it must be admitted, because Bernstein’s music courts opera and actually becomes it in places, e.g., “Maria,” the Anita-Maria duet). Coached to within an inch of their lives, whatever Spielberg’s actors who can sing may lack in sheer vocal technique or range when compared to singers as such, when I play the new soundtrack on its own, they do not sound like singers playing young people, they sound like the characters themselves brought vividly to life through words and music. No other recording of West Side Story manages this as persuasively, effectively, and movingly as this one. And Dudamel is so attentive an accompanist you never feel he is holding the instruments back out of deference to the cast.

Like any great work of the theatre, West Side Story was a collaborative effort by four prodigiously gifted artists in their prime. But it’s Bernstein’s music that elevated the show to greatness and keeps it there. In the documentary made when he recorded the score, the composer indulged himself a moment of pride, marveling at how “fresh” the music still sounds—then he immediately demurred: “Well, it’s not fresh the way Mozart stays fresh.” We must all admire his humility, but who can concur with that pull back? It’s over 60 years since an opening night audience heard that tritone with its augmented fourth sounding out on a Broadway stage for the first time. Yet this music remains as fresh now as then—nay, fresher even, because we know it so much better, thus appreciate it deeper, thus treasure it all the more.