the real west side story
by Douglas Messerli
Tony Kushner (screenplay, based on the musical
by conceived by Jerome Robbins, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by
Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), Steven Spielberg (director)
West Side Story / 2021
I’d been putting off viewing Steven
Spielberg’s West Side Story for a number of reasons, most notably
because I have long felt that the 1961 Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise version
of the Broadway musical was one of the best film musicals in existence. And it
will be nearly impossible to discuss Spielberg’s work, now that I have seen it,
without having to re-view the earlier film as well.
Certainly, I’d read the numerous positive reviews, along with a few
negative ones and the hearsay of numerous friends, while trying to apply a kind
a lens over all those responses knowing all too well that the major critics,
after more than a year of cinematic silence, were desperate for a big movie
musical to bring everyone back into the theaters again, and in some respects
felt almost a necessary enthusiasm that in another day they might not have so
easily felt.
Moreover, contemporary film reviewers mostly do not share my historical
view of musical theater, mine going back at least to the early 1950s, involving
an immersion in the genre from childhood on and a knowledge of the theater
history that few others my age share. I think I have heard and studied nearly
90% of Broadway musicals since the turn of the 20th century into the 1970s.
After that, except for Stephen Sondheim, Fred Ebb and John Kander, and a very
few others, I have simply loss interest.
I
have liked only a handful of theater musicals over the past few decades, and
their cinematic adaptations were for so many reasons unsuccessful to my way of
thinking, some of those responses which may become apparent in my comments
here, that I have resisted watching new versions of my beloved genre.
On
the other hand, I knew that friends of my generation might have the same inborn
prejudices against a new adaptation of the 1961 version which I shared. And I
was still attempting to keep a perspective of objectivity, even if I couldn’t
live up to it.
On
top of all of these lenses, I shared many of the observations that argued for a
new reading of the original, which had, as commentators argued, misunderstood
gang life and Puerto Rican immigrants and their New York barrio lives, as well
as noting the obvious missteps of the Wise/Robbins version which forced
light-skinned Puerto Rican and other cast members such as Rita Moreno and
George Chakiris (who born in the US, is actually of Greek ancestry) to wear layers
of brown pancake makeup in order to make them “look” Puerto Rican, and required
them to fake accents that sounded to the American ear more Hispanic than the
“real” way those immigrants might have spoken. And finally, even the way
teenage angst was represented in the original grew out of 1950s notions of what
was described as juvenile delinquency. In short, even my beloved musical was
filled with bigotry and misconceptions.
Even I, who so loved the 1961 film, had also to admit that some of the
major actors, particularly Russ Tamblyn as Riff, Natalie Wood as Maria, and
even my later friend, fellow-Iowan Richard Beymer as Tony were not the best
actors one might imagine for these roles. Tamblyn was neither a great dancer
(his forte was acrobatic maneuvers) nor a great singer (the marvelous Tucker
Smith, who played the character of Ice, dubbed Tamblyn’s “Jet Song”). For my
taste, Wood was simply miscast, without the acting and singing talent of Carol
Lawrence in the original Broadway cast (her numbers were dubbed by Hollywood’s
reliable Marni Nixon). Beymer made for a handsome Tony, but exuded a far too
nice “good boy” quality that shone through in his performance in The Diary
of Anne Frank, but was not quite right this role; if he was pretty to
watch, he mostly just wandered rather woodenly down cinematically composed
street scenes pleasantly dreaming of what wonders might be coming his way and
the beauty and name of the girl he just met ((his singing, quite wonderfully
accomplished by Jimmy Bryant).
Accordingly, the original depended almost entirely upon the remarkable
talents of Chakiris, Moreno, and the enormously talented dancers and singers
affiliated with the Jets and Sharks, choreographed and filmed (in the dancing
scenes) by the absolute martinet Robbins, who eventually was fired for his
endless rehearsals and retakes, forcing another amazingly talented figure, Tony
Mordente, to take over as dance director.
Recognizing all of this, most of it even during the years in which
originally saw it, I still feel that it is a feat of cinematic musical theater
that is nearly impossible to be matched.
I
suppose I should also add another layer to my original experience with the work
by recounting my personal dilemmas. Although I had early in the Broadway run
bought the original Broadway cast recording and played it endlessly for months
on our recently-purchased home “stereo record player,” as it was described in
those days, my parents, who evidently hadn’t heard a note or noticed me
sprawled out for days on the living room floor, forbade me to see the
movie—fearful, I can only imagine that I might join some nonexistent gang in
our small Iowa town, or perhaps pull out a knife and thrust it into someone’s
chest, or maybe just run about town singing the name some new girl I had just
met—putting me in the position of having to lie to them, telling them I was on
my way to see another film but sneaking off to West Side Story instead.
As a musical student, finally, I had sung several of Tony’s songs in our annual
school revue held to raise money for our school annual. I might add that,
although I already had nearly memorized the Burns Mantle Best Plays annuals
from 1910-to the present, and was precociously reading plays on the sly by
Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet, I was only 14.
While sports served many of the boys my age as a mode of high school survival,
my life saver was theater, an obsession I was forced to hide.
Accordingly, I actually feared seeing Spielberg’s movie, particularly
since he is not a filmmaker of whom I am particularly fond. I simply brought
too much garbage to the movie, I imagined, to be able to watch it with any
possible objectivity.
What a surprise yesterday when, after seeing the new West Side Story,
I came home with feelings that if they were not completely enthusiastic are
generally benign. Perhaps I should begin by simply proclaiming the obvious.
What struck me once more is simply how absolutely brilliant Leonard Bernstein,
Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim’s creation is. I leave out the extremely
gifted Arthur Laurents only because it is the book or scenario that presents
the most problems. And in that respect, we simply have to admit that Tony
Kushner is a better playwright and helped to fix up some of the story’s
difficulties—while also introducing other new ones. In short, however, this is
such a strong musical that it can easily bear up to different interpretations as
long as the music and dance remain fairly truthful to the original.
Director Gustavo Dudamel, along with the New York Philharmonic in 2019
and his own Los Angeles Philharmonic during 2020, produced glorious sounds that
were impossible for a small pit orchestra in the original theater production
and not able of being recorded in 1961. With the alterations to the score made
by Johnny Green for the 1961 film version and later by Bernstein himself, the
music for West Side Story has attained the epitome of popular classic US
music masterworks. If Bernstein had composed nothing else, he would have been
famous for this.
And although the lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim are. on occasion,
still a bit too influenced by his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II—particularly the
work which he himself admitted to disliking. “I Feel Pretty”—and along with the
rather inane lyrics of “Maria” and the early Sondheimian too clever
tongue-twister “Gee, Officer Krupke” that sometimes seem like set pieces
plopped down into this tragic story for variety, overall, they still hold up,
particularly the work’s major anthems to youthful blind faith and belief in the
future: “The Jet Song,” “Something’s Coming,” and “There’s a Place for
Us.” Surely "A Boy Like That/I Have
a Love” is the greatest narrative antiphon ever created.
Justin Peck is clearly no Jerome Robbins, but his choreography, with its
occasional gestures to Robbins is serviceable. I admit to hating street group
gatherings for dance such as those featured in the recent musical In the
Heights, and, accordingly, I think Peck’s version of Robbins masterpiece,
“America” was just short of a disaster. But the dancers still strutted their
stuff enough and the women flounced their inner skirts as a symbol to Robbins’
original in a way that somewhat appeased me.
The
real problem here is not with Peck’s choreography but with Stephen Spielberg’s
directorial vision. Spielberg is a realist who in literature might be described
as a solid soldier of mimesis. And I’m convinced dance does not truly do well
in large public spaces. Whenever large groups of dancers come together, the
work seems to be more like gymnastics or something closer to soldiers marching en
masse or a marching band. The Rockettes may be truly wonderful in their
precision, but great dancers they’re not. What interests us in dance is not the
similarities and synchronization of the dancers but their differences, their
expressions of their own bodies in space.
For
me dance does not do well in the presentation of endless repetition or mime,
but functions best in its presentation of the strangeness or oddness of
movement. It is precisely why when the first Jet leaped up
into an air for instant from his ordinary strut down the street in the 1961 version, most audience members were momentarily stunned or found the act
incredulous. Not until others joined in this special language, this artificial
expression of reality, did it begin to seem plausible. Even those of us who
might like to, do not generally dance down the street because it would seem too
strange, too odd, out of place in the “real” world or what we pretend is the
real in mimetic art.
Taking the incredibly private and culturally-inspired “America” off the
isolated rooftop and bringing it down for a streetside spectacle, accordingly,
diminishes what was stunningly brilliant in the 1961 Robbins version.
Similarly, most current directors and their choreographers don’t at all seem to
mind that their grand, en masse dance numbers are all cut up, legs
cropped, body parts chopped into pieces. What is lost in signaling the energy
of dance movement is the dance itself, the vision of the entire body in
movement across space in time. That is why in Fred Astaire movies, the dance
numbers occur generally in a kind a dream moment, completely separated from the
world around it. The camera becomes a committed observer to the body as it
moves with the dancers through the entire course of its expression.
For
the most part, Spielberg recognized that he needed to actually slow down the
camera’s cuts and show the feet as well as the pelvises of his dancers, but
grounded in the real as he is, he couldn’t help himself in his desire to catch
a glimpse of the dancers’ audience and to further observe the location in which
they were performing, the camera panning to the larger gathering of street
life, rushing over and about the dancer’s shoulders, shifting back and forth
over the whole picture he is trying to encompass. And accordingly, like
directors such as Rob Marshall in Chicago or Randal Kleiser in Grease
to name only two among the many, dance gets lost in the dozens or even
hundreds of fast cuts as if the camera were the dancer instead of the human
beings it is supposedly recording. Dance and realism, like grease and water do
not a good mix make. Sometimes we can never truly tell whether the people
moving can actually even dance.
Fortunately, we do get see that most of the Shark men and women at the
center of scene are excellent dancers. But at times it was struggle to perceive
what we immediately recognized to be true in Robbins’ version of “America.”
Sometimes, of course, there are also benefits to the realism that film
more easily provides than does the stage. Musical comedy by nature is also
somewhat abstract with regard to the backgrounds of its characters. The story
or “words” in the earliest of musicals were simply bridges to the next musical
number. And even when musical theater creators such as Oscar Hammerstein and
Jerome Kern in Showboat, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in Pal Joey,
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein in Oklahoma!, Alan Jay Lerner and
Frederick Loewe in My Fair Lady, and Frank Loesser in Guys and Dolls
began to perceive that their song and lyrics might be interwoven to a drama or
comedy with far greater effect, they still relied on the songs basically to
express the inner emotions of the characters as they were affected by the
story, and accordingly the story itself remained somewhat abstract. In the
stage version of West Side Story, for example, we never know why Tony
has left the gang, Chino is only a shadowy friend of Bernardo’s who he feels
might be a good match for his sister, Doc is a cipher who simply cares about
the kids in his neighborhood, Bernardo and Riff are simply the gang leaders
without any evidence of who they might otherwise have been.
The realist Spielberg has evidently asked the playwright Kushner to
provide us with more details about these characters and the reason why the
behave as they do. And in several ways this enriches the story of the West Side
of Manhattan.
The very focus on the changes in the neighborhood itself, the fact that
vast expanses of Manhattan’s upper West Side were being flattened in the early
1960s to build Lincoln Center make it clear that the real battle between the
Jets and Sharks is not territory—for in fact their homes and streets will soon
no longer exist—but about hate, particularly in the case of the Jets; the
battles they wage are struggles of pretense for a territory which shall soon be
gone, but actually emanate from a xenophobic fear of the new culture and
language different from their own; similarly Bernardo refuses Maria even the
opportunity to dance with a “gringo,” and Anita insists that she “stick to her
own kind.” Both the native boys and the recent immigrants are fearful of each
other, which is what makes both sides dangerous and on edge.
Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) is not simply a mysterious adjunct to
Bernardo (David Alvarez) and his gang, but here is presented as someone smart
enough to go to school and develop a profession. Just as the mafia in Francis
Ford Coppola’s The Godfather recognize Vito Corleone’s youngest son
Michael as someone outside of the gang who will represent the group’s
assimilation into the culture at large, so is Chino seen as a bridge between
the world they left behind in Puerto Rico and the new lives that the women, in
particular, imagine for themselves in New York.
Bernardo is a born fighter, not just an angry victim of gringo abuse. A
boxer back in Puerto Rico, he remains someone ready to use his fists in order
to get his way in a new world that permits him little room in which to develop
his profession.
Although just 18, Maria (Rachel Zegler) is clearly more a grown woman
than the innocent Maria still living with her father in the 1961 movie. Here
she has remained behind with the father after Bernardo has left, and has not
only survived but dealt with his death and burial. She is a woman who has been
given to the opportunity to fend for herself and has her own views about how
her life should be led, not just a virginal and naive neophyte that has no
comprehension of the new world in which she has just entered.
Anita (Ariana DeBose) has already become somewhat assimilated; working
as a cleaning woman and saving up her money, she has no intentions as Bernardo
proposes of settling down as his wife to have six babies and perhaps even
return to the island culture from which they have escaped.
The new character Valentina (Rita Moreno) replaces the previous figure
Doc, but is given a full back story which adds a great deal of dimension to the
story as a whole. Having married the Anglo Doc as a young Puerto Rico
immigrant, she represents an earlier model for the couple that Tony and Maria
hope to become. Whereas somehow they have made their relationship last, it
appears that as the world in which all of these figures live is being swallowed
up by gentrification,
Finally, Kushner has transformed the minor character Anybodys role from
a simple “tomboy” who wants to be allowed into the gang, into what perhaps
Susan Oakes—the 1961 actor who played Anybodys—truly was, without our knowing
back then how to describe him, a girl desiring to become a boy, a transgender
figure. Whereas, in the early movie, “she” was simply dismissed as not
appropriate for membership in the gang because of “her real” gender, here the
character (Iris Menas) is not just dismissed but actively mocked and
maltreated, described as a “boil” on the face of the earth, the way many
transgender figures are treated still today.
In
short, I feel that Spielberg’s film benefits from its development of character,
even if at times Kushner’s setting up of that personal history is rather
obvious in its shifts away from the dramatic action toward which this tale is
always rushing.
The
character developments also stretch out time in this work, but even more so do
the scenes in which, in order to establish the reality of the place, Spielberg
extends dramatic encounters forcing us to carefully move our eyes across
surfaces, walls, tables, curtains, and even the floors of Maria and Bernardo’s
apartment for example.
One of the most remarkable of scenes visually is the famous scene in
which Maria sings of her deep love for Tony despite the wrongs he has
committed. In the 1961 movie, the set was so simple that the room’s furnishings
might not have even be noticed, the only focus being the painted glass windows
between Maria’s bedroom and the dining room. Here the two move around the
entire apartment, Maria implanting her nails on the hardwood table, the light
carefully reflecting her face as she intensely sings of her love. Instead of
colored windows, the set designer has strung up colored pieces of gauze that
serve as a curtain between rooms, and the movement and flow of that “curtain”
almost simulates the push and pull between Anita and Maria. Spielberg is a master
at creating such “real life” moments, no matter how fantastical his works might
be. And here we witness his true genius.
The director also takes us continually out not only to the local streets
but into the entire city, the subway, Gimbels, and The Cloisters. The latter
location makes perfect sense for the scene in which Tony and Maria symbolically
marry while singing “One Hand, One Heart.” Not as successful, in my estimation,
is the scene in Gimbels where Maria’s “I Feel Pretty” is turned into a
commentary on the bourgeoise world of clothing and housewares that the cleaning
Puerto Rican women will likely never be able to acquire. I found the police
station location of “Gee, Office Krupke” to be trite and almost ludicrous.
Leaving a gang alone in a police station while the cops run after a transgender
tough is simply a kind of “correct thinking” commentary that becomes utterly
absurd. And I’ve already expressed by displeasure with the street scene
displacement of “America.” But finally, the warehouse full of salt, which
creates a kind of North Pole, end-of-the world backdrop, is a perfect location
for the rumble.
Spielberg’s realism, accordingly, works in a few cases, but becomes
problematic in so many other instances. And by concentrating on the “real,” the
film loses much of its original “romance.” I miss the beautiful abstract
settings such as the school dance where, after establishing a simulacrum of a
high school auditorium, the film quickly fades into a vast space without walls
or limits. In Spielberg’s world the only place the two lovers can find to dance
and kiss is behind the bleachers, which trivializes everything. The street upon
which Tony sings out his heart to Maria in the original was a space that
existed only in the imagination, here it’s simply an ordinary dark sidewalk.
The playground, so central to the original film, which revealed so completely
just how infantile and childlike these gangsters truly were in their battles of
love and hate, is banned in preference of images of the real Harlem, the
Brooklyn Flatlands, and, evidently, Patterson, New Jersey—although I like the
idea of the latter because of the William Carlos Williams connection.
And oh how I miss the beautiful pan of the staircase in Bernardo’s
apartment building as we hear voice and voice relaying the news of his death.
That is the pure architecture of romance and death, while meeting up with Chino
in the back room at Gimbels offers us nothing but the news.
The truly great actors, singers, and dancers of the original film,
Moreno, Chakiris, Tucker Smith, Tony Mordente, David Winters, Eliot Feld, Ned
Glass, Yvonne Wilder, Suzie Kaye, and Joanne Miya are replaced by equally
talented thespians in Spielberg’s version, and in fact, this time around
represent even some of the major characters. Certainly his Maria, Zegler, is a
wondrous find with a beautiful voice. The Anita in Spielberg’s West Side
Story, DeBose, is almost the equal of Moreno, and his decision to
give Moreno the role of Valentina was brilliant casting as well as a deep bow
the original version.
Despite the critics derision of Ansel Elgort as Tony, I found him
entirely credible and able, with a lovely voice that—even though it can’t match
the vocal shadings of the original stage actor Larry Kert or the capable
dubbing of Jimmy Bryant—is perfectly respectable. Critic Brain Tallerico, for
example, critiques Elgort as not having the “almost jittery....adrenalin of
youth” so evident in Faist and Zegler. But I think that is just the point: Tony
has apparently aged in prison, and has become a more mellow fellow who now has
a faith and belief in the future that his previous anger did not permit him and
which the others still lack. I’d argue that in his maturation he has actually
become more naïve, a kind of holy fool—a quality that in a better world might
have saved him. Elgort is not as beautiful as Beymer, but he is certainly a
better actor, and his face is one you just have to watch, almost mesmerizing in
its various textures; his is a face, as they used to say in vaudeville, that
has personality. Besides, I loved him in his previous role in Edgar Wright’s Baby
Driver, and was delighted to discover that he could also sing so well.
If he doesn’t have the sculpted beauty of George Chakiris nor the easy
charm, Alvarez is a totally believable Bernardo nonetheless. And Feist, not at
all as likeable as Russ Tamblyn, is a true find, a remarkable actor with depths
that should land him many another role.
Spielberg’s West Side Story, in other words, offers new
dimensions while losing much of the ineffable wonderment of the old. If this
director’s gangs have their feet firmly planted in the real world, it is
nonetheless a world that was already threatened and has now disappeared from
existence. If Kushner and Spielberg have corrected much of the historical
record, they have forgotten the marvel of the four white gay Jewish boys,
Bernstein, Robbins, Sondheim, and Laurent who had enough to chutzpah to imagine
they might possibly retell Shakespeare’s heterosexual love story in the context
of mostly Polish and Irish juvenile street thugs and Puerto Rican immigrants,
with none of which none they’d had much personal contact. And yet, I end with
how I began: ...it is a feat of cinematic (and stage) musical theater that is
nearly impossible to be matched. The real is often overvalued.
Los Angeles, December 23, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December
2021).
