Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story: Get Ready to Rumble

You will not have to ask, do we need yet another adaptation of this classic? With Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics firmly implanted in your head, a memory of the 1961 Jerome Robbins’ choreography and Arthur Laurents’ book, prepare to be delightfully shocked at how much this new version of West Side Story feels new. Maybe it’s Tony Kushner’s masterful script that takes us first into an image of urban renewal, the ‘hood, a battleground for the Sharks and Jets, being right here in Hell’s Kitchen cum Lincoln Center (shot on a lot in Paterson, New Jersey), and the wisdom we bring knowing the future: everything must change.

But come back to that era: to the cars and shops declaring poverty, ethnicity, the warehouses, crumbling buildings—the boys styled like mid-century heroes, a bit of Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac. Enter the sweet-faced Polack Tony for Anton (Ansel Elgort) and the Latina ingenue Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler). Justin Peck updates the original choreography without upsetting Robbins’ vision. And then there’s Rita Moreno, the Oscar-awarded Anita in 1961, now near 90 and getting ready to be celebrated at the Museum of the Moving Image. A widow, perhaps an oracle to the young, as Valentina, Moreno bridges past and present: Spielberg has her singing “Somewhere,” and your heart aches.

Funny, in this last week’s memorial tributes to Stephen Sondheim who wrote the lyrics for this show, we learn, he was not happy with this work. Collaborating with Bernstein—(Sondheim resented not writing the music too)—he did not like the simplicity of the words he was tasked to compose. And Bernstein himself got to like West Side Story, originally conceived as East Side Story with feuding Jewish immigrants and their gentile neighbors—oy vey! His identity invested in classical music, what was he doing writing for Broadway? This work’s long history speaks for itself.