Restoring (and Rescoring) “West Side Story”

What does it take to remake the beloved 1961 musical, West Side Story? I’d say it requires two things: chutzpah and cojones. And Steven Spielberg has plenty of both. As a lover of the original film, which won ten Oscars in 1962, Spielberg sought to preserve the greatness of the original. But he clearly saw a need to re-contextualize a story (of feuding street gangs and a forbidden love affair) that has come to seem hackneyed over time.

 When the stage musical that melded the talents of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins first burst onto the Broadway scene in 1957, the contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seemed bold and fresh. Years later, though, we can’t ignore the creakiness of the material. And today’s sensibilities aren’t comfortable with the casting of Anglos in dark makeup as Latinos. (In the 1961 film version, the supposedly Puerto Rican Sharks gang was comprised of dancers from as far afield as Japan. Though Rita Moreno was genuinely born—like her character—in Puerto Rico, fellow Oscar winner George Chakiris is of Greek descent. Nor was Natalie Wood a PC choice to play the film’s romantic heroine,)

 Along with correcting the casting faux-pas of the original film, Spielberg gave his version a sense of the historical forces at play. New York City, circa 1960, was a place where slums were being noisily demolished to make room for Lincoln Center. In the opening, we spot at a construction site an idyllic sketch of the theatres and concert halls that will soon be springing up. A cop-character tasked with keeping order among the slum-dwellers drives the point home: one day the area will be filled with glitzy apartments owned by wealthy whites. Any Puerto Ricans still in the vicinity will be doormen and maids. And the feckless white kids who make up the Jets will continue to descend the social ladder, crowded out of their own turf first by immigrants, then by gentrification.

 I give playwright Tony Kushner full credit for fleshing out many characters, hinting at backstories for Jets like Tony and Riff, while also showing the aspirations of the immigrant Sharks. (Bernardo in this version is an up-and-coming boxer.) Fresh attention is paid to the women, who are given far more heft and dignity than in the previous film. Anita (at least sometimes) campaigns against the violence of the street gangs, Maria is less of a delicate flower than previously, and there’s an important moment late in the film when the women on opposite sides of the conflict are seen trying to look out for one another. The major addition to the familiar plot is a brand-new character, Valentina. Played by Rita Moreno, now an astonishing 90, she fills the function of Doc, the sympathetic Jewish drugstore owner of the first film. We learn she is Doc’s widow, a living example of how an interracial couple could thrive even in these fraught surroundings. As Tony’s confidante, she is in an ideal position to project the fundamental optimism behind the whole belief that SOMEWHERE there’s a place where love can survive.

 This new film is hardly perfect. There are a few serious gaps in plot logic, and the distinctive personalities of the Jets (so memorable in the earlier film) get lost here. I appreciate, though, the bleaker, tougher visuals, as well as the smart new use of the song ‘Cool” to lead into the climactic rumble. I suspect, though, that the new film will never have the same power for its audiences as the one I thrilled to back in 1961.

 

Soaring Aloft with West Side Story

I can’t believe it’s been 55 years since I walked into Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to see the brand-new West Side Story. Everyone at my high school was excited about what this stage musical would look like on the big screen. As SoCal kids, we were hardly familiar with the original Broadway production, which had opened (to only modest acclaim) back in 1957 when we were still in elementary school. Maybe we’d heard some of the show’s score on our parents’ cast albums. But West Side Story didn’t become an international phenomenon until the movie was released in October 1961. Suddenly everyone wanted to be a Jet or a Shark, and to dance down New York City sidewalks with fingers snapping to a Leonard Bernstein beat.

And the appeal wasn’t solely to American audiences. A high school classmate, newly arrived from the Republic of South Africa, told me that every boy in his social set yearned to buy a tight purple shirt, in emulation of the Sharks’ handsome Bernardo. That classmate, of course, was white. It was still the era of apartheid, and South African blacks weren’t permitted to see the film, for fear it would give them dangerous ideas.

I relived my high school experience on a seat-back screen while flying from Amsterdam to L.A. I’m grateful indeed to those airline programmers who realize that not every passenger wants to watch the latest shoot-‘em-up. As a matter of fact, one thing that today makes West Side Story seem quaint is that, in a story about rival gangs duking it out in a New York slum, only one gun is drawn. Death in this film is horrific, not matter-of-fact. Would that today’s real-life gang members could be so cowed by the sudden loss of a few young men.

Of course, the creators of the original West Side Story, who included playwright Arthur Laurents along with Bernstein and a very young Stephen Sondheim, knew that their stage production would in no way accurately capture what was happening on the streets of Manhattan. Their aim was to translate Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a modern context, turning the Capulets into recent arrivals from Puerto Rico and the Montagues into white kids whose own immigrant roots go slightly further back. It was a dynamic concept, one lifted into the realm of the extraordinary by Bernstein’s pulsing music and the choreography of the great Jerome Robbins, who also directed. 

When the time came to make the movie, the directorial reins were handed to Robert Wise, a Hollywood veteran who’d edited Citizen Kane before moving into directing. Wise had depicted New York’s mean streets in films like Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), but he had no experience with musicals. That’s why Jerome Robbins was invited aboard as co-director and choreographer. It was hardly a match made in Heaven. Robbins, a perfectionist who could be brutal on those around him, was fired midway through, though he was still eventually honored with a director credit.

Of course one big difference between stage and screen musicals is that stage performers must be able to do their own singing. Hollywood was comfortable hiring attractive stars and then dubbing in someone else’s voice. Poor Natalie Wood desperately wanted to sing Maria’s arias. She strenuously rehearsed, because no one had the heart to tell her that Marni Nixon had already been hired to vocalize her songs. Today perhaps we’re more resistant to the idea of ghost voices (as well as using Caucasians in dark makeup to play Latinos.)

But fifty years later, one thing hasn’t changed. I still shed tears at the ending.

Jerome Robbins: Leaping from Stage to Screen with West Side Story

We mostly think of Jerome Robbins as a stage creature. There are all those ballets he choreographed for George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. He supplied the dance numbers for such Broadway gems as On the Town and The King and I, then both directed and choreographed everything from Peter Pan to Gypsy to Fiddler on the Roof.

But he loved movies too. With the help of Amanda Vaill’s marvelously insightful Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, I want to focus here on the transition from stage to screen of perhaps his most famous production, West Side Story.

Jerry Robbins was part of the West Side Story team from the very beginning. In fact, the original idea came from him. While studying at the Actors Studio,  he advised young Montgomery Clift on how to make the part of Romeo relevant to the modern world. The trick, he felt, was to think about the tight-knit ethnic enclaves of New York City: “What would you do if you were an Irish Catholic kid and fell in love with a Jewish girl? . . . And what if you were in a gang, and her people were too, and there was fighting?”

By the time Jerry and colleagues Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim were ready to transform this concept into a Broadway musical, the ethnicities of the central characters had changed. At first, potential backers simply weren’t interested. But West Side Story, both directed and choreographed by Robbins, proved to be a stage triumph. And a movie sale quickly followed.

Hollywood was not entirely receptive to Robbins’ talents. He didn’t lack for screen experience, having staged the dance sequences for the film version of The King and I, including the remarkable “Small House of Uncle Thomas.” But the studio honchos who were producing the cinematic West Side Story were determined to hire a veteran Hollywood director. They found one in Robert Wise, who’d helmed successful action films and (years before) edited the great Citizen Kane. Robbins himself was grudgingly hired as co-director, responsible for the musical sequences while Wise concentrated on the book scenes.

 Jerry immediately began experimenting with ways to synthesize music, camerawork, and dramatic action, but his extensive notes on every aspect of the project rankled the powers-that-be. As he wrote to a friend back home, “It’s a hard time out here now, and rather than my teaching them how to make the camera dance it’s possible that I’m being taught the limitations of imagination and lack of daring.”

Despite Jerry’s original preference for black-&-white film noir stylistics, the studio bosses insisted on Technicolor and recognizable stars. Natalie Wood was no problem for Jerry: the two got along famously. (Neither had much use for the actor cast opposite her, Richard Beymer.) And Robbins was at his happiest filming a brilliantly danced Prologue on the streets of New York, in a slum area that would soon be cleared to build Lincoln Center. Afterwards, though, while in the midst of staging the Dance at the Gym, he suddenly found himself dismissed. His firing was blamed on the film being over budget, though this was hardly a convincing excuse.

Ultimately, West Side Story collected ten Oscars, with Wise and Robbins sharing the directorial prize (and ignoring one another in their acceptance speeches). Robbins received a special award for choreography as well. Later the film’s screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, paid tribute: “Jerry Robbins is the man behind the gun. He put the bullets in, he cocked it, he shot it—and everybody else is just smoke and noise.”