Falling in Love with West Side Story -- Again

Before I could read, I thrilled to Mom's LP from the 1961 movie West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein's music created tension and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics were scary -- Something's coming,/ I don't know what it is, but it is...down the block, on a beach, under a tree, then it's at the door, where I prayed silently, "Don't open the latch!" I imagined it was the Blob.

After TV aired the film in my 6th grade year, my friends and I listened to the music for weeks. This musical wasn't kids' stuff; this was serious!

After studying Shakespeare, I appreciated how the playwright Arthur Laurents had adapted Romeo and Juliet.

But then it became cliché, subject to parody; gun violence made Jets and Sharks look tame; and, while I never stopped loving Bernstein's music, hearing his West Side Story suite on public radio every blessed request day grew tiresome. Steven Spielberg's remake seemed a bad idea: I believed the material had lost its freshness and its edge.

[PHOTO: Alvarez, DeBose, Spielberg, Zegler, Elgort]

FreshThe cast of Spielberg's West Side Story makes the characters fresh. Michael Faist, a lean and hungry "Riff" displays bravado for his gang "the Jets" but his deep vulnerability comes out in bitterness when his closest friend "Tony" (Ansel Elgort) seems to have outgrown the gang -- and him. From a bit of background added to the dialogue, we know that Tony is the closest thing he has to family. Like Shakespeare's "Mercutio," Riff jokes right up to the moment of his death, but Faist delivers quips as challenges. Riff's silent response to a loaded gun makes an old man laugh, but Faist is intense, not funny.

On the other side of the white-Puerto Rican divide that defines the story, David Alvarez plays "Bernardo" as a boxer who's as quick to laugh as to fight, always dressed to impress. Alvarez is a fine singer and great dancer, but it was his "gravitas" that impressed Spielberg. While Riff sang that being a Jet makes him "a family man," Bernardo revels in his actual family, delighting in his lover "Anita" (Ariana DeBose), protective and fond of his little sister "Maria" (Rachel Zegler). His confrontation with both women at breakfast is unexpectedly funny: as he tries to be the strong and wise paterfamilias, they pick apart his decrees, and he's reduced to spluttering into his scrambled eggs.

When Tony and Maria fall in love at first sight, as hackneyed as that could be, the actors' wide-eyed surprise and joy land the moment. During their awkward dialogue and an elegant dance behind the bleachers, we fall in love with them. There's magic in the camera work, too, as dozens of frenetic dancers between them seem to fade away. Bernstein's music underscores the moment by a sudden shift from super-heated Mambo to a gentle cha-cha-cum-minuet. The actors prolong that magical moment when they sing the familiar songs "Maria" and "Tonight" as beautifully as I've ever heard (around 50 versions), high notes and harmony expressing their exuberance.

We're enchanted. Although we know they're all doomed, we're lured into a hope that it'll all work out for those kids this time.

Sharp Edges To sharpen the edge of Arthur Laurents's original script, scenarist Tony Kushner and director Spielberg redefine the context for the gang war. This time, the turf they're fighting for is marked for demolition to make way for Lincoln Center -- the very same abandoned streets where the 1961 film was shot. For the first image of the film, a camera tracks along yards and yards of wreckage on the ground until suddenly, a door opens upward and Jets climb out. We're disoriented; and so in a way are the Jets, as Spanish has replaced English in streets they used to know. Their own futures are closing shut. Police Lieutenant Shrank berates them as nogood sons of the only immigrants who ever failed to advance out of the neighborhood. When they sing that they rule "the whole ever mother lovin' street," they're posed like fighters, kings of the hill -- but the actual hill is rubble. The story isn't just boys' behaving badly; it's existential despair.

The Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, are upwardly mobile. Bernardo, Anita, and Maria all have jobs, nice clothes, and plans for the future. Bernardo has promised Maria to an awkward young man named Chino, whom he bars from the gang to save him for college. Bernardo plans a return to Puerto Rico with money and children, but Anita has sights on building a business in New York. Their playful banter develops in the song "America," a witty catalog of the obstacles they're overcoming. Always a show-stopper, the song in this context expands to involve their entire community in a celebratory dance. Even the traffic is choreographed: three cars hit their brakes on three successive beats of a measure!

[Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez as "Anita" and "Bernardo"]

Song and Dance The music is sharp as ever, due in part to a choice Bernstein made back in 1957. The first two notes we hear are three whole steps apart, an interval we don't hear much in popular music. Called the "tritone," it's a musical edge, a literal tipping point between fa and sol in the familiar scale. Because we are conditioned to hear the note tip towards one note or the other, the repetition of the tritone makes us as tense as if we saw a tightrope artist waver. This effect made "Something's Coming" scary for me as a kid, as the tritone repeats in the accompaniment and the melody. The first two syllables of "Maria" make a tritone; it's the basis for "Cool," and it even peppers the comic song "Gee, Officer Krupke." The tritone lurks in almost every number.

Yet Bernstein's music can be exuberant and joyful, as in "America" and "Tonight," or tender, as when Tony and Maria sing "One Hand, One Heart," their voices overlapping on the ominous lyric, "Even death won't part us now." Anita's furious aria "A Boy Like That" is pitched in her highest range, close to screaming at Maria with the full force of Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic behind her, making very sweet and very sad the moment when her fury melts into harmony with Maria's anthem, "I Have a Love."

All the dances flirt with fighting, and all the fights teeter on the edge of ballet. In Jerome Robbins' original choreography, the song "Cool" is a highlight, as the Jets try to hold it together after the fatal rumble. In this version, "Cool" is re-imagined as a confrontation between Riff and Tony. When Tony calls Riff a "yo-yo schoolboy" in a bid to prevent the rumble, he's only deepening the rift between the young men. The dance grows out of a dangerous game of keep-away with Riff's loaded gun.

[PHOTO: Faist and Elgort as "Riff" and "Tony"] In the 1961 movie, "Gee, Officer Krupke" is comic relief. With slapstick staging, the boys mock the runaround they get from the authorities in their lives. It always had a subtext of anger, but this version, set in the police station, brings rage close to the surface. The horseplay is aggressive, even vicious.

Other choices by Spielberg and Kushner palliate faults that have embarrassed Sondheim since 1957.

• In "Maria," young lyricist Sondheim gave the actor nothing to do but stand and repeat that he liked the young woman's name -- because, what else does Tony know about her? Exasperated, the director Jerome Robbins told Sondheim to stage it himself. (Sondheim learned from then on to write every song with action in mind.) For this version, Spielberg follows Elgort as he strides through the nighttime streets exulting at the top of his lungs. In gentle homage to "Singing in the Rain," there's a puddle for splashing and a street cleaner who looks askance at the singer.
• I've seen Sondheim shudder at his overripe poetry, "Today the world was just an address / a place for me to live in / no better than alright." The words of the song "Tonight" haven't changed, but it's okay if they're a bit over-the-top because Spielberg and Kushner go back to Shakespeare to punch up the comedy in this updated balcony scene. Like Romeo, Tony has to beat obstacle after obstacle to get a kiss: the neighbors can hear them, the fire escape is out of his reach, there's a grille in their way. Like Juliet, Maria is worried but kind of enjoying his plight, and she forgets why she called him to come back. Because they're a little foolish in this situation, their fond lyrics are forgivable. It helps that the first line of this song, "Only you / you're the only one I see" is what we experienced when they met, and that the line is doubly poignant when we hear it again later.
• Sondheim was proud of clever rhymes he fit to Bernstein's lilting waltz for Maria, "I Feel Pretty," before Sheldon Harnick (lyricist for She Loves Me and Fiddler) pointed out that a girl learning English shouldn't sound like a guest in Noel Coward's living room. Bernstein didn't care about that, so the words remained. But Spielberg and Kushner make it right by finding a credible way to set the song in a place very much like Noel Coward's living room. I was delighted, and I think Sondheim was, too, because he told Steven Colbert he loved the ways that songs were re-imagined for the movie.
• Sondheim regretted that, given the music for "Somewhere," he set his least significant syllable on a high half note, giving it ridiculous prominence: "There's AAAAA place for us." As this is the go-to song for classical musicians' pop concerts, I've heard lots of opera singers go full-throttle on that "a." For this remake, Kushner gives the song to "Valentina," a new character who replaces the shopkeeper "Doc" from the original script. As Doc's widow, Valentina is Tony's employer, surrogate mother, and confidante (he sings "Something's Coming" to her). She's also Puerto Rican. When things are going wrong, this little old lady sings "Somewhere" alone in her shop, gazing at a photo of herself with her husband, expressing her hopes for Tony and Maria. In that setting, the actress can under-sing the melody and act it, instead. Kushner wrote this part for Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing "Anita" in 1961.

Many iconic moments are left as they were in 1961, barely re-touched, such as the "Jet Song," the final scene, and my personal favorite, the "Tonight" Quintet. That was my first exposure to the technique of layering multiple characters' perspectives in one slam-bang number, cutting from Jets, to Sharks, to Anita anticipating a hot night, to Tony and Maria foolishly believing they can stop the violence.

Spielberg has said that he loved the original; he has made me love this material again. I want everyone else to love it, too. Ecstatic reviews didn't draw big audiences to theatres in its first two weeks; my hope is that this film will get the audience it deserves in time.