Review: Steven Spielberg’s rousing ‘West Side Story’ revival
We’re so rife with reboots and remakes today that it can take a moment to gauge just what Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” is. It isn’t a papered-over modernizing or a thinly disguised retread. It’s a feat of reconstruction. Spielberg, Tony Kushner and Steven Sondheim have taken the original play and reworked it from the inside, burrowing into the DNA of “West Side Story” and its characters to recast, reconsider, deepen and clarify one of the 20th century’s most iconic musicals.
It is, I think, a better movie than the 1961 original, by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, in almost every respect. The Sharks, the Puerto Rican gang who squares off with the white Jets in 1950s New York, have been a given a new and fuller life, bringing “West Side Story” into balance and righting some of the wrongs of the original in its stereotyped depictions. Rachel Zegler’s María, Ariana DeBose’s Anita and David Alvarez’s Bernardo are, to remarkable degree, what makes this “West Side Story” sing. And the story, as scripted by Kushsner, is more emotional and complex than ever, fully realizing the “Romeo and Juliet” tragedy while shading the ‘50s gang strife with notes of today’s divisions and battles of gentrification.
And, yet, as fully realized and impeccably crafted as this “West Side Story” is, I’m not sure it matches the power and force of the original. As problem-filled as that movie was 60 years ago, with Natalie Wood as the Latina Maria, its potency is impossible to shrug off. There was Robbins’ electric choreography, the expressionist Panavision color and Rita Moreno — my god, Rita Moreno — a dynamo of almost overwhelming talent. The 1961 “West Side Story” was propelled by a teeming, lurching mid-century America energy — a surge of bodies in motion, syncopated with finger snaps. This “West Side Story” comes out of a different cultural moment, one of tasteful renovation — three 20th century titans of the arts, like master remodeling craftsmen, shifting and rearranging the play’s latticework of scaffolding, brick and fire escape.
Delayed a year by the pandemic, “West Side Story” (Dec. 10 in theaters) arrives with a glow of eulogy, coming on the heels of Sondheim’s death at 91. “West Side Story,” originally staged in 1957, was Sondheim’s first musical. (Robbins conceived it, with music by Leonard Bernstein, book by Arthur Laurents and lyrics by Sondheim.) Six decades later, it’s Spielberg’s first musical, too. Spielberg, naturally, doesn’t finally wade into song and dance with some little one-act but with possibly the most beloved musical there is. (He does, after all, know a thing or two about sharks.) When it comes to big-screen grandeur, there’s still nobody who does it better.