west side story review essay

West Side Story

Although “West Side Story” was named the best picture of 1961 and won 10 Academy Awards, it is not much mentioned by movie fans these days, and the old warhorse “ Singin' in the Rain ” is probably more seen and certainly better loved.

“West Side Story” was the kind of musical people thought was good for them, a pious expression of admirable but unrealistic liberal sentiments, and certainly its street gangs at war — one Puerto Rican, one the descendants of European immigrants — seem touchingly innocent compared to contemporary reality.

I hadn’t seen it since it was released in 1961, nor had I much wanted to, although I’ve seen “Singin’ in the Rain,” “ Swing Time ,” “ Top Hat ,” “ My Fair Lady ” and “ An American in Paris ” countless times during those years. My muted enthusiasm is shared. Although “West Side Story” placed No. 41 in the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest films of all time, the less industry-oriented voters at the Internet Movie Database don’t even have it in the top 250.

Still, the new two-disc restored edition of the movie inspired me to look at it again, and I think there are great things in the movie, especially some of the songs of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim , the powerful performances by Rita Moreno and George Chakiris, and above all Jerome Robbins’ choreography. It is a great movie … in parts. Mainstream critics loved it in 1961. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times thought its message “should be heard by thoughtful people — sympathetic people — all over the land.”

What is the message? Doc, the little Jewish candy store owner, expresses it to warring street gangs: “You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?” It’s a strong moment, and Ned Glass’ Doc is one of the most authentic characters in the film, but really: Has a racist ever walked into a movie and been converted by a line of dialogue? Isn’t this movie preaching to the choir?

The scenario by Arthur Laurents is famously inspired by Shakespeare’s “ Romeo and Juliet ,” although it shies away from the complete tragedy of the original by fudging the ending. It is not a cosmic misunderstanding but angry gunfire that kills Tony, and Maria doesn’t die at all; she snatches the gun and threatens to shoot herself, but drops it — perhaps because suicide would have been too heavy a load for the movie to carry. Then as now, there is a powerful bias in show business toward happy endings.

Such lapses seemed crucial to the best critics reviewing the movie. Although Stanley Kauffmann named “West Side Story” “the best film musical ever made” when it came out in 1961, the rest of his review seemed to undermine that claim; he said it lacks a towering conclusion, is useless and facile as sociology, and the hint of a reconciliation between the two gangs at the end is “utter falseness.” Pauline Kael’s review scorched the earth: The movie was “frenzied hokum,” the dialogue was “painfully old-fashioned and mawkish,” the dancing was “simpering, sickly romantic ballet,” and the “machine-tooled” Natalie Wood was “so perfectly banal she destroys all thoughts of love.”

Kael is guilty of overkill. Kauffmann is closer to the mark, especially when he disagrees with Kael about the dancing. Robbins, one of the most original choreographers in Broadway history, at first refused to work on the film unless he could direct it. Producer Walter Mirisch wanted a steady Hollywood hand, and chose Robert Wise , the editor of “ Citizen Kane ” and a studio veteran. Robbins agreed to direct the dancing, and Wise would direct the drama. And then the problem became that Robbins simply could not stop directing the dancing: “He didn’t know how to say ‘cut,'” one of the dancers remembers in a documentary about the making of the film. Robbins ran up so much overtime he was eventually fired, but his assistants stayed, and all the choreography is his.

Certainly the dance scenes, so robust, athletic and exhilarating, play differently after you’ve seen the doc. Robbins rehearsed for three months before the shooting began, then revised everything on the locations, sometimes many times. His choreography was so demanding that no scene was ever filmed all the way through, and dancers in the “Cool” number say they never before and never again worked harder on anything. There were injuries, collapses, setbacks.

Look at a brief scene where a gang runs toward a very high chain-link fence, scales it bare-handed, and drops down inside a playground. That’s a job for one stuntman, not a dozen dancers, and we can only guess how many takes it took to make it look effortless and in sync with the music.

As for the music itself: Usually, says Rita Moreno, dancers work in counts of fours, or sixes, or eights. “Then along comes Leonard Bernstein with his 5/4 time, his 6/8 time, his 25/6 time. It was just crazy. It’s very difficult to dance to that kind of music, because it doesn’t make dancer sense.” And yet Robbins’ perfectionism and Bernstein’s unconventional rhy-thms created a genuinely new kind of movie dancing, and it can be said that if street gangs did dance, they would dance something like the Jets and the Sharks in this movie, and not like a Broadway chorus line.

The movie was made fresh on the heels of the enormous Broadway success of the musical, and filmed partly on location in New York (it opens on the present site of Lincoln Center), partly on sound stages. There was controversy over the casting of Natalie Wood as Maria (she was not Puerto Rican, her voice was dubbed by Marnie Nixon, she was only a fair dancer) and some indifference to Richard Beymer, whose Tony played more like a leading man than a gang leader. They didn’t get along in real life, we learn, but Wood does project warmth and passion in their scenes together, and a beauty and sweetness that would be with her all through her career.

What shows up Wood and Beymer is the work of Moreno and Chakiris, as the Puerto Rican lovers Anita and Bernardo. Little wonder they won supporting Oscars and the leads did not. Moreno can sing, can dance, and exudes a passion that brings special life to her scenes. For me, the most powerful moments in the movie come when Anita visits Doc’s candy store to bring a message of love from Maria to Tony — and is insulted, shoved around and almost raped by the Jets. That leads her, in anger, to abandon her romantic message and shout out that Maria is dead — setting the engine of Shakespeare’s last act into motion in a way that makes perfect dramatic sense. To study the way she plays in that scene is to understand what Wood’s performance is lacking.

Kael is right about the dialogue. It’s mostly pedestrian and uninspired; it gets the job done and moves the plot along, but lacks not only the eloquence and poetry of Shakespeare, but even the power that a 20th century playwright like O’Neill or Williams would have brought to it. Compare the balcony scene in “West Side Story” with the one filmed six years later by Franco Zeffirelli in “Romeo and Juliet,” and you will find that it is possible to make a box-office hit while still using great language.

What I loved during “West Side Story,” and why I recommend it, is the dancing itself. The opening finger-snapping sequence is one of the best uses of dance in movie history. It came about because Robbins, reading the screenplay, asked, “What are they dancing about ?”

The writer Laurents agreed: “You couldn’t have a story about murder, violence, prejudice, attempted rape, and do it in a traditional musical style.” So he outlined the prologue, without dialogue, allowing Robbins to establish the street gangs, show their pecking order, celebrate their swagger in the street, demonstrate their physical grace, and establish their hostility — all in a ballet scored by Bernstein with music, finger-snapping and anger.

The prologue sets up the muscular physical impact of all of the dancing, and Robbins is gifted at moving his gangs as units while still making every dancer seem like an individual. Each gang member has his own style, his own motivation, and yet as the camera goes for high angles and very low ones, the whole seems to come together. I was reminded of the physical choreography in another 1961 movie, Kurosawa’s “ Yojimbo ,” in which a band of samurai move quickly and swiftly through action with a snakelike coordination.

So the dancing is remarkable, and several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards, and there are moments of startling power and truth. “West Side Story” remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno’s fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there’s no telling what might have resulted. The movie began with a brave vision, and it is best when you sense that vision surviving the process by which it was turned into safe entertainment.

A two-disc special edition of “West Side Story” has been released on DVD by MGM. Ebert’s Great Movie reviews of “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), “Swing Time” (1936) and “Romeo and Juliet” (1968) are also available.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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‘west side story’ review: spielberg’s take on musical not as bad as you’d think.

The best part of Steven Spielberg’s new film of “West Side Story” isn’t the dance at the gym, or the Sharks and Jets’ scuffle in the prologue, or Tony and Maria’s love duet.

Oddly enough, it’s the jazzy song “Cool” that’s performed ahead of the rumble. “Got a rocket in your pocket. Keep coolly cool, boy!” the antsy Jets sing before their battle with their rival Puerto Rican gang.

This is show-queen blasphemy, I know, but the jolting number tops Jerome Robbins’ iconic original choreography and Robert Wise’s Oscar-winning 1961 film. 

It’s absolutely ferocious.

WEST SIDE STORY

Running time: 156 minutes. Rated PG-13 (some strong violence, strong language, thematic content, suggestive material and brief smoking). In theaters Dec. 10.

Spielberg transplants the sparky scene to a decrepit dock by the river — it has the bleak look of the final scene of “On the Waterfront” — and choreographer Justin Peck has Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Riff (Mike Faist) fight in glorious dance over a loaded gun. 

Those shifts in locale, subtly updating the tunes’ drives and motivation, are what make Spielberg’s very good adaptation of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ musical memorable. It’s the “ET” director’s most visually exciting film in a zillion years.

Still, it’s not gonna become a classic in the way the 1961 original movie adaptation did. Where this “Story” occasionally walks into West Side Highway traffic is screenwriter Tony Kushner’s many needless additions to the script. The “Angels in America” scribe has never met a plot he couldn’t stretch out like a medieval torture victim. 

Now, young lover Tony is an ex-convict. Maria’s (Rachel Zegler) parents are dead (clearly to avoid any implication that they’re absent). There’s a gentrification subplot about how the neighborhood is about to be demolished to build Lincoln Center and the streets are covered in rubble. It’s too much.  

Getting uber-specific and justifying every single choice that dumb teens make saps the story of its magic and universality. There’s no ironclad equation for why we fall in love or why we hate. 

There is a gorgeous line in the 1957 show that’s naturally been cut. Doc admonishes the boys and tells them, “You make the world lousy.”

“That’s the way we found it, Doc.” 

A lot more compelling than blaming a construction project, no?

Kushner doesn’t totally derail the movie, though, which is a great pick to bring your family to over the holidays. Ninety percent of it is the “West Side” you know and love. 

It’s the classic tale based on “Romeo and Juliet” — Did Shakespeare tell us the reason the Capulets and Montagues are feuding? Nope! — in which Polish Tony, one of the Jets, falls in love with Puerto Rican Maria, the little sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks.

So begins a whirlwind romance that, over the course of just one day, has its leading man sing, “Always you, every thought I’ll ever know! Everywhere I go, you’ll be!” That’d be a dating red flag in 2021, but here it makes your heart soar. 

Or it’s supposed to. Unfortunately we don’t fall in love with Elgort like we should. There are a lot of choices an actor can make with Tony — puppy dog, sexual, obsessive, whatever — but Elgort, who was excellent in “Baby Driver,” picked “stoner needs a nap.” “Maria” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written in a musical, yet here it’s a shrug. That’s a shame, because Broadway audiences were briefly treated to Isaac Powell’s interpretation in 2020 , which was as good as it gets.

The mood is instantly lifted, however, when Elgort meets up with the wonderful Zegler on a fire escape. Smart Spielberg locks it, so there is a sexy barrier between them. Zegler shows us her sweet singing voice and radiating goodness that evokes Maria the singing nun.

It’s the ensemble that wows most, though. Faist makes an unusually spindly Riff, yet he is scarier than any I’ve seen. Bernardo, the best role in the show, is given real intensity by David Alvarez, and Ariana DeBose dances the dickens out of “America” as Anita.

And then there’s Rita Moreno. The original Anita plays a new role , Valentina, the owner of Doc’s Drugstore. The late Doc was her husband and she takes Tony in as a tenant. At 89, there is pathos and tenderness in every word, breath and note. In the song “Somewhere,” she sings “there’s a place for us.”

Be glad Spielberg found a place for her. 

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‘West Side Story’ Review: Steven Spielberg Gives the Musical Classic a Gritty, Rousing Upgrade

The director makes the 1957 musical his own and stays reverently true to what generations have loved about it. But he can't solve its last-act problems.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Steven Spielberg ’s “ West Side Story ” has a brash effervescence. You can feel the joy he got out of making it, and the kick is infectious. Directing his first musical, Spielberg moves into the big roomy space of a Broadway-meets-Hollywood classic, rearranges the furniture (the film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, has spiced up the dialogue and tossed out the most cringe-worthy knickknacks), and gives it all a fresh coat of desaturated, bombed-out-city-block, gritty-as-reality paint. He makes it his own. At the same time, Spielberg stays reverently true to what generations have loved about “West Side Story”: the swoon factor, the yearning beauty of those songs, the hypnotic jackknife ballet of ’50s delinquents dancing out their aggression on the New York streets. There are scenes in Spielberg’s version that will melt you, scenes that will make your pulse race, and scenes where you simply sit back and revel in the big-spirited grandeur of it all.

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The setting is the Upper West Side in 1957, something the film lets us know with a wink that nods to how Spielberg and Kushner are going to tinker with the material. Robert Wise’s 1961 screen version opened with that God’s-eye panoramic sweep of Manhattan, but Spielberg’s opens with a panorama of rubble, the camera swooping over what looks like a war zone, which turns out to be the wrecking-ball “slum clearance” that will make way for the construction of Lincoln Center. The turf war between the film’s white and Puerto Rican teenage gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, now has a bigger-picture backdrop. Both are being crushed by gentrification — which is to say, part of their tragic folly is they never realize they’re in the same boat.

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The Jets start off slathering paint on the mural of a Puerto Rican flag. As the boys move and groove to their inner thug, singing “Jet Song” (“When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way…” ), Justin Peck’s choreography plays off the hypnotic, limb-thrusting, rhythm-of-the-city athleticism of Jerome Robbins’ original dances, and Spielberg, working with his dynamic cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has the camera moves to match. We seem to be gliding through the streets right along with the Jets, channeling their reckless exhilaration, and the ’50s-punk acting has been liberated so that the snarls and struts aren’t trapped in that bubble of old-movie corniness. (The 1961 “West Side Story” felt dated…in 1961.) As Riff, the leader of the Jets, Mike Faist has a lean sociopathic squint, and David Alvarez plays Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, with a mean swagger of self-righteousness. Bernardo is now a boxer (fighting is what gets him high), and his problem is that he has never embraced his life in America. The racial antagonism he faces each day has singed his soul, and Alvarez infuses the character with a dark-side-of-rock-star bravado.

Of course, at the center of “West Side Story” is something — maybe I should say “Somewhere” — softer and more tenderly lyrical. And Spielberg has done an ace job of casting his two romantic leads. Before now, I’ve never been a fan of Ansel Elgort . One’s first thought about him may be that he’s Ashton Kutcher without irony ­— and that you miss the irony. But in “West Side Story,” Elgort, with lips like Brando’s, has a brooding heart and personality that pop, and he’s a wonderfully expressive crooner. Tony, updated by Kushner’s script, has now spent a year in prison for nearly punching someone to death, and Elgort, speaking in understated street vowels, strikes just the right balance of sweetness and danger. At the high-school dance, which Spielberg stages with a hip-twirling electricity that rivals the big school dance number in “Grease” (yes, that’s a compliment), Tony has his first glimpse of Maria ( Rachel Zegler ), the girl who will burn down what’s left of his gang loyalty, and she has her first glimpse of him, and…well, it could all spearhead a revival of love at first sight. Singing “Maria,” his voice soaring into the upper register, Tony is transported, and so are we.

In the Oscar-winning 1961 film version, adapted from the 1957 Broadway show, Maria was mostly a perky, saintly innocent, but here she gets a spitfire upgrade. The charismatic newcomer Rachel Zegler gives her a touch of fierceness and a boldly chiseled stare of longing. When Maria and Tony sing “Tonight,” the most transcendent song in “West Side Story,” they’re on the fire escape, in vintage Romeo-and-Juliet-of-the-tenement fashion, and Spielberg stages their duet with an intimate choreographed flow, so that the words seem to spin and dance. Their love is an oasis of hope in the concrete jungle. And that’s an emblem of how “West Side Story” now lands in the larger movie world: as a heady nostalgic crowd-pleaser that offers the rare alternative to both blockbuster overkill and indie angst. Can the Oscars possibly say no to it?

That said, I’ve always had a love/gripe relationship with “West Side Story.” It has what may be the greatest set of songs in any American musical, composed by Leonard Bernstein as if he were the magic link between Richard Rodgers and Brian Wilson. The lyrics, by the late Stephen Sondheim, are as peerlessly playful as they are poetic, and the choreography remains a marvel of expressionistic street movement.

For me, though, the original film version goes off the rails during the big rumble. I could never buy that Richard Beymer’s Tony would pick up that switchblade and do what he does. And Natalie Wood’s Maria gets angry at Tony for killing her brother for about five seconds, before she seems to forget all about it. There’s an unconscious racist element to that (quite apart from the regrettable decision to cast Natalie Wood as the Latina Maria), and it gums up the emotional flow. The unintentional subtext seems to be: Bernardo was a Latino hothead, so his death doesn’t even matter to Maria all that much. “West Side Story” may owe its story to Shakespeare, but that doesn’t mean it parses. The last act is less a romantic tragedy than a belabored gang-war scramble that turns into a tidy plea for tolerance.

And those are problems I don’t think the new version completely solves. Given how Kushner has retooled and enriched the script — Tony and Maria’s romance, for instance, isn’t the melodramatic secret it was before — I was surprised to see that the rumble climaxes in the same old hyped-up but unconvincing way. (No, even with Tony having been in prison, I didn’t buy it.) And once that happens, you feel an energy leak out of the movie.

Up till then, “West Side Story” is a parade of delights. Spielberg has staged “America,” with its rousing mock patriotic tongue-twisting lyrics, as a swirling, roving block party of triumphant feminine bluster. “One Hand, One Heart” is now a gorgeous hymn, shot through stained-glass sunlight, and where “Gee, Officer Krupke,” set inside a police station, is the number you’d think would have dated most, it’s actually a witty wonder, since the Jets are using the new furrowed-brow therapeutic “understanding” of delinquency to defend themselves, and the joke is that they know it’s all bunk. Ariana DeBose makes Anita a radiant force of nature, and the legendary Rita Moreno , who played Anita in the original film, is on hand as Valentina, widow of the soda-shop owner Doc. The 89-year-old Moreno, with a no-frills luminosity, steals every scene she’s in, and her rendition of “Somewhere” is a highlight. The whole film feels as contemporary as it needs to, since topicality is baked into its tribal dance of racial animosity. “West Side Story” is a bursting, live-wire pageant of a movie. I just wish it had a final act that soared instead of lumbering to what feels like an overly determined message-movie landing.

Reviewed at SVA Theater, New York, Nov. 29, 2021. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 146 MIN.

• Production: A 20th Century Studios, Walt Disney Company release of a 20th Century Studios, Amblin Entertainment production, in association with TSG Entertainment. Producers: Steven Spielberg, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Kevin McCollum. Executive producers: Tony Kushner, Daniel Lupi, Rita Moreno, Adam Somner.
• Crew: Director: Steven Spielberg. Screenplay: Tony Kushner. Camera: Janusz Kaminski. Editors: Sarah Brosher, Michael Kahn. Music: Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim.
• With: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, Rita Moreno, Corey Stoll, Brian d’Arcy James, Josh Andrés Rivera, Iris Menas.

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Why the new West Side Story works — and one thing that doesn’t

Our critics hash out Steven Spielberg’s remake of the 1961 classic.

by Alissa Wilkinson , Alex Abad-Santos , and Constance Grady

Steven Spielberg has never directed a musical before now, but you can’t accuse him of aiming low. For his first attempt, he took on one of the most beloved and influential movie musicals of all time: West Side Story , which has its 60th birthday this year. The original film — directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, with songs from the stage musical composed by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim — is itself an adaptation of Romeo & Juliet , set on the west side of Manhattan. It’s a tragic love story and the tale of two warring gangs.

The original screenplay by Ernest Lehman was due for a bit of updating, so in this new version, frequent Spielberg collaborator and legendary playwright Tony Kushner (who, among other things, wrote Angels in America ) took on the project, gently tweaking and sculpting what was there into something new. Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Anita in the 1961 film, returns as executive producer and in a new version of a familiar role. Anita is now played by the fantastic Ariana DeBose, with Ansel Elgort and newcomer Rachel Zegler in the lead roles of Tony and Maria.

So how does the new version hold up? What do we make of the performances? And does West Side Story still have relevance today? Vox critics Constance Grady, Alex Abad-Santos, and Alissa Wilkinson sat down to hash it out — hopefully without a rumble.

Alissa Wilkinson: Well, it’s finally here. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake has been in the works for so long (at least since 2014) that I’m sure I’m not the only person who figured it was more of a pipe dream than reality. And even when they finally shot the film, the pandemic delayed it by a full year; we were meant to see this movie last Christmas.

My expectations were admittedly muted going in (did we really need a remake of such a canonical film?), but even if they hadn’t been, they’d have been exceeded. Kushner’s screenplay feels to me like exactly what this kind of “update” should be — fully rooted in the 1961 original, and yet unpacking themes, probing subtexts, digging into matters that the original glossed over.

As a result, it feels a bit more raw and rooted in our world than the fantasy of the original film, or the stage musical on which it’s based, starting right from the beginning, which tells us that this isn’t just the west side of Manhattan; it’s a neighborhood that’s being razed for one of Robert Moses’s “urban renewal” projects, this one to build Lincoln Center. (I saw the film at its premiere, held at Jazz at Lincoln Center, just a few blocks from the site in the film’s opening shots, which elicited a few nervous chuckles from the audience.)

And that was just the start. For the most part, I was bowled over. But I’m wondering what you expected, and how the film matched up with that?

Constance Grady: Remaking West Side Story has always felt to me like a wild act of hubris that should be impossible on two fronts.

First of all, the original 1961 film is such a classic that it seems like it should be untouchable. Imagine putting some poor young actress in the position of having to live up to Rita Moreno twirling her frilly skirt through “America” as Anita! Cruel and unusual!

Second of all, the original 1961 film is so dated that it seems like it should be untouchable. Imagine putting some poor young actor in the position of having to sincerely call his scene partner “buddy boy,” or trying to drag the film’s conception of Puerto Rican culture into the present day without stepping into a thousand racial land mines. Cruel and unusual!

But damn, this new West Side Story more or less manages to make it all work. There are still some big issues here — the Sharks, as ever, are wildly underwritten compared to the Jets, and the equivalence the movie seems to draw between the two gangs feels more askew than ever given its increased understanding of the racial power dynamics at play — but this West Side Story is still able to go toe-to-toe with its predecessor.

With the fairly large exception of Ansel Elgort as Tony (we’ll get to him), this cast is strong enough to stand up to the memories of the 1961 cast. (And to be fair, it’s not like 1961’s Richard Beymer was such great shakes as Tony either.) Ariana DeBose as Anita has been an early critical favorite for a reason: She beams off the screen like a ray of sunshine, all verve and warmth. You can’t look away from her when she dances. And Mike Faist digs into doomed, awful Riff to find the layers of a whole tragic backstory, implying most of it through pirouettes and crooked smile alone.

The rest of the tragic backstory comes through courtesy of that Kushner screenplay. I have to agree with you, Alissa, that Kushner’s put together a model for this kind of adaptation. He preserves the original’s white-hot youthful yearning for some kind of release, through sex, through a dance at the gym, through a rumble. Heck, he even keeps in most of the “buddy boys.” But he also finds room to work some nuance into these archetypal figures.

The Jets, with their ideology of resentment and displacement, become proto-Trumpists, directing their anger to those they consider outsiders rather than the city that’s razing their neighborhood to the ground. The Sharks, clearly, became an army out of sheer self-defense. And with that context, the whole story comes pulsing to violent life once again.

Alex Abad-Santos: In the context of the increase of white supremacy and xenophobia we’ve seen in the last few years, our present reality sharpens the “stick with your own” messages of the Sharks and Jets, specifically the latter. The Jets kind of become white supremacist twinks, which is all the more unsettling when you compare them to the Sharks, who are simply trying to survive. That contrast also highlights how clumsy the racial politics of the original were when both gangs were sort of thought to be the same; that Puerto Ricans, by virtue of their ethnicity, were comparable to racist rapists. And Kushner does his very best to really inspect the original’s ideas about villainy and instigation.

That in mind, I really enjoyed the movie! And I’m a tougher sell. Aside from a few exceptions — a truly bizarre hill I will die on is that La La Land was good and fun — I’m not really that much of a musical fan. Yet I found myself thinking about this gorgeously shot firecracker of a movie long after it ended — so much that I would just send abrupt texts (“Ariana DeBose!” or “America!” or “Rita Moreno!” or “That hot twunk!”) to my friend who saw it with me.

After seeing it, I found myself YouTubing Moreno’s old performance of “America,” watching her Netflix documentary, and reading about how she dated Marlon Brando and used Elvis to make him jealous .

It’s truly a feat of moviemaking that this film soared so high, despite being weighed down by a sentient, charmless sack of potatoes as its leading man. I suppose that’s a testament to how good this movie is — so good that you can overlook Elgort’s aggressively flaccid performance.

Alissa: Ah, right. Elgort. His inclusion in the film is a bit of a mystery to me because — well, I don’t know, he just can’t really sing? Certainly not next to Rachel Zegler, who plays Maria and landed the job, her first screen role, in an open casting call.

On reflection, it felt a bit like the studio might have told Spielberg he had to have a movie star in the film, and Tom Holland was unavailable. I can’t say I’ve ever found Elgort too memorable except in Baby Driver , where he’s a live wire and beautifully light on his feet. Here, I was bummed out every time he showed up, especially next to the exuberant and kinetic Faist, who plays his sidekick. But I’d like to know what you both think of his performance.

And there’s the other matter, which is that Elgort was accused in June 2020 — a year after principal photography on West Side Story concluded — of having sexually assaulted a teenage fan named Gabby in 2014, when he was 20 and she was 17. Gabby’s accusations were harrowing; Elgort denied the charges , calling it a “brief, legal, and entirely consensual relationship” while also apologizing for his “attitude” and saying he was “disgusted and deeply ashamed of the way I acted.”

So that complicates the film as well. What do you make of all of this?

Alex: Elgort is a black hole of charisma at the center of this movie. Every number, every scene, and every second that his face flashes onscreen, he deflates it. If this movie were an incredible Thanksgiving spread, he would be the disappointingly dry, white meat turkey main course. His inclusion raises questions, the first being why? Why put this charmless man front and center? Did the casting department fall asleep at the wheel? Does Ansel Elgort have incriminating evidence on Fox’s movie executives? Did he save Spielberg’s life?

I know you mention that they probably wanted a “movie star,” but is Elgort a movie star? He is certainly in movies, but a star? Hmmm.

Elgort’s underwhelming performance made me think about who else might be perfect, and it was hard to think of young actors who can sing and dance. The current crop of “movie stars” are probably all too old. That might be one of the repercussions of big superhero action movies dominating the industry — the male “movie star” seems to be someone big enough to be in those movies, and all those movies, save for the aforementioned Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, need heroes in their 30s.

Anyway, it’s really too bad we couldn’t put James Marsden in a time machine for this role.

Constance: Watching the publicity machine simply whisk Elgort away from any solo interviews and otherwise continue on as though those accusations never happened — I dunno, you guys, it’s a bummer. It’s the kind of thing that you would have hoped to leave behind in the pre-Weinstein era.

Of course, West Side Story is not Elgort’s alone. It’s a collaboration of which he is merely one not-that-impressive part. And I don’t know that throwing out the whole movie or reshooting all the Tony scenes would have been the right solution here. But simply ignoring the accusations against Elgort certainly isn’t the right solution, either. And Elgort brings so little to the table besides his baggage that it really feels like a stain on what’s otherwise an enormous accomplishment of a film.

It’s especially ironic because last year saw Ivo van Hove’s West Side Story revival on Broadway , in a production that was thoroughly unmemorable except for a really excellent Tony. Can someone just copy-paste Isaac Powell’s performance into Spielberg’s West Side Story ?

Alissa: The good news is that in the future, we’ll totally have that technology ! (Spoiler: not good news.)

Okay, one last question for you both. It’s 2021. The original West Side Story has just passed its 60th birthday; the stage play is even older. And, of course, the whole thing is based on Romeo & Juliet , which is much older (around 424 years from the first publication!). There’s the tale of star-crossed lovers here, which never goes out of style.

But I feel like there’s something more to it, and the decision to root this West Side Story in an actual historical event — the razing of the Lincoln Square “slum” — really hit hard. It’s a tale of ultimate futility; these kids are fighting one another as a proxy for the fights they know in their guts they can’t win, against the police, looming racism, poverty, and the will of a city to whom they are merely bodies, easily displaced. Their anger becomes more vivid and, for me, a lot more heartbreaking, especially since people obviously still experience these fears — and not just in New York City.

What kind of resonance do you think the show has today? What does the movie evoke best for you, and why do you think it could endure?

Constance: This is another case where the van Hove West Side Story is a helpful comparison. That production tried to drag the show kicking and screaming into the present day, racist book and all: The kids all had smartphones. “Gee, Officer Krupke” turned into a commentary on police brutality. Onscreen video cameras zoomed way, way in on every act of violence, so that during the rumble you could see the blood projected hugely up onto screens that loomed above the action, and when the Jets assaulted Anita there was a shocking close-up of her jeans zipper getting pulled down.

It was a mess! Spielberg and Kushner’s adaptation, which remains a period piece, ironically feels much more relevant to contemporary America than van Hove’s modern-day staging did. It’s a very careful, very thoughtful excavation of the white populist rage that animated the subtext of the original, now brought to screaming life, from the moment we see Riff start splashing paint all over the Puerto Rican flag.

Interestingly, quite a few restagings of classic musicals have focused on the same theme in recent years, even when you wouldn’t have considered them to be natural fits. The much-admired Oklahoma revival of 2019 turned Oklahoma! , classically a byword for jingoistic Americana, into a commentary on the genocide of Natives and white America’s sense of entitlement to the land it claims. John Doyle’s Assassins , now playing off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company, has his assassins form their final tableau in front of footage from the January 6 Capitol riot. The problem of populist violence has always been in that show’s music, no question, but the last time Assassins was on Broadway in 2004, it was considered primarily a commentary on the vapidity of America’s celebrity worship.

Now, musical theater is one of the great purely American art forms (alongside jazz and hip-hop), and white populist violence is a major force in American history. So it makes sense that a lot of musicals would have that theme embedded in their scores, waiting for the right director to draw them out.

But it also strikes me that we’re seeing what always happens with really great theater. If a show is good enough and rich enough and meaty enough, someone will always be able to get a production out of it that feels fresh and exciting and relevant. It doesn’t have to have been written explicitly about Trumpism for us to find a way to pull Trumpism out of it, not if that’s what we’re all thinking about.

All of this is a long lead-up to say, Alissa, I think this movie is a very, very good portrait of the political atmosphere of 2021, using the material of 1961 to get there. And I’d be interested to see if someone could manage to do something similar with it again in 2071.

Alex: If I make it to 2071, please just upload my consciousness to the cloud. Hopefully we’ll have some kind of San Junipero option by then. Beam me up. But in all seriousness, I think the Spielberg adaptation soars because it isn’t afraid to stare directly into the story’s hopelessness.

I think Anita’s role in particular is richer and deeper than in the original. She’s fully bought into the American dream; she’s ready to give up everything to gain everything. And in an instant, it all comes crumbling down, and she sees what “America” truly is. Love, money, and happily ever afters don’t exist for her here anymore. She’s one more life that America has ruined.

Even more than the original, I found myself empathizing with Anita. I absolutely do not blame her for burning it all down. I’d help her light the match if I could.

Whew, that’s bleak! But the story’s ability to convey the harshness of this country is what allows West Side Story to endure. It was all right there in the source material.

West Side Story opens in theaters on December 10.

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West side story (2021).

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 19 Reviews
• Kids Say 58 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Dazzling musical adaptation has violence, language.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that West Side Story is Steven Spielberg's much anticipated adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet -inspired 1957 Broadway musical (which previously inspired the Academy Award-winning 1961 film). It stars Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler as legendary star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria…

Why Age 13+?

The big rumble includes lots of fistfighting, punching, weapon use (chains, kniv

Language includes "s--t," "bulls--t," "ass," "d--k," "crap," "t-ts," "friggin',"

Teens and young adults smoke cigarettes, and characters drink; one scene takes p

Characters flirt, kiss, dance sensually, and, in two cases, have implied sex. An

Any Positive Content?

Unlike the 1961 movie, which had only one actual Latino actor in the main ensemb

Explores themes of social injustice, an us-vs.-them mentality, racism, and a cor

Maria is clearly positioned as a positive role model. She doesn't believe in fig

Violence & Scariness

The big rumble includes lots of fistfighting, punching, weapon use (chains, knives, pipes, bats, clubs), and two characters being stabbed to death. A character is shot and killed; the same gun is held by others and used to threaten; characters fight over it in a tense scene. Other scenes of hitting/beating. One character has a nail put through his ear (bloody). One character has to identify the body of someone she loves; two dead faces shown. An Afro-Latina character is sexually assaulted by a group of White men. A cop hits one of the Sharks. Anita slaps Maria. The Jets vandalize a mural of a Puerto Rican flag and steal from Puerto Rican shops. Tony's past includes a violent incident that haunts him. Much of the violence is expressed through choreographed numbers, which can lessen the impact for some.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes "s--t," "bulls--t," "ass," "d--k," "crap," "t-ts," "friggin'," "bastard," "SOB," "Christ almighty," "mother lovin'," "godforsaken," and "goddamn," plus slurs including "spic," "wop," "dago," "guinea," "hyena," "Chiquita Banana," "Polack," "pansy," etc. "Krup you" is used as a sound-a-like to "f--k you."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Teens and young adults smoke cigarettes, and characters drink; one scene takes place in a seedy bar. Reference to getting some beer and weed and going to the zoo. The lyrics of "Gee, Officer Krupke" include lines about parents being drunks, junkies, and using marijuana.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters flirt, kiss, dance sensually, and, in two cases, have implied sex. Anita and Bernardo can be heard giggling in their bedroom after kissing suggestively. And Maria and Tony kiss and then are shown in bed together, with bare shoulders (her) and chest (him). Song lyrics include a reference to a "social disease."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Diverse Representations

Unlike the 1961 movie , which had only one actual Latino actor in the main ensemble, this version boasts all Latinos (mostly Puerto Rican, one Afro-Latino actor) playing the Sharks. Women have more agency here than in the original, notably Maria, Anita, and Valentina. Character Anybodys isn't referred to as a tomboy but is depicted as transgender; they are bullied for that at times but ultimately they're somewhat accepted by the Jets. Lyrics in "Gee, Officer Krupke" refer derogatorily to a sister with a mustache and a brother wearing a dress; in another scene, White characters disparage an Afro-Latina woman by calling her "too dark to pass" and telling her "go back where you came from."

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Messages

Explores themes of social injustice, an us-vs.-them mentality, racism, and a corrupt system in mid-1950s New York, as well as the power of compassion and empathy. Although America is known as "land of the free," movie portrays how immigrants struggle and are discriminated against, and the impact of impoverishment, including increased feelings of alienation and desperation (one White character says that "this isn't about skin, it's about territory"). Love is portrayed as being stronger than hate, but violent, climactic ending suggests that it can't really conquer all.

Positive Role Models

Maria is clearly positioned as a positive role model. She doesn't believe in fighting or war, is able to see people for who they are rather than based on race or social class. Anita is strong, has agency. Valentina is caring and protective but doesn't take any guff. Tony is trying to follow the right path, but it's hard for him to stick to it when people he cares about are in trouble. Riff and Bernardo can't put their hate for each other aside; determined to hurt each other, they'll fight to the death, even at expense of someone's life. Detectives/police officers are portrayed as judgmental and biased and, in some cases, racist.

Parents need to know that West Side Story is Steven Spielberg 's much anticipated adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet -inspired 1957 Broadway musical (which previously inspired the Academy Award-winning 1961 film ). It stars Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler as legendary star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria. The setting is still 1950s New York City, but this version features more of the Sharks' Puerto Rican neighborhood and the community of the historical midtown Manhattan neighborhood. Unlike the mostly whitewashed original film, this version has only actors with Latino backgrounds cast to play the Puerto Rican characters -- although cultural specificity gets lost among iffy accents and the casting of only one Puerto Rican actor in a key role. Expect romance (love at first sight, kissing, flirting, sensual partner dancing, and implied sex) as well as tragic violence (including several deaths, sexual assault against an Afro-Latina woman by a group of White men, and fight scenes involving fists, chains, knives, and, ultimately, a gun). The language is occasionally salty ("t-ts," "s--t," "damn," and more) and racist ("spic," "wop," "dago," "guinea," "Polack," etc.), and one song famously uses the words "Krup you" as a sound-a-like to "f--k you." Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner ( Angels in America ) and co-starring Rita Moreno (who won an Oscar for playing Anita in the original film adaptation), the film explores themes of social injustice and racism, as well as the power of compassion and empathy. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (19)
• Kids say (58)

Based on 19 parent reviews

Not appropriate for children… at all

Be aware of the violence - realistic and intense., what's the story.

Director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner 's adaptation of the classic Broadway musical-turned-movie WEST SIDE STORY is, like the original , a Romeo and Juliet -inspired story of star-crossed love and warring street gangs in midtown Manhattan in the late 1950s. The Jets, who are White and led by Riff (Mike Faist), and the Sharks, who are Puerto Rican and led by Bernardo (David Alvarez), confront each other over turf issues. They clash at a dance that Bernardo, an aspiring boxer, and his seamstress girlfriend, Anita (Ariana DeBose), attend with Bernardo's younger sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), who has recently arrived from taking care of their late father in Puerto Rico. At the dance, Maria makes electric eye contact with Riff's co-leader, Tony ( Ansel Elgort ), who was reluctant to attend due to the rules of his recent probation. Maria and Tony instantly connect, but trouble starts when they're spotted together. Riff challenges Bernardo to a rumble to settle control of the neighborhood streets, but Tony just wants to see Maria again. Tragic circumstances make the lovers' future seem impossible.

Is It Any Good?

Spielberg's take on this legendary musical is gorgeously shot and brilliantly interpreted, with updates from the 1961 version to be more Latino (if not fully authentically Puerto Rican). The gifted cast is full of musical theater vets, including EGOT winner Rita Moreno as a new character, Valentina. The widow of the original musical/film's drugstore owner Doc, she runs the pharmacy and has taken Tony under her wing since he was released from prison on probation for nearly killing a rival gang member (both details are part of Kushner's substantial additions to the plot, deepening the characterizations). Kushner also adds dialogue between the supporting characters, beefs up the inclusion of Anybodys (Iris Menas) as transgender instead of "just" a tomboy, and tries to deliver the third-act sexual assault at Doc's in a way that forces the Jets to at least acknowledge their crime. The order of the musical numbers changes slightly for the better as well. The showstopper "America" is now set outside, in the Puerto Rican area of the community; "Somewhere" is sung by Valentina (rather than Maria and Tony); and "I Feel Pretty" takes place at the department store where Maria and her friends work the late shift as cleaners.

DeBose's Anita is particularly scene-stealing, with her strong personality, twirly dresses, and big sisterly attitude toward Maria. Faist's Riff is equally as impressive as both a dancer and singer. Zegler is excellent as Maria, who, while still young and naive, is also ambitious and dreams of a future full of opportunity and love. The only weak link in an otherwise perfectly cast film is Elgort; he's tall and handsome like Richard Beymer, but his voice, while better than expected, isn't nearly on the level of his co-stars. Of all the classic songs, the ones that stand out beyond "America" are the "Tonight" quintet; Anita and Maria's heartbreakingly beautiful duet "A Boy Like That/I Had a Love"; and the opening "Jet Song." Oscar-winning cinematographer and longtime Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kaminski firmly roots viewers in the ruins of the New York City neighborhoods that were destroyed to make Lincoln Center. Several of the shots are dazzling, and Justin Peck's choreography pays tribute to Jerome Robbins' without copying it move-by-move. Ultimately, Spielberg's version of West Side Story addresses the whitewashed (or, in Moreno's case, brown-faced) wrongs of the 1961 version. It provides a deeper backstory for the main characters and highlights his ensemble's enormous talent -- but Puerto Rican viewers may still wish it had more authentically represented their culture.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in West Side Story and whether the impact of violence in musicals is different from that of other movie genres. Does realistic violence pack a bigger punch than stylized violence? Why, or why not?

What kinds of racial, ethnic, and class stereotypes are explored in the story? What about the depiction of law enforcement? In the end, does the movie challenge or reinforce stereotypes?

Why is it notable that, in this version, the Puerto Rican characters are played by Latino performers? How has the importance of representation in the media changed since the first movie came out in 1961? Discuss what the new version gets right or wrong about Puerto Rican authenticity and what stereotypes of Latinos you still see remaining.

Talk about the LGBTQ+ influence of West Side Story as a musical. The four men who created the original musical were all gay (and Jewish): composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, book writer Arthur Laurents, and choreographer Jerome Robbins -- as is the new adaptation's screenwriter, Tony Kushner. Which parts of the story explore LGBTQ+ themes?

How are the characters humanized despite their flaws? Who, if anyone, do you consider a role model ? How do they demonstrate compassion and empathy ?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : March 15, 2022
• Cast : Ansel Elgort , Rachel Zegler , Rita Moreno , Ariana DeBose
• Director : Steven Spielberg
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors, Multiracial actors, Queer actors, Black actors
• Studios : Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures , 20th Century Fox
• Genre : Musical
• Topics : History , Music and Sing-Along
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Empathy
• Run time : 156 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some strong violence, strong language, thematic content, suggestive material and brief smoking
• Awards : Academy Award , Common Sense Selection , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : August 14, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

West Side Story

Romeo and Juliet

In the Heights

Romeo + Juliet

Musicals for kids, related topics.

• Music and Sing-Along

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

West Side Story | Steven Spielberg

Spielberg’s authorship is distinctly felt in this version of west side story, and more than in the original, it here truly feels as if life exists beyond the music..

The New York City of Robert Wise’s 1961 West Side Story — rendered as line-drawings in the overture and then shot from above in a helicopter telephoto sequence — no longer exists, if it ever did in the first place. The 1957 play, as produced by Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein, plays with a certain, harmless universality, no doubt facilitated by its omnipresent source material, Romeo and Juliet , so even as Wise decided for a few flourishes of documentary realism, his adaptation was a self-contained entity, successful, but successful only on its own, noncommittal terms.

Steven Spielberg’s own adaptation begins similarly to Wise’s, but within an instant, yanks itself away from any precedent. Opening with an aerial shot of an obvious cityscape, or, what at least used to be one, the camera surveys an endless field of battleship gray rubble, with a few mangled fire escapes poking out, before panning up toward a sign that lends the film a bracing period setting: as the frame expands to bring more half-crumbled buildings and various construction vehicles into view, an announcement of “slum clearance” for the city’s monument to displacement, Lincoln Center. No sunbaked playgrounds, no brick walls of screaming reds — just the aural hallmark of West Side Story , the Jets’ assembly whistle, echoing across the lots and blown-out apartment blocks.

As West Side Story on the stage was such a hit, Wise maintained a certain fidelity that distended the virtues of his film, so that song sequences, even if coasting on a specific visual and performative brio possible only within the musical, could unceremoniously spin out of nowhere, and then crouch back into nothingness. With 60 years now elapsed, Spielberg isn’t restrained by any requirements of preservation to ensure the ubiquity of the stage production for those who may have not experienced it. This cold open — a proclamation of newness that furnishes itself as such by interrogating the past — practically encourages one to begin divvying up the film in their head, separating it into varying camps of past incarnations. Still, it’s important to first orient oneself within the realm of what’s carried over: the American (Italian, Irish and Polish) Jets are in a turf war with the Puerto Rican Sharks; Tony (Ansel Elgort), a former Jets heavy-hitter, has fallen for María (Rachel Zegler) at a gym-dance; María , however, is the sister of Sharks’ leader Bernardo (David Alvarez) who will have it out with his enemy and counterpart, Riff (Mike Faist), Tony’s best friend. A night of unencumbered love is followed by a night of unforgivable violence, the story is a tragedy.

Spielberg is an aesthetic re-constructivist, a tic that’s even outpaced certain films of his just this past decade (like, say, The Post ) — story can be dispensed with fast and loose, but the formal building blocks of each and every scene, in their temporal specificity and thematic import, hints at a nagging perfectionism, like the IP-binge of Ready Player One or the East-West divide of Berlin in Bridge of Spies , both projects which have their detractors and champions alike (both are strong works). West Side Story, then, is one of the more amenable frameworks for the director’s intense style, as the only way to make it truly yours is to characterize more , to imbue a stronger sense of place. Its relative scantness disallows the scales moving in the opposite direction. And thus, Tony is on parole for almost killing a kid in a previous rumble; Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) is an adding-machine repairman and aspiring accountant; Bernardo is a boxer, and he lives with María and his girlfriend Anita (Ariana DeBose), the family’s tailor shop now an enterprise run from behind a few curtains stretched between the kitchen and the living room (where parents were once spoken of as if they were just in the next room, or at least down the block, they’re entirely absent here, save for a handful of brief mentions); the drugstore proprietor, Doc, has died, and now the store is run by his Puerto Rican wife Valentina, played by Rita Moreno, who was Anita in Wise’s film all those years ago.

These newly established details provide recourse for a text that has had trouble reconciling its idealism with an attempted unflinching reality. Far from superfluous, the throughline of conflict is made all the more combustible, as gentrification looms, the struggle over these surviving few blocks a last-ditch pledge of contested ownership. Spielberg smuggles in more verbal abuse, more plainspoken racism that stings just as much as the newfound viscerality of the fights, which introduce themselves with a few paint cans smashed against some skulls, and even a nail driven through Baby John’s (Patrick Higgins) earlobe. Spielberg isn’t just deromanticizing a film that occasionally treated race as little more than window-dressing with a few more epithets hurled at the Sharks (as well as some transphobia as experienced by Iris Menas’ Anybodys), instead constructing a graceful twinned narrative, one that finds its mirrored elements among unlikely, but no less worthy, candidates: Chino, as well as Tony, is a reluctant participant in his friends’ scrapping, but finds himself drawn in all the same.

Wise’s film confined much of the Sharks’ activity to their one apartment building, while the Jets took advantage of Manhattan. Now, both gangs stake out territory, with “America” whirring alive not after a night out, but the morning after, casually sung within the throes of routine — singers join as they string their laundry out their windows — before moving out to the streets. Life is a local matter, which Spielberg conveys through his backlot playground of New York City, the frame bisected by laundry lines and fire escapes, oscillating rays of light beaming from box fans, curtains blowing through windows. The director’s manipulation of space is often remarkable, where emotional gulfs as large as the city itself open themselves between characters in paradoxically cramped apartments, which makes “A Boy Like That,” between a tearful DeBose and Zegler sideswiping in its staging, the hitherto warm interior now broken apart.

The song sequencing is reshuffled to accommodate for this expansive setting — “Play It Cool” sung between Tony and Riff at the dilapidated 57th street pier, “I Feel Pretty” now sung by Marìa on her night-shift at Gimbel’s — and Janusz Kamiński’s vigorous camera chases actresses through the opulent displays as if this were a George Cukor film. There’s some courtship at the Cloisters, “Gee, Officer Krupke” believably develops from within central booking, Tony and Marìa even take the subway (!), and only after shooting “Tonight” with some fire escape acrobatics that animate the song with the lovestruck inability to remain still. Such a willingness to wander courses even through the gym dance, as the couple meet behind the bleachers, their romance elevating them beyond the scattered detritus of the dance floor’s daytime use. Moreno stands as the zenith of this recombinant structuring, with “Somewhere” reserved for her by her lonesome, the lyrics coming as she sits at a table at her empty store, her voice touchingly weathered with age, reedy at the high notes, but still robust with the lows.

Too bad Elgort is mostly a dud, ennobled not by the material, but an apparent smugness. If Tony is historically a void, Elgort beats out Richard Beymer, while the lithe and casually charismatic Faisk definitely encroaches upon Russ Tamblyn’s status as Riff. Tony may plateau, but as Marìa, Zegler facilitates her own transformation across West Side Story ’s trajectory, the otherwise generic loss of innocence made palpable by an actress who cuts herself off before her visible hopefulness tips over into cloyingness — perhaps her strongest attribute is her ability to inhabit an all-encompassing hesitancy. She’s an arresting presence, even when Spielberg and Kaminski aren’t flooding the screen with flares and innumerable light sources, which elsewhere is used to frequently save Elgort from his own anticlimactic exhibitionism (like when a puddle reflects back fireworks of apartment-building lights surrounding Tony). The stage-like “naturalism” of West Side Story is unerring, but here, for the first time, it truly feels as if life exists beyond the music.

• Blockbuster Beat
• by Patrick Preziosi

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EMPIRE ESSAY: West Side Story Review

16 Sep 2011

145 minutes

EMPIRE ESSAY: West Side Story

In 1957, playwright Arthur Laurents collaborated with Bernstein, Sondheim and choreographer Jerome Robbins on West Side Story, a show that followed The Boys From Syracuse and Kiss Me Kate in wrestling a Shakespeare plot into a Broadway musical.

Laurent set Romeo And Juliet against a New York gang war straight out of the headlines. His Montagues are the Jets, the ‘American’ gang - though a few tossed-off insults suggest they’re mostly Polish with token Irish and Italian members.

Certainly, the gangs they’ve already beaten (the Harps and the Emeralds) sound Irish. In place of the Capulets, West Side Story brings on the Sharks, sharp and resentful lads recently arrived from Puerto Rico, hotly eager to match any force thrown against them.

The lovers are Maria, innocent sister of Shark leader Bernardo, and Tony, co-founder of the Jets but lately drifting into the straight life - given how keen Riff is to get Tony back in the gang, it’s not difficult to perceive a gay subtext - and the duels of Shakespeare become gang ‘rumbles’ with switchblades.

United Artists, evidently keen on cutting in on MGM’s position as the natural home of Broadway musicals, bought up the rights and got the film out in 1961. It won the Best Picture Oscar and nine additional statuettes, including an unprecedented shared award for direction plus supporting actor and actress nods for George Chakiris (Bernardo, though he had played Riff on stage) and Rita Moreno (as Bernardo’s girl, Anita).

Like most Best Picture Oscar winners, it’s too big a production to be perfect and its greatness floats in with a fair amount of lesser stuff. Neither Richard Beymer (Tony) nor Natalie Wood (Maria) could handle the songs, so their singing voices come from Jimmy Bryant and Marni Nixon.

Both castings are compromises: Tony was offered to Elvis Presley, but Colonel Tom Parker, with typical disregard for his client’s career opportunities, turned it down, relegating The King to nonsensical children’s films. Could Tupelo’s finest have played a New Yorker? If his Southern twang were controlled, Presley would have been a lot more convincing in the fight scenes. Wood, in nut-brown make-up and thick accent, is an appealing if not remotely Hispanic Maria.

A possible reason for the Colonel’s rejection is that Tony doesn’t even get the best numbers. And West Side Story has more hit songs in it than Chicago, Les Miserables and the entire Andrew Lloyd Webber back-catalogue rolled up together. Gee, Officer Krupke!, banned by the BBC for its mentions of drug use (ìDear kindly judge, Your Honour, my parents treat me rough, with all their marijuana, they won’t give me a puffî) and sexual ambiguity (“My sister wears a moustache, my brother wears a dress, goodness gracious that’s why I’m a mess”), is blazing satire, vintage 1957.

I Feel Pretty, although sung by Nixon, allows Wood to be funny for a stretch rather than a saintly killjoy. If you wonder why the Academy handed out Oscars to Chakiris (a one-way ticket to Palookaville) and Moreno (the most explosive performer in the film), look no further than the standout song, America.

On stage, this was a smaller number, with Anita’s friends arguing with a conservative Puerto Rican girl. In the film, by matching the integrationist girls (“Free to be anything you choose”) with the resentful boys (“Free to wait tables and shine shoes”), the conflict is more even, and we get a blazing musical battle at once celebration and indictment. A classic musical scene in a classic musical film.

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West Side Story (1961 film)

By robert wise, west side story (1961 film) essay questions.

What is the tension in the film between the youth world and the adult world?

Adults barely feature in the plot of the film, and it often feels as though the two gangs are inhabiting an empty city where they run the entire social order. When adults do show up, they scold the young people for being so negligent and reckless. Lieutenant Schrank is always telling the Sharks and the Jets to try and get along, but he has one of the most racist attitudes towards the Sharks of anyone. When Doc scolds the Jets after they attack Anita, Action reminds Doc that they did not make the world they have inherited. In subtle ways, the film shows that the youths at the center of the narrative are as much victims of the ways they were brought up, and products of a broken world, as they are perpetrators of crimes.

How does the dancing help reveal the emotional aspect of the story?

West Side Story seamlessly blends music, dance, and narrative in a way that makes the elevated dance numbers seem like organic extensions of the narrative rather than heightened breaks. This is evident from the very beginning of the film, when the Jets begin walking down the street, gradually breaking into balletic movement. The dancing serves to contrast high art with gritty realism, but it also shows the ways that the characters have emotions that are bubbling up inside them and are too strong to contain. The Jets dance down the street because they are eager for a fight and they want to feel like they have some power in the world. The expressiveness of the dancing shows this. Later, dancing highlights the differences between the Sharks and the Jets, as the two gangs dance on either side of the gym. Then, in a number like "Cool," dancing again shows the ways that the Jets are trying to keep their hot-headed emotions under wraps, to quell their overwhelming feelings.

What is the role of loyalty in West Side Story ?

Loyalty functions in multiple ways within West Side Story : loyalty to one's race, loyalty to one's friends, and loyalty to oneself. Both Tony and Maria experience internal and external conflict when they sacrifice being loyal to their races in order to be loyal to each other and their feelings of love. Loyalty is fluid in this movie. During the rumble, Tony is loyal to Riff and the Jets after Bernardo kills Riff, then chooses to be loyal to Maria, going to her and planning to run away.

What elements of the plot of West Side Story are most similar to its source material, Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet ?

The central premise, for one thing, is almost identical to that of Romeo and Juliet. Two young lovers from dueling "families" find themselves falling in love, much to the chagrin of their respective clans. The difference in this musical is that instead of Capulets versus Montagues, the story concerns Sharks (Puerto Ricans) versus Jets (whites) clashing in a gang war over the run of the neighborhood. Many of the characters are stand-ins for characters from the original, with Riff standing in for Mercutio, and Bernardo for Tybalt. Even the misunderstanding at the end bears some resemblance to the ending of the Shakespeare, in which Romeo kills himself after mistakenly thinking that Juliet is actually dead.

What were Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' respective roles as directors of the film?

At the time of filming, Robert Wise had never directed a musical, and the original stage musical of West Side Story had been such a labor of love for choreographer Jerome Robbins that it seemed natural to have them both take the helm. Wise was charged with directing the narrative scenes, while Robbins covered the musical numbers, which clearly have his choreographic and visionary touch.

West Side Story (1961 film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for West Side Story (1961 film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What are some major differences between the Jets and Sharks from the old movie (1961) and the new one (2021)?

Sorry, I actually have not seen the new version yet but check this out:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/evelinamedina/west-side-story-1961-2021-steven-spielberg

west side story (1961)

Sorry, I saw this film so long ago. I don't recall the opening.

What reason does the play give for the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks?

B. the jets consider the area their home and dislike the sharks entering their territory.

Study Guide for West Side Story (1961 film)

West Side Story (1961 film) study guide contains a biography of Robert Wise, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About West Side Story (1961 film)
• West Side Story (1961 film) Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for West Side Story (1961 film)

West Side Story (1961 film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of West Side Story (1961 film) by Robert Wise.

• Futile Fights: A Comparison of the Power Struggles in 'Romeo and Juliet' and 'West Side Story'

Wikipedia Entries for West Side Story (1961 film)

• Introduction

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — West Side Story — Critical Analysis Of The West Side Story

Critical Analysis of The West Side Story

• Categories: West Side Story

About this sample

Words: 594 |

Published: Jun 9, 2021

Words: 594 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Berger, J. (2014). Ways of seeing. Penguin UK.
• Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2019). Film art: An introduction. McGraw-Hill Education.
• Brook, P. (1968). The empty space: A book about the theatre: Deadly, holy, rough, immediate. Penguin UK.
• Hodge, A. (2019). Screenplays: How to write and sell them. Routledge.
• Kuhn, A. (2019). An introduction to television documentary: Confronting reality. Routledge.
• Lehman, P., & Luhr, W. (2011). Thinking about movies: Watching, questioning, enjoying. John Wiley & Sons.
• Magliaro, J. J. (2017). Behind the scenes: Contemporary set designers talk about their role in theater, film, and television. Routledge.
• Nelmes, J. (Ed.). (2016). Introduction to film studies. Routledge.
• Schatz, T. (2019). The genius of the system: Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era. University of Minnesota Press.
• Thompson, K., & Bordwell, D. (2019). Film history: An introduction. McGraw-Hill Education.

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West Side Story

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What to Know

Steven Spielberg's West Side Story presents a new look at the classic musical that lives up to its beloved forebear -- and in some respects might even surpass it.

The acting, singing, and dancing are terrific, and Steven Spielberg's West Side Story updates the original without losing its heart.

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Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die

The latest Broadway revival can’t fix the painful way it depicts Puerto Ricans.

By Carina del Valle Schorske

Ms. del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator.

SAN JUAN, P.R. — For many years I’ve avoided writing about “West Side Story.” As a Puerto Rican critic, I resent the expectation that I have something to say about a musty old musical from 1957.

Just as the U.S. government bestowed second-class American citizenship upon islanders in 1917 without popular consent, “West Side Story” continues to recruit us as extras even when we never intended to audition for the show. The Puerto Rican writer Nelson Rivera once recalled studying abroad in Paris, where he was greeted by “Oui, ‘West Side Story’!” at every turn, as if collecting stamps in the passport of an imaginary nation everyone else thought was real.

But the show remains one of the most enduring representations of Puerto Rican life in American pop culture, and the entertainment industry won’t leave it alone. A new movie adaptation from Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner is coming to theaters this year, and a modernized production by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove is the latest Broadway revival.

So when my literary agent reached out with free tickets for a dress rehearsal in December — the show officially opened on Thursday — it felt like my long-delayed civic responsibility to bear witness. I clipped on my gold hoops and painted my lips red, as if for battle, tweeting a selfie before I left for the theater: “Always Anita, never Maria.”

My mother taught me to resist the cartoonish stereotypes of macho teenage gangsters and hysterical lovers in “West Side Story.” But I also know that when the 1961 movie version came out, she and her friends went to see it twice at the local theater in Washington Heights and cheered when the Sharks came onscreen. If this musical is still our narrative ghetto, then the least we can do is make noise about what it feels like to live in it.

In 2020, it feels exhausting.

There’s no doubt that “West Side Story” has long functioned as a vehicle for great performances by Latinx artists, despite the fact that the lead Puerto Rican roles of Maria and Bernardo in major productions have most often gone to white actors in brownface. Rita Moreno’s best supporting actress Oscar for her brilliant turn as Anita in the 1961 film remains, to this day, one of only two Latinas to win an Oscar for acting. Though this distinction has grown bitter with time, it’s still a thrill to watch her “sing of assimilation while dancing its undoing,” in the words of the performance studies scholar Deborah Paredez. But whatever pleasure and power Puerto Ricans have extracted from “West Side Story” have been extracted against the odds.

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West Side Story

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Discussion Questions

How does West Side Story question the idea of what it means to be an American? What does Americanness mean to Tony or Riff? What about Maria? Bernardo? Anita? Use evidence from the text to support your claims. What do you think the musical says about American national identity? 

Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim updated Romeo and Juliet to address a 1950s audience . What themes from the Shakespeare play did they emphasize? How might West Side Story connect to a contemporary 21st-century audience? What themes and issues remain relevant and why? What seems irrelevant or doesn’t age well?

In Romeo and Juliet , Romeo, thinking Juliet is dead, swallows poison and dies. Juliet awakens, discovers that Romeo is dead, and kills herself with his dagger. How is the end of West Side Story different? How do these changes create meaning that differs from the Shakespeare original? 

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Review: Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” Remake Is Worse Than the Original

A rich and famous artist spends a hundred million dollars to revive a corpse with the blood of young people. The creature is still alive, but barely, and the infusion leaves it deader than when it started. This is not the plot of the latest horror film from A24 but the unfortunate tale of Steven Spielberg ’s efforts to remake “West Side Story,” the movie musical about love and ethnic rivalry among New York City gangs. With the screenwriter Tony Kushner, Spielberg has attempted to fix the dubious aspects of the 1961 film, including its cavalier depiction of Puerto Rican characters and its stereotypes of a hardscrabble New York. But, instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology, along with slight dramatic rearrangements. They’ve made ill-conceived additions and misguided revisions. In the process, they’ve managed to subtract doubly from the original.

Like the first film, Spielberg’s is set around 1960 in San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square, at the time when much of the area was being demolished. A swooping opening shot in the remake shows a rubble-strewn landscape dominated by a billboard announcing “ slum clearance ”—to make way for a gleaming new complex called Lincoln Center. The ethnic tensions between the neighborhood’s white and Puerto Rican residents are rooted in a battle over their shrinking terrain. Whereas once the area was sufficient for both sides, there’s now only room for one. (There’s no hint of the fact that San Juan Hill was, in fact, a predominantly Black neighborhood.) The filmmakers’ attempt to pin down a cause for the Jets-Sharks rivalry reflects their more general shift, in the new film, toward facile psychologizing. In the original, directed by Robert Wise, the Jets are more than just defenders of white interests; they are full-service bullies who harass white kids, too. For all of its faults, the original film doesn’t rationalize aggression—or racism—away or reduce its characters to single motives.

The original Tony, for instance, wants to avoid a fight because he has a job and wants a better future than the one that seems to await his layabout friends in the Jets. There’s no single awakening that led him to want out of gang life. His decisions seem to follow the complex yet inchoate impulses of his character. By contrast, the Tony of Spielberg’s film is a convict who has spent a year in Sing Sing because of a fight in which he nearly killed another young man. He avoids the Jets because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his parole. When Riff tries to persuade him to take part in the “rumble” with the Sharks anyway, Tony explains that he’d spent his time in prison examining himself ruefully and resolving to live differently. Whatever Spielberg and Kushner may have had in mind, what they deliver with this simplistic backstory is an endorsement of incarceration: the movie makes clear that Tony came out of prison a better person than he went in.

Maria has a fuller life in New York than she did in the 1961 film. In the original, she has recently arrived from Puerto Rico for an arranged marriage to Chino. In the new film, she has been in the city for years, caring for her father (it’s hinted that he died), and she expresses, in a single line, a desire to go to college. Bernardo is now a boxer just beginning his career. Chino, an undefined presence in the original, is now in night school, studying accounting and adding-machine repair. But nothing comes of these new practical emphases; the characters have no richer inner lives, cultural substance, or range of experience than they do in the first film. Maria still has little definition beyond her relationship with Tony; she remains as much of a cipher as she was in the 1961 film.

Indeed, Spielberg’s film radically, woefully transforms the one scene in the original that conveys a sense of Maria and Tony’s family histories, and it does so with a sanctimoniousness that might have embarrassed studio filmmakers even then. In the original film, Maria works with Anita at a local bridal shop owned by a Puerto Rican woman, and Tony comes to visit her there, after hours. In a playfully comedic sequence, they use mannequins to playact meeting each other’s families, until their banter gives graceful rise to a mock marriage ceremony. In Spielberg’s film, Maria works at the department store Gimbels as a cleaner on the night crew, and the graceful irony of the humble bridal-shop wedding has been traded for a solemn faux union in the expressly religious setting of the Cloisters, at an altar in front of a stained-glass window. In another nod to the beneficial effects of his incarceration, Tony explains to Maria that he saw the Cloisters for the first time from the window of the bus that was taking him to prison.

Rita Moreno, the original movie’s Anita, has famously returned for Spielberg’s, playing the widow of Doc, the owner of the candy store and pharmacy that serves as the Jets’ hangout. More Moreno is a winning formula for any movie, but even here Spielberg relies on her presence to justify his superficial and reductive choices. Valentina and the late Doc are portrayed as the primordial mixed marriage of the neighborhood, and Tony lives in the basement of the store—after his release from prison, Valentina gave him both a job and a place to live. Now that Tony has met Maria, he tells Valentina that he wants to “be like Doc,” his role model of masculine virtue. In planning a life with Maria, he isn’t merely following the romantic dictates of his heart but also enacting a social archetype.

Both the casting and the direction of the actors in Spielberg’s film are strangely paradoxical. Natalie Wood, of course, had no business playing Maria in the original film, and her irrepressible presence couldn’t salvage the dismally narrow role. In Spielberg’s film, Maria is played by Rachel Zegler, a young actress whose mother is Colombian. Unlike Wood, whose singing voice was dubbed by that of Marni Nixon, Zegler performs her own songs, with a voice both powerful and delicate. Yet Spielberg directs her to act like a Disney princess, with oversimplified facial and vocal expressions reflecting a single unambiguous emotion at a time. Ansel Elgort, as Tony, has a boyish bewilderment in his eyes, and, if Spielberg were interested in Tony’s life rather than his checklist of motives, that quality could have been used to great effect. But Elgort is also seven years older than Zegler, and his bearing toward her is nearly avuncular. There’s no chemistry, no sense of a meeting of equals.

There wasn’t much of a spark between Wood and Richard Beymer (the original Tony), and Wise wasn’t exactly the most audaciously original of Hollywood filmmakers. But he nonetheless found some inspired work-arounds to conjure passion onscreen. For starters, the dance at the gym where Tony and Maria meet is far sexier than anything in Spielberg’s film. In Wise’s version, the very walls of the gym are hot with passion, painted a furious red, and the dancing itself, unlike that in Spielberg’s film, is blatantly erotic. When Tony and Maria see each other at the dance in the original, the entire gym goes out of focus, leaving them with a surrealistic kind of tunnel vision for each other. Then the gym darkens into a mystical night space and the music shifts, and the entire setting goes swooningly romantic with the force of their love. In the new film, their meeting is just a face-to-face behind the bleachers.

The change is emblematic of Spielberg’s failure, because it isn’t only visual imagination and fantasy that he can’t match. The best things in his version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing. There is no police lieutenant’s open insulting of white kids, or openly racist and threatening rant against Puerto Ricans, who respond by whistling, sardonically, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The ending of the original, with its restraint and simplicity, has been weighed down with extra details and grandiosity. The remake counteracts even the basic empathies of the original. It includes a particularly vigorous version of the number “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in which the Jets mock the casual diagnoses and homilies applied to them and other so-called juvenile delinquents. But the 1961 movie offers no easy answers to their troubled lives; it agrees with the song, if only by omission. Spielberg, by contrast, delivers the very kinds of diagnoses that the song is meant to mock—he himself Krupkifies the film. He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes. Instead, he enumerates topics and solutions dutifully and earnestly, creating a hermetic coherence seemingly rooted not in the positive shaping of drama but in the quest for plausible deniability in the court of critical opinion.

The story of the original “West Side Story” is that of white Jewish artists (Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins, later joined by Stephen Sondheim ) who planned to make a musical play about Jewish and Irish gangs and then, worrying that they were heading for cliché , shifted their focus to people they knew nothing about. The result was a big stage and screen hit that has always been diminished by the blind spots of its script and its casting. Spielberg didn’t open up the story to involve new ideas and experiences, nor did he reckon with the cultural and political forces that gave rise to “West Side Story” in the first place. In a year that has also seen the release of “ Tick, Tick . . . Boom ,” a meta-musical about the composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson, one wonders about the meta-film of “West Side Story.” Perhaps the behind-the-scenes tale of its creation and its compromises was the audacious new musical that the moment was ripe for. Dismayingly, Spielberg didn’t have the courage or the insight to imagine it.

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Black characters in the film.

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One of two teens charged with murder in Columbus gas station shooting arrested

U.S. Marshals arrested one of two 18-year-olds wanted for murder in an Aug. 3 shooting outside a gas station, Columbus police said.

Isiah Wharton-Howard was charged with murder earlier this month after police said he shot and killed Michael Simmons, 28, after a fight at around 6:50 p.m. at a Sunoco gas station on the 2600 block of Noe-Bixby Road.

Marshals took Wharton-Howard into custody Wednesday in Sylvania.

Wharton-Howard, of Columbus' West Side, pulled a gun during the argument and shot Simmons, according to court records. Simmons ran away and Dwayne Johnson, 18, of Columbus, chased him, pulling out his own gun and shooting at Simmons, court records said.

Columbus police arrived to find Simmons shot at the scene. He was transported to Mount Carmel East Hospital, where he died.

Johnson, also charged with murder, remains at large.

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