The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular B films of West Side Story’s own era – those black-and-white films of the 1950s in which rebellious teenagers, led by a charismatic male (Vic Morrow or, better still, Marlon Brando), maraud and rumble, mock respectable grownups (especially teachers), terrorize proper teenage girls, talk hipster slang (“Daddy-o!”), and give veteran cops (character actors like Edward Platt or Robert Keith) the runaround. This isn’t real street life, about which most of the American public, including Arthur Laurents (and Sondheim), knew little. Sensationalized and simplified, this is street life as Hollywood chose to see and sell it.
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I came of age, during my late teens, in the golden era of the LP, the original-cast recording, and the Broadway musical. I came of age, in other words, in the era of West Side Story. It marked, for me, the upper limit of “modernist” musical theater’s potential. Here in abundance were great new possibilities for raw excitement (that dance music), drama (Anita and Maria’s duet), musical sophistication (the “Tonight” quintet), satire (“America”), and lyricism (“Maria”). Of course, I’m speaking only of the Bernstein/Sondheim score, as available to me on the recording. It wasn’t until much later – after coming to know all of West Side Story, via the 1961 film and, later, a full, touring-company production – that I began to see anything counterfeit in this treasure.
At the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s new West Side Story, a sign at a demolition site tells us that Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will be constructed here. At the showing I attended, the sign provoked laughter. Maybe the laughter was a kind of protest against so aggressive a move from Spielberg and Tony Kushner to modernize the original. Or maybe, more fundamentally, it was a protest against any effort to bring reality in too close contact with this world of artifice and fantasy.
Take Maria. She is puertorriqueña, yes, but she is first of all that ageless daughter of the stage the ingénue: young, pretty, sweet, and innocent (“Maria” is also spotless Mary), and therefore needing protection. She’s modeled on Shakespeare’s Juliet, but Romeo arouses a prodigious passion – desperate and violent – in Juliet, and ingénues don’t do passion; they do loyal devotion. Her real ancestor in musical theater is a far more limited creature – Oscar Hammerstein’s Magnolia or Julie. Watch an interview with Rachel Zegler and you’ll marvel at the grace with which an actor so fully vital – mentally, verbally, emotionally, physically – is able to diminish herself to fit inside little Maria.
The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular B films of West Side Story’s own era – those black-and-white films of the 1950s in which rebellious teenagers, led by a charismatic male (Vic Morrow or, better still, Marlon Brando), maraud and rumble, mock respectable grownups (especially teachers), terrorize proper teenage girls, talk hipster slang (“Daddy-o!”), and give veteran cops (character actors like Edward Platt or Robert Keith) the runaround. This isn’t real street life, about which most of the American public, including Arthur Laurents (and Sondheim), knew little. Sensationalized and simplified, this is street life as Hollywood chose to see and sell it.
Given their second-hand origins, it’s a struggle to bring the Sharks and Jets to authentic life. David Alvarez, as Bernardo, and Mike Faist, as Riff, deliver charged performances as the gang leaders, but, by a cruel irony, the greater the performers’ verve as Sharks or Jets, the hollower their roles feel. Corey Stoll and Brian d’Arcy James seem wholly defeated as the flustered cops, and Spielberg, apparently sympathizing, doesn’t bring them forward. They give us pastiche bordering on parody – impersonations, for old times’ sake, of the likes of Broderick Crawford or Lee J. Cobb.
Sondheim himself said that, given the inherent realism of film, he’d never seen a screen actor plausibly break into song. Certainly, having the gang members sing and dance complicates the authenticity problem. In the film’s weakest scene, however – the drugstore scene in which the Jets, without Riff, assault Anita – the gang members don’t sing or dance at all. Still, we just can’t see them as brutal or lawless. Compliant under Riff’s guidance, they seem aimless and undermotivated without it. (The scene’s clumsy staging doesn’t help.) Plus, we know these guys as healthy, well-trained chorus boys. Who follows orders better than a dancer?
Sondheim also believed that he and Laurents had created a convincing speech idiom for these stage toughs. Yes and no. It’s hard to imagine a gang member reminiscing about “your first cigarette,” and no one speaking naturally commits the redundancy of “your last dying day.” The Jets’ rather creepy motto – “Womb to tomb!” “Sperm to worm!” – is exchanged a few times by gang members, with fading conviction. (Rhetorically, the Jets, like Shakespeare, seem to favor antithesis.) Relieved of the introductory “Smoke on your pipe and put that in,” the language of the Sharks’ “America” stays wonderful – short quips in pointed but natural-sounding language that fly and land on the song’s bullet rhythms. Even the fancy verb tense of “Everyone there will have moved here,” which caps the song, doesn’t sound arch; in context it sounds inspired. (Argument makes you clever.) But the language of the Jets’ “Gee, Officer Krupke” never sounds natural. The song makes fun of the social psychology of “juvenile delinquency” of the fifties, but the analytical language being satirized seems well beyond any Jet’s interest or experience. The wordplay of “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!” would appeal mainly to – well, Stephen Sondheim.
And yet the Jets’ “Krupke” number is a highlight of the film. These foot soldiers get to break ranks and, in smaller, ad hoc groupings, cavort and clown – mug, roll, bounce, do flips and pratfalls. Bernstein’s harsh, driving jazz rhythms give way to burlesque oompah, and the dancers’ showoff abandon suggests that they’re happy just to be entertaining us, released for the moment from the solemn self-seriousness of the movie’s prevailing atmosphere. The two other big dance numbers – “Dance at the Gym” and “America” – achieve a similar exuberance. “America” is led by the most accomplished of the major performers, Ariana DeBose; her Anita is triumphant, elevating her to hero and muse of physical joy. Both are “challenge” numbers (Sharks vs. Jets in “Dance at the Gym,” Sharks vs. Sharks in “America”), but in both the dramatic purpose fades as the screen fills, top to bottom, with energized dancers. “America,” especially, becomes a vast community celebration, in a neighborhood of open air and sunshine beyond gloomy West Side tenements and rubble. You don’t complain, however. You smile.
Maria isn’t allowed the effusion of dance, and it’s a good bet that Tony won’t be either. (He didn’t dance in the play or the 1961 film.) As Ansel Elgort plays him, Tony remains a sullen outsider, sulking around the periphery, troubled in a Troy Donahue sort of way, even after finding Maria. We’re told he’s just done time, but that’s hard to believe, given Elgort’s preppy vibe. A close brush with the film’s moral mascot, the scold Valentina (a role for Rita Moreno created for the film), seems to seal Tony’s disaffection. But then Tony has to confront Riff. The music for a number starts up – and Tony steps up. Elgort’s dancing isn’t as polished as Faist’s, but it’s athletic, it’s game. The dance moves are difficult but he holds his own, at the jazzy center of “Cool.” Look at that, I kept thinking. They’re letting Tony dance. These were my favorite moments in the film.
West Side Story has heights, depths, and places in between. But don’t ask me to renounce or dismiss it, in any of its iterations. It’s, for me, too much a cultural touchstone, too much a part of the foundation of my tastes. To forsake West Side Story would take an act of unthinkable disloyalty. I would have to betray myself.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshot from the film’s trailer.
