“To be honest, making West Side Story was intimidating,” Steven Spielberg said at the movie’s lavish premiere in New York on Monday evening.
I first listened to the West Side Story album when I was 10, and it’s been part of me ever since.”His new West Side Story is based not on the 1961 film, but the original 1957 Broadway musical created by director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died last Friday at the age of 91—two weeks before the new movie’s December 10 release.
Spielberg collaborated with writer Tony Kushner and Sondheim on the updated story, which tells a classic tale of forbidden love and bitter rivalry between two street gangs in 1950s New York.
And we cast all Latinx actors for the Shark boys and the Shark girls.”In previous Broadway revivals, many non-Latinx actors have played the Sharks, who are Puerto Rican; in the 1961 movie, some Caucasian actors wore brown face makeup while playing those characters.
“I am so proud every single Latino character is portrayed by a Latino actor, and that is very important because we are authentically showing what it means to be Latin,” said Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for playing Anita in the original 1961 film and appears as Doc’s widow, Valentina, in the new film.
— Jennifer Lawrence Exclusive: “I Didn’t Have a Life.
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