What its creators attempted — a swirling fusion of literary sophistication and contemporary social concern, of playfulness and solemnity, of realism and fantasy, of street fighting and ballet — hadn’t quite been attempted before, and hasn’t been matched since.
The idea of harnessing the durable tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet” to the newsy issues of juvenile delinquency and ethnic intolerance must have seemed, to Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, both audacious and obvious.
The genre has always been a glorious, messy mash-up of aesthetic transcendence and commercial ambition, a grab-bag of styles and sources held together by the energy, ingenuity and sheer chutzpah of scrappy and resourceful artists.
Spielberg’s version, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner that substantially revises Laurents’s book and new choreography by Justin Peck that pays shrewd tribute to Robbins’s genius, can’t be called flawless.
Rather than embalming a classic with homage or aggressively reinventing it, Spielberg, Kushner, Peck and their collaborators have rediscovered its breathing, thrilling essence.
A sign posted at one of the demolition sites shows a rendering of the shiny Lincoln Center arts complex that will rise where the slums once stood.
This “West Side Story” is explicitly historical, grounded in a specific moment in New York City’s past.
Shakespeare’s play supposes “two households, both alike in dignity”; in Act III, Mercutio famously calls down “a plague” on both of them.
The Jets and the Sharks, a white teenage gang and their Puerto Rican antagonists, aren’t mirror images of each other.
The Jets, by contrast, are the bitter remnant of an immigrant cohort that has, for the most part, moved on — to the Long Island suburbs and the bungalows of Queens, to a share of postwar prosperity.
As the song says: “Life can be bright in America/If you can fight in America.” But what lingers after this “West Side Story” is a darkness that seems to belong more to our own angry, tribal moment than to the optimistic ’50s or early ’60s.
The cast members — notably including Rita Moreno, who was Anita in 1961 and who returns as a weary, wise pharmacist named Valentina — bring exactly the sincerity and commitment that a movie like this requires.
Tony and Maria are sweet and likable, but also a bit bland, and their whirlwind progress from infatuation to eternal devotion, which unfolds over a scant two days, feels shallow against the big, complicated forces moving around them.
This is partly a consequence of Kushner and Spielberg’s commitment to realism and historical nuance, and in some ways it works to the movie’s advantage.