The stage-to-screen transition frequently poses insurmountable challenges in translating the magic of live performance into cinema, so it’s exceedingly rare for a Broadway musical to get even one successful cinematic adaptation. West Side Story miraculously now has two. The pair of filmed versions of the musical—released 60 years apart in 1961 and 2021, respectively—each have distinct sets of strengths and weaknesses that are all the more apparent when juxtaposed with each other.
Despite praise for its grit and grounded location work at the time of its release, the charm and artistry found in the 1961 West Side Story today comes from its embrace of the larger-than-life artifice and spirit of Broadway musicals, ascending to the realm of the fantastic whenever possible. The film, directed by Robert Wise with support from Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins, features some of the most powerful dance sequences ever staged in American cinema. The opening number—a wordless dance brawl between the Polish-American Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks—breezily and effectively introduces the conflict, mood, and supporting cast with nothing but Leonard Bernstein’s stunning score and Robbins’ vigorous choreography, performed by stage dancers with precision and remarkable athleticism. But the ‘61 Story’s other standout scenes are the ones that almost border on abstraction. The blurry tunnel-vision meet-cute between Tony and Maria at the school dance uses surreal, dreamlike imagery to maximize the pure romantic energy of their introduction, while the rooftop extravaganza of “America” and the aggressive garage hijinks of “Cool” both find their power in maximalist stylistic indulgence. The latter two numbers serve little narrative utility, as they’re marvelous exercises in relishing the spectacle of the choreography, music, and Stephen Sondheim’s cutting lyrics. Aside from Rita Moreno, the performances aren’t fantastic, but the cast’s dancing prowess is so strong that it’s tough to remember your quibbles with their line deliveries when they’re in motion.
Unfortunately, popular prejudices of the era influenced the filmmakers to cast almost all white actors in Puerto Rican roles, caked in brown makeup with little regard for authenticity. There’s a sharp, distracting dissonance between the story’s persistent anti-hate messaging and the prejudicial casting decisions that make almost all the Sharks’ scenes somewhat difficult to fully appreciate: how could a movie with such antiracist aspirations be made in such a racist context?
It makes perfect sense, then, that West Side Story enthusiasts Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner would want to create a new cinematic edition of the musical without the uncomfortable cultural baggage of the 1961 version (they consistently refer to their movie as a “re-adaptation” or “reimagining” of the Broadway show, rather than a true remake of the Wise film). The 2021 version immediately distances itself from its predecessor in a number of ways, the most obvious being its casting of culturally-appropriate Latine actors as the Sharks. But the more substantial changes come from the film’s aspirations to ground the story in a more organic, lived-in reality. The performances are far more naturalistic and emotional, and actually utilize the actors’ incredible singing voices, unlike the original film, which employed numerous vocal dubs. Kushner’s script—which almost entirely rejects the book from the original musical that the ‘61 version so heavily drew from—pays far more attention to individual character arcs, providing each player with a stronger personality and motivation than either the Wise film or the source musical. Tony has reformed after a history of troubling violence, Bernardo is a boxer and breadwinner for the parentless household he shares with Maria and Anita, Chino is Bernardo’s sensitive younger-brother friend full of potential, and Riff wants to save his neighborhood from gentrification. Establishing the motivations and bonds between these characters helps give the story’s tragedy much more emotional weight: the senseless murders in the second half seem much more understandable when the warm fraternity between the rumblers has been so stunningly established in the first half. By enhancing the naturalism and emotionality of the film’s characters, Kushner’s dialogue (including some unsubtitled Spanish) and Spielberg’s pitch-perfect blocking make the non-musical scenes almost as enticing as the show-stopping song-and-dance numbers.
And what exhilarating numbers they are. Though Spielberg can’t quite top the bravado of Wise’s opening skirmish, nearly every other musical sequence is as strong as or stronger than their 1961 equivalents. The new film wisely recontextualizes many of the songs. “America” takes to the streets in the daytime instead of being confined to a dark rooftop, becoming an exuberant outburst of the neighborhood’s conflicted collective joy. “Cool” is now a slick dockside battle, pitting Tony’s nonviolence against Riff’s aggression as they scuffle over a pistol. “Something’s Coming” gives Tony an audience in Rita Moreno’s Valentina. And the numbers that use comparable locations to their ‘61 counterparts are assisted by more complex shot selections and staging: “Tonight” uses dramatic closeups and physical barriers between Tony and Maria to emphasize the emotions and tension of their mutual interest, while the school dance utilizes elaborate gliding camera movements to give a greater sense of the gym’s geography.
But some of the new Story’s deviations from the old hinder its overall impact. The film moves “I Feel Pretty” to after the tragic rumble, which Spielberg and Kushner have defended as integral to making the audience sympathize with Maria’s ignorance of the fight’s devastating consequences. But despite the visual splendor of the sequence, it’s so tonally jarring that it takes a lot of wind out of the second half’s sails. The new version also relocates Tony and Maria’s faux-wedding (“One Hand, One Heart”) from the closed fabric store to the Cloisters uptown—and the decision to move from a private space to a public location dampens the sense of intimate play in which the couple engages, subsequently disrupting their budding chemistry. Perhaps the most disastrous alteration, though, is the handoff of “Somewhere” to Valentina. The switch is metatextually moving because of Moreno’s ties to the ‘61 film, but eliminates one of the most essential turning points from Tony and Maria’s relational trajectory—in the Wise film, it serves as a penultimate climax for the couple, but here, it’s reduced to something close to a montage.
Yet there are also endemic flaws at the very core of the West Side Story text that no amount of updating or rewriting can adequately address. Spielberg and others have described the driving narrative as “a story about love and hate,” which sounds simple on paper, but becomes much thornier and more complicated upon inspection of the original musical’s genesis. The show was created by four white men with no meaningful connections to Puerto Rican culture, yet assumes an uncomfortable attitude of unfounded familiarity with it. The creators weaponize a culture they know almost nothing about to make a point about “love and hate,” but fail to adequately address the systemic issues at play. Yes, Sondheim’s lyrics in “America” acknowledge the difficulty of immigrant status, but the broader construction of the overall story is much more troubling because it paints the Sharks vs. Jets conflict with a tonal and thematic palette that suggests both sides are equally disadvantaged, equally immoral, and equally at fault.
This is an inescapable problem when storytellers map Romeo and Juliet’s star-crossed lovers routine onto real-world cultural conflicts––if the feud between the Montagues and Capulets is presented as a “both sides are wrong” struggle in Shakespeare’s original play, then the same judgment (or lack thereof) falls onto its updated versions like West Side Story. It’s foolish to make a musical about racism that suggests racial prejudice is a two-way street when evidence overwhelmingly supports that it’s always one-sided, at the expense of the minority. The lofty baggage of its cultural depictions—even if updated to be more respectful and authentic in its details, as the 2021 version is—means that West Side Story can only succeed on technical, artistic, and emotional levels, and never on a sociopolitical one. As such, both film versions of the musical have a lot to love and a lot to question, and they’re both striking works of art that future generations will continue enjoying and unpacking.