West Side Story 2021

^{A new take on West Side Story}

Spielberg’s new version of West Side Story, is based on the original musical rather than Robert Wise’s 1961 film. However, Wise’s film is the inevitable yardstick against which Spielberg’s effort will be measured. Jerome Robbins, who is credited as Wise’s co-director, developed the original idea for the stage show and choreographed both stage and film versions. Robbins wanted to create a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, set in New York.

In Romeo and Juliet, the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets is attributed to an unexplained, ancient grudge. In West Side Story the Jets are a gang of young men, unemployed and poorly educated, who lay claim to a section of Hell’s Kitchen as their turf. This is beautifully captured in the opening scene as they dance through their territory, graceful and graciously dominant. Suddenly, they encounter an intruder; the Jets are melting-pot white, Polish-Irish-Italian, but the intruder is brown. He is a member of the Sharks, a gang of young men recently arrived from Puerto Rico. There is no obscure, ancient grudge here, but the familiar conflict between established residents and immigrant groups, like the conflict between nativists and Irish depicted by Scorsese in Gangs of New York, set a century earlier.

Robert Wise was one of the great Hollywood craftsmen, first as an editor and then as a director. Unlike the classic auteurs, he placed himself at the service of the material, and in translating West Side Story to the screen he worked to realise the vision shared by his co-director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, with composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Stage to screen translations often involve “opening out”, filming scenes on location to give a more realistic feel. Apart from a long aerial shot of New York and an opening sequence introducing the Jets and the Sharks, West Side Story is virtually all interiors or location-like exterior sets.  “Action sequences” – the opening, the dance at the gym, the rumble – are all balletic, and the musical convention of having characters burst into song is closely adhered to, as in the highly stylised aesthetic of the stage show. Robbins spent so many shooting days on the major dance sequences that the studio removed him and left Wise, a famously efficient worker, ins sole charge; Wise nevertheless insisted that Robbins still be credited as co-director.

Spielberg is one of the great auteurs of American cinema, and in his film he leans towards a more social realist aesthetic, within the constraints of Hollywood production values. Most of the film takes place in the area of the West Side demolished to make way for the Lincoln Centre, though it looks more like a bomb-blasted European city than an actual demolition site. Where the 1961 Jets confidently owned a territory, the grubby, ragamuffin Jets of 2021 squabble over the rubble with the immigrant Sharks.

^{White privilege}

Robbins’ original conception was of a conflict between Jews and Christians, whether gangs or youth groups I’m not sure. It was only later recast as poor white Americans and Puerto Ricans, and became the Upper East Side’s view of the West Side.

The term “white privilege” was not used widely, if at all, before the mid–1960s, but privilege is recognisably present, overtly and covertly, in the original stage production and the 1961 film. Whites can move freely about the Jets’ territory, so long as they keep out of the way, but the appearance of a brown face requires an aggressive response. The white police openly side with the Jets. More subtly, the Jets’ viewpoint is also privileged; they have more scenes, they have more songs. There are more identifiable characters amongst them, including fringe members Little Boy and Anybody’s. Even the names of the gangs reflect this privilege, the technologically modern Jets versus the dangerous, nonhuman Sharks. This does not weaken West Side Story aesthetically, but it dates the film as unmistakably as Bernardo’s pompadour.

Given the issues of identity and authenticity that have arisen concerning the casting of the film versions, it’s useful to identify the original version as a New York left liberal Jewish gay cultural product. Besides Robbins there were Leonard Bernstein (composer), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Arthur Laurents (book). The film was scripted by Ernest Lehman, a Jewish New Yorker, and Saul Bass from the Bronx did the titles and end credits – both of them straight.

The theme of white privilege under pressure from newcomers has become even more relevant in America, and elsewhere, today, but in 1961 the ethnicity of the cast members was only relevant to the question of which ones would need brown make up, and how much.  George Chakiris, ethnically Greek, became Puerto Rican through accent training and make up somewhat darker than Natalie Wood’s. This was a time when any white actor could play any ethnicity with the use of darkening makeup, and a little eye work if the character was Asiatic. Even Moreno, an actual Puerto Rican, was tinted a little darker. Nobuko Kitamura, an accomplished dancer, played a Shark girl in brownface.

This was common practice; Susan Kohner, a white Jew, played a mulatto in Imitation of Life (1958). Perhaps not entirely absurd, because the character was passing for White, and in a similar role in Pinky (1949) Jeanne Crain was cast  in preference to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. These casting decisions would pose interesting questions today. Bizarrely, Brando played a Japanese in The Teahouse of the August Moon , as did Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and equally incongruous examples abound.

Fifty years later the issue has become far more complex. The idea that a Puerto Rican ought to be played by an authentic Puerto Rican would have been politely ignored in 1961, but 60 years later considerations of inclusion and representation have disrupted conventional approaches to the making of entertainments. These considerations are essentially moral and political rather than aesthetic

^{Representation and inclusion}

In the narrative the identity of a character may be significant: gay, black, female, disabled, Communist, Jewish etc., and the actor who plays the character must normally be sufficiently convincing. Can one represent an identity that is not one’s own? Obviously yes, but the legitimacy of assuming an identity not one’s own has been called into question, particularly when the identity being assumed is of a disadvantaged group.

In the performing arts aimed at a mass audience the inclusion and portrayal of certain identities have been increasingly subject to political and commercial considerations; issues of oppression, discrimination and privilege arise, offering opportunities for reflection and reparation, and also offering soapboxes to those inclined to mount them. If there has been progress from The Birth of a Nation to The Green Mile, from degraded black rapists to the Magic Negro, it has been limited, as the goals of inclusion and relatedness have been displaced by a goal of redemption, in service not of the excluded groups but of Hollywood’s amour-propre.

Representation, inclusion, accountability – words that evoke the wish for ethical behaviour in fields where political and commercial considerations lead to contradiction, compromise and absurdity. If a straight white novelist writes a lesbian as a central character, the credibility of his work might be questioned, but the situation in the performing arts is far more complex and contested. To argue that the actor who plays Othello must be black, Shylock must be Jewish and Macbeth must be a Scot would be an insincere reductio ad absurdum, and yet the production and casting system generates its own absurdities.

1. British actress, Maureen Lipman, has criticised the casting of Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in a forthcoming film, “because the Jewishness of the character is so integral”. This is part of the “Jewface” debate, a term borrowed, or perhaps appropriated, from the discussion of “blackface”. Skipping over the concept of “Jewishness” – the Nazis had their own definition – this boils down to an assertion that Jewish characters should be played by Jewish actors. This has proved controversial, and one consequent issue is the assertion that the critics of Jewface are themselves “Ashkenormative”.

2. Lin-Manuel Miranda created the musical “In the Heights” as a celebration of the Latino culture of Washington Heights, but apologised when charged with casting fair-skinned Latinos to the exclusion of darker Afro-Latinos – not racism but “colourism”.

3. Pointing out that the original film had originated with a team of Jews, the Times of Israel asked: “Were Spielberg and Kushner the right people to attempt a remake of “West Side Story”, or should that task have fallen to Puerto Rican creatives?” Of course, the question flies in the face of all that’s ever been revealed about the Hollywood process of film funding and production, but it does underline the intrinsic endlessness of the struggle for redemption.

^{1961 and 2021}

What of the films themselves? In the 1962 Academy Awards the film won 11 Oscars; it also did very well with the critics and at the box office. Inspired by Romeo and Juliet but happily, not too faithfully, it is blessed with Bernstein’s marvellous score, and Sondheim’s lyrics are among his best although “Somewhere” was a bit wet even in the 1950s. Despite notes of social realism it is essentially as stylised and anti-realistic as any Hollywood musical of the era.

Originally conceived by Jerome Robbins, West Side Story it is a dancer’s musical, combining jazz ballet with light opera in a frequently exhilarating fusion – but the leading characters don’t dance. Richard Beymer (Tony) had started as a child actor and was being built up by 20^th Century Fox as the next big thing. Natalie Wood was an established young actor and gave the film a recognised name above the titles. Neither of them could sing, but dubbing took care of that. Acting was a different matter; Beymer was wooden and unconvincing, and recalls the experience of playing Tony as “miserable”, and though Wood made a decent fist of Maria she had to concede centre stage to the fiery, exuberant Anita of Rita Moreno – sexy always trumps virginal.

Well cast minor characters add to the texture of the film. Simon Oakland’s Lieutenant Schrank has a face straight out of film noir; Ned Glass perfectly inhabits the role of the weary old Jewish drug store owner, Doc. Schrank represents the overarching social authority, arriving after the killing of Tony, like the fleet of police cars which arrive so often after the cathartic finale  If Schrank represents tardy, negligent authority, Doc is the voice of reason, an impotent commentator reminding the audience of what they ought to think, a regular figure in movies about war. Anybody’s (what a grossly misogynist name!) is an equivocal figure, female dressed as male and, despite her name, of indefinite sexuality. Clarity on this point would not have been commercially acceptable at the time.

But however well the actors do, in opera and ballet the plot must be simple and unsubtle because it is in service to the music and dance. The dance sequences in the Wise film are simply stunning – in the opening ballet of the fight for territory, in the dance at the Gym where the Sharks’ mambo confronts the Jets’ Lindy Hop, in “America” and the Rumble, and above all in the “Tonight” quintet.

Spielberg and Kushner set out to adapt their film from the stage show rather than remake Wise’s film, in which the song order of the stage show had been changed at the behest of Sondheim and Robbins and the lyrics of “America” altered to be more biting. in 2021 the the original song order and lyrics were restored, both of which negated improvements in the initial transition from theatre to film. The 1961 version had Maria sing “I feel pretty” with her workmates in a dress shop just after she first meets Tony, and is a dialogue between her ecstatic infatuation and their scepticism. In 2021 the song follows the rumble; Maria is now a cleaner in Gimbel’s, a much more upmarket setting giving far greater opportunities for production design and cinematic flourishes, but since the audience know about the deaths at the rumble her optimism now plays off against the bitter irony of the actual situation. However, the virtuoso visuals diminish the irony, leaving something reminiscent of a 1950s MGM musical. Although Robbins is given part-credit for the choreography, almost all of it is done by Justin Peck – workmanlike, but not inspired.

The biggest change is in the casting. In line with current expectations, Spielberg has sought to redress the balance of ethnicities in the casting. Most of the Puerto Rican roles have been given to Puerto Ricans, or at least Latins – Maria has a Colombian mother and a Polish father, Bernardo’s parents are both Cuban and Anita has just one Puerto Rican parent. African-Americans, invisible in Wise’s New York, are included in Spielberg’s; a Black crim sells Riff the pistol that Chino eventually uses to kill Tony, a Black couple have a walk-on during the “Jet Song” and a couple of Black kids briefly join in the dancing for “America”. The ambiguous, feisty Anybody’s returns as an explicit but gloomy transsexual.

Sondheim approved the changes Kushner and Spielberg made, updating the plot and casting in line with ethnicity. An imaginative plot twist allowed Rita Moreno, the original Anita, to reappear as Tony’s employer Valentina the deli owner, having taken it over from her deceased husband Doc. Casting Moreno is an hommage to the 1961 film that doesn’t quite come off The character is a wise-woman cliché and to justify her presence Spielberg allows her to sing “Somewhere”, a naïvely optimistic song when performed by the young lovers in the original film, but saccharine in the remake.

The cast changes are hit and miss. Mike Faist is convincingly grungy as Riff, and despite some poor reviews Ansel Elgort’s Tony is at least as convincing as Richard Beymer’s. As Anita, Ariana DeBose pales beside Moreno, and although Rachel Zegler is pretty and sings her own songs, it’s unfair to compare her with an experienced actor in Natalie Wood.

Spielberg’s film was warmly received by the critics but the paying public didn’t turn up. A stage show can be revived, but a remake of a 60-year-old movie is another matter. Forget the flim-flam about it being a re-adaptation of the stage show, it’s a remake, and the rationale for its existence is questionable. The racial, sexual and political insensitivities of the old Hollywood are a part of history now and ought not to be replicated but nor can they be redeemed and though WSS21 is a watchable film, as a $300m act of contrition it’s a failure. 

Spielberg has offended the offence-takers in the same way Lin-Manuel Miranda did. Some of the “Puerto Ricans” are not Puerto Rican at all, Puerto Rican reality is filtered through the White imagination, and Hollywood is Whiter than ever, anyway. Some give Spielberg points for trying, but redemption remains a chimera.

Spielberg will move on and make better films; his current project is a semi-autobiographical film about a Jewish family, so he should be alright there. Meanwhile, there is still this: