West Side Story
Directed by Arthur Laurents
One of the great cultural disappointments of my life came at the age of 23, when I watched the Academy Award-winning film version of the Broadway musical West Side Story for the first time as an adult. I had seen the movie at least a dozen times on television and loved it beyond measure.
At some point, I had already begun to see a few shortcomings. Like the way Natalie Wood’s brown pancake makeup, intended to make her look Hispanic, instead gave her the aspect of a shrunken-headed kewpie doll. Or how the extremely fey Richard Beymer seemed almost physically ill when the script called upon him to kiss Wood, then one of the most beautiful women in the world. But what the hell. It was West Side Story, and who could object?
Then came the nightmare moment, when I journeyed to the American Film Institute’s theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington to see West Side Story on the big screen. And it was . . . awful. Draggy scenes. Inappropriately theatrical lighting. And the dialogue! Hep cat blather from the late 1950s, including the peerlessly comic moment when one of the skanky girlfriends of the white gang offers the following words of wisdom: “Ooh . . . ooh . . . oooble-dy ooh.”
By the time Natalie Wood cradled the dead Richard Beymer in her arms, I was cradling my head in my hands. The songs were still great, and the dancing too, but everything else about West Side Story seemed overdone, overcooked, and dreadfully dated–a problem drama about juvenile delinquency and racial strife that might have resonated in the early 1960s but which seemed quaint and silly two decades later.
A new revival of West Side Story has just opened on Broadway, the first in nearly 30 years, and I sat through it last week not with head in hand, but with heart in mouth. The evening was one of the most thrilling I have ever spent in a theater. It turns out that the distance of a half-century from the show’s opening has drained it of any specific relevance; no longer ripped from the headlines, West Side Story turns out instead to be a high melodrama. In terms of the emotions it evokes, West Side Story is more akin to opera than any other Broadway musical ever written.
The director, Arthur Laurents, makes this almost explicit with an inspired decision to allow the Puerto Rican characters to speak Spanish to each other for the most part, and (again for the most part) to sing their songs in Spanish as well. The choice works, and works brilliantly, because it makes the characters seem less like ethnic stereotypes and more like recognizable people.
The fact that the lyrics of two songs are entirely in Spanish doesn’t prove at all onerous, because the songs in question (“I Feel Pretty,” “A Boy Like That”) are so familiar that we remember what the words mean. But even if we didn’t, like a Verdi aria in the days before opera houses provided supertitles, Leonard Bernstein’s remarkable music conveys the emotion. (And to be honest, the lyrics in question are ghastly, as their author, Stephen Sondheim, himself has admitted; the show benefits from our not having to hear “A boy like that, who kill your brother/Forget that boy and find another.”)
Part of the problem with the movie is the use of close-ups; they make the instant love affair between Maria, the girl just off the boat, and Tony, the white-ethnic gangbanger who’s gone straight, seem preposterous. On a stage set that evokes the streets of New York but remains largely barren and abstract, we almost don’t notice the lovers discovering each other across a crowded gym floor until they are embracing. Four immortal songs, coming at you over the course of 20 minutes, make the romance between Tony and Maria rapturous and infectious: “Something’s Coming” and “Maria” and “Tonight” and “One Hand, One Heart.”
The revival was directed by the author of the libretto, Arthur Laurents, who is 90 years old. Judging from this production and his work last year at the helm of his other peerless musical libretto, the one for Gypsy, Laurents the nonagenarian has achieved a purity of vision and an ability to bring out the most heartfelt aspects of his own work that mark him forever as one of the great directors in the history of Broadway. He is building here, as he did for Gypsy, on the original work of the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, but the clarity of feeling seems entirely original to Laurents.
By bringing out the delicacy and beauty of the relationship between Tony and Maria, Laurents causes the audience to hope against hope that they will indeed secure the future together they deserve–even though everyone watching knows full well that all will end tragically. This injection of blissful teenage optimism makes the dark turn of the plot (the show is, of course, based on Romeo and Juliet) all the more painful and gripping.
Musicals triumph when music, lyric, story, and dance all combine to produce an indelible emotional response in the audience that is akin to joy. Even though the new Broadway West Side Story ends with the sound of weeping, taken as a whole, it is a transporting experience–and, for a onetime admirer turned betrayed skeptic, a restorative one.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
