This year, my birthday was on a Tuesday, and a really shitty one. It was wet and cold, plus, you know, I was a year closer to death and all that. What could I do to combat the meteorological and existential gloom? I knew just the thing. A single ticket for a 10am screening of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Already, my day was looking up.
The risk was minimal, given that I’d already seen Spielberg’s movie – which follows, at a respectful distance, the first 1961 film version, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, which was itself based on the 1957 Broadway production conceived by Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (itself based on Shakespeare’s… etc) – at a press screening, from which the usually stony-faced film critics emerged beaming and finger-clicking into the late afternoon.
I could have spared myself the dreary walk in the rain and watched Wise and Robbins’ original film adaptation at home, which starred doe-eyed Natalie Wood as Maria and smiley Richard Beymer as Tony, won 10 Oscars including Best Picture, and is frequently named as one of the best movie musicals of all time. But I’d seen it again recently, so as to be able to better compare it to Spielberg’s (which has itself been nominated for a not-to-be-sniffed-at seven Oscars ahead of this year's awards at the end of March), and after a couple of months of reflection I had come to realise… I like the new one better.
Watch 'West Side Story' on Disney+
In some respects, this is the easy option. The casting of white actors as the Puerto Rican street gang, the Sharks, in the 1961 film has been much discussed (in a debate that has good reason to continue); so too the uncomfortable sense that the Jets are being pitched, even subtly, as the “goodies”. On a technical level, though the dancing is sensational, it’s also hard not to feel disconnected by the fact that the voices you hear on Tony and Maria’s big numbers – “Maria”, “Tonight,” “Somewhere” – are not Beymer’s and Wood’s (Tony’s songs were performed by Jimmy Bryant and Maria’s by Marni Nixon, both uncredited at the time).
Spielberg’s version comes with some problematic casting of its own: Ansel Elgort, who plays Tony, was accused of sexual assault after the film had finished shooting (in an interesting IRL plot twist, Rachel Zegler, the new Maria, is now dating Josh Rivera, who plays Maria’s spurned lover Chino). But to focus on the allegations against Elgort – not to mention that he’s the only cast member who, as he dances, seems to be counting in his head – takes away from the radiance that Zegler brings to Maria, or the bruised feistiness of Ariana DeBose’s Anita, or the sinewy elasticity of Mike Faist’s Riff.
And of course societal awareness has come along – just a little, and sluggishly, but still – since the original film was made: Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner’s new screenplay, some of which is in Spanish (and sin subtítulos), gives greater space to the political and economic undercurrents in the story, as the more recently arrived Sharks come up against the longer established, now disenfranchised Jets (who, guess what, are from immigrant stock too!), within a rigged system that considers them both alike in dignity (ie. Having none). Likewise Spielberg – and by extension choreographer Justin Peck – can take advantage of the abilities of cameras now to swoop and dance in a way that can make set pieces like “Dance at the Gym”, "America" or “The Rumble” newly immersive and electrifying.
And you know what else is wrong with the first movie? Sondheim rearranged the songs from the Broadway running order and, well, it drags. Spielberg’s film is more closely modelled on the original stage production, and it restores the placement and narrative tension to songs such as “Cool” and “I Feel Pretty”, while also bringing new poignancy to “Somewhere,” sung this time by 90-year-old Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar as Anita in the 1961 film and for whom a new role in the 2021 movie, as twinkly-eyed store owner Valentina, was devised.
Later on on my birthday Tuesday, my godmother in New York sends me an email. She’s a former dancer and worked with Robbins briefly. Like Justin Peck’s father, as he told Esquire last year, she saw the original Broadway production as a child. I confessed to her, sheepishly, that I’d just been to see the new movie again and had been having some sacrilegious thoughts about the first. My godmother replies that she has mixed feelings about the new one, says she missed the more abstract elements, and wonders if having more exposition “robs some of the poetry”. Then she cracks. “If truth be known,” she writes, “I was quite moved by it.”
Of course you shouldn’t take my word – and her half-word – for it. If you missed Spielberg’s West Side Story in the cinemas you can at least now judge it for yourself, on a smaller screen but without the wet walk, as it has just become available to stream at home. And if, after watching it, your preference is the same as mine, don't be ashamed. There’s a time for us. Someday, a time for us.
West Side Story is now streaming on Disney+
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
