West Side Story -- a review

 

First watch this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5GJLwWiYSg

This, friends, is the best movie I've ever seen. Yes, just like the original 1957 Broadway play, it is a musical. So if you do not like musicals, you need not watch it. And if you like musicals because they are joyously light entertainment, you may not want to watch it.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet inspired Jerome Robbins' original Broadway production of West Side Story. 

        William Shakespeare 1597                                                        Jerome Robbins 1957        

The young daughter and son of two rich,                             A young Puerto Rican girl and white boy

powerful Veronese families fall in love.                               from poor families fall in love.

Two households, both alike in dignity                                 Two gangs, both alike in poverty 

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),                            in Manhattan's Upper West Side.

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,                         A neighborhood divided by race,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.                     being torn down by Urban Renewal.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes                         Both gangs are losing their "turf."  

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;                         A pair of star-crossed lovers meet.

           ....                                                                              

The fearful passage of their death-marked love                   Hate warps their death-marked love.

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,                          If their love cannot defeat hate.         

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.                     Can death?

West Side Story is set in the mid-1950s in Manhattan's Upper West Side. The blue-collar neighborhood is already stressed by limited resources and racial strife. Add to that Urban Renewal. New York City intended to remake substandard inner city housing and limited or deficient community services into a clean, safe place for people to live. It, however, ended up destroying neighborhoods and displacing poor and powerless people.

Robbins' Broadway musical reimagines Shakespeare's wealthy and powerful Veronese Montagues and Capulets with New York City street gangs. Tony, a former member of the white Jets and best friend of the gang's leader, Riff, falls in love with Maria, the sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican Sharks. Their love story inflames already explosive neighborhood racial tensions. 

The musical's dark theme focusing on real life, contemporary social problems ending in violence and tragedy expressed in music and dance marked a turning point in American musical theatre.

From the mid-'50s into the '70s, West Side Story's theme was real life experience for the people living in Manhattan's Upper West Side neighborhood. In April, 1955, Mayor Robert J. Wagner, Jr.'s Slum Clearance Committee approved Lincoln Square for Urban Renewal. Committee Chair Robert Moses defended his forced displacement of poor and minority communities saying, "I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs."

The Broadway production was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, in 1958, winning two. The 1961 film adaptation, co-directed by Robert Wise and Robbins, starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won ten, including Best Picture. 

2021 Enter Steven Spielberg
Is there anything he can't do? And do it better?

I chose this photo of Spielberg, because in it, he looks like someone I would like to know. Okay, so I've never seen Jaws or Saving Private Ryan and don't intend to, but his movies -- The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Lincoln, The Post, and now the remake of West Side Story make me think he is the kind of man I would like to know.

What is different, 1961 to 2021? Lots and little. The story is the same. 

The cinematography has, as one would expect, changed the most in the 60 years since the first West Side Story movie. Technology, technology! Remember they didn't even have cell phones in 1961. No human had yet stepped on the moon. The movie industry was still dangling space ships from wires.

                

from the 1961 movie                                     from the 2021 production

The new production's light and color seem to heighten the sense of an old neighborhood being torn down to be rebuilt, all shiny and new, for shiny new people because its current residents will not be able to afford to live there.

Top: Rita Moreno as Anita in 1961. Scene shot on a set in a studio.
Bottom: Ariana DeBose as Anita in 2021. Scene shot on the streets of Harlem.

2021 Rita Moreno
as Valentina,
the voice of reason in 
Spielberg's West Side Story

The Sharks' leader and Maria's brother Bernardo

  
1961 Sharks                                              2021 Sharks      

        George Chakiris definitely sexier            David Alvarez, pretty attractive, too  

The Jets' leader and Tony's best friend, Riff

              

                         1961 Jets too cool                                    2021 Jets too eager                                              Russ Tamblyn                                               Mike Faist                 

The Balcony scene

1961

 
Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood

I didn't know if the new Tony and Maria, Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler, could come up to Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood, but they do. If anything, they seem younger which makes the "love at first sight" premise more believable. And their being so quickly swept away by their passion without regard for the tragically strong passions their own would provoke.

2021

Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler

Leonard Bernstein's music and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics are unchanged, "Almost perfect in every way."

Gustavo Dudemel conducted The New York Philharmonic, recording about 80 percent of the score in New York City. Then the Covid lockdown hit. Shifting to Los Angeles, post production, Dudemel conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic to finish recording the music. 

A man named Justin Peck, just 34 years old, did the choreography for Spielberg's movie. It's possible his parents weren't even born when the first West Side Story movie was made.

The music and choreography build a solid emotional base for the story.

Spielberg uses Shakespeare's pacing -- build tension then break it with humor. Let the audience relax, then drop the hammer.

In this production, Spielberg follows the threatening behavior at a school dance and an even more aggressive clash on the street between the two gangs with a decidedly humorous scene in the court room. Tension builds again only to be broken by Maria.

Celebrating her new love, she whirls and twirls through the department store where she works as an after-hours cleaner, singing "I Feel Pretty." It's light-hearted and colorful, but reminds us that Maria and her fellow cleaners are too low on the social register to shop in the store they clean.

When Maria gets off work, the hammer drops.

The Rumble -- 2021
Take overhead photography,
emphasize shadows,
add music, dance,
threaten death.

Murder happens. More murder happens. Nothing can stop the violence except more murder and threat of murder.

The terrible fabric of violence between people, against love, against hope, woven of music and dance will break your heart.

Eaglecrest High School Speech Tournament -- An essay

So, what is one to do on a snowy Saturday? I don’t know about ‘one,’ but I know what I did yesterday. I was a volunteer judge at a high school speech tournament – The Eaglecrest Raptor Rumble.

Eaglecrest High School is on the far side (meaning away from the mountains) of Centennial, Colorado. I’ve been to Centennial before. My husband likes a woodcraft shop down there and my father’s ophthalmic neurologist’s office is there. Say that twice, fast – the ophthalmic-etc.-part not woodcraft.

Our region was under the weather gun with promises of the biggest snow storm in three years. They were predicting five to ten inches, maybe more. Rain turning to snow Friday night, then snow Saturday through Monday.

I’d never been to the east side of the city of Centennial. I started to say town, but with a population of more than 100,000 and me being from Oklahoma, that qualifies as a city.

I got lost twice. Once going to and again coming from. Saturday morning the highways were wet and a little snow-packed in places, but generally fine. I had never judged at a speech tournament before and it was many years ago that I competed in them.

So, by the time I drove the twenty-five-plus miles on iffy highways through unfamiliar territory on my way to do something I’d never done before in the midst of people I did not know, I needed a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll.

Actually there were two people there I knew. Bob O’Daniel and Cortney Green, both of whom are practically family by way of my daughter Grace. And it was reassuring to see them.

I had planned to stay until noon, and considering the weather, I stuck with that plan.

That means I only judged two events.

The first was Extemporaneous Speaking, my personal favorite back in the day. In this event, each competitor draws a question involving either a national or international issue. They have 30 minutes to prepare a seven-minute speech.

In the old days we would come with a box full of file cards bearing various and sundry bits of information, quotes, research sources, and concepts. Man, today I’d just bring my tablet and Google away.

The competitors came into the room one at a time and give their speeches. There is no audience -- only the speaker and the judge. The judge has been admonished not to judge the speaker based on whether or not you agree with them. The judge is not to discuss the speech or speaking style with the student. The judge writes comments on the ballot sheet, hopefully including at least three statements of what they did well and three pieces of constructive criticism.

Of the five young people I judged, one was outstanding, two were very good, and one only slightly less so.

The fifth was a young man who was great. He was immaculately dressed and presented himself with great élan. He spoke clearly and confidently. He cited sources for his information and presented a good argument for his answer to a question. However, he only tangentially connected his speech to the question he drew. It appeared he had prepared his speech before coming to the competition and did not let the question he drew dissuade him from his chosen course.

He’ll make a fine lawyer, or politician, or TV preacher. But I ranked him dead last. In fact, the officials requested that I not give him such a low score because it was 15 points below their lowest allowable score.

The other event I judged was Poetry Interpretation. All five of these competitors obviously understand that poetry is a performance art. It was hard to rank them, but we weren’t allowed to have ties. They each chose very different poems to perform.

Only one chose a rhymed poem which, to my mind, gave her a handicap. One which she did not completely overcome. Rhymed poetry is so hard to read without falling into the sing-song trap. The rhyme is too easily given more importance than the story.

The poem was The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. If you do not know it, it is a romantic ballad with the traditional star-crossed lovers. The young woman dies to save her lover who in turn dies attempting to avenge her death. A situation I find more poignant than Romeo and Juliet where the young people end up dying because he failed to get the memo.

In The Highwayman love concurs all. The ghosts of the lovers continue to meet.

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor . . . .

If done right, the performer can even avoid melodrama.

Those high school age people participating in the tournament are the future of our nation, our culture, our species. And they promise a bright future indeed.

There were no baggie pants, no dirty jeans, no fuzzy house slippers. Come to think of it, there were no flip flops either, but that could have been because of the weather. Best of all, there were no slovenly thinkers.

P.S. Bob taught me how to use my phone as a stop watch. I suppose I'll have to learn how to use its GPS app, too.