West Side Story

seen on 18 January 2022

Was it just the excitement of attending a cinema? Or the pleasure of attending a cinema with a friend? I have done both these things last November. But with Steven Spielberg's new version of West Side Story there was an added exhilaration almost from the first moments as Leonard Bernstein's music started, the fingers of the Jets began clicking as they walked through the demolition sites which were encroaching on their turf, and the heady adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet story took off.

With a few new twists to the story provided by playwright Tony Kushner and a startlingly fresh cast led by newcomer Rachel Zegler and fresh-faced heart-throb Ansel Eglort as Maria and Tony, Ariana DeBose as Anita, and a touching new role written in for Rita Moreno (the original Anita in 1961) as an elderly shopkeeper who has taken on Tony as an employee after his time in prison, the film is full of energy and passion, driven by the wonderfully rhythmic score but slowing in the right places for the emerging but dangerous love between Tony and Maria to be expressed in the softer lyrics Stephen Sondheim provided for them.

The film is still set in the 1950s, with the slums of the West Side fated for demolition ironically to prepare the way for the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts, home now of the Metropolitan Opera, and one of Bernstein's stamping grounds. Once that nice irony has been flagged everything is concentrated on the turf battles between the Jets and the Sharks, the prejudice against Puerto Ricans, the intensely tribal mores of the men and the difficult loyalties of the women. The camerawork is sharp, the choreography by Justin Peck sharper, evoking at times the original work by Jerome Robbins, but adding a grittier flare in place of the often stylised presentation of the older film. Rachel Zegler's Maria is beautifully poised, while Ansel Eglort's Tony is engagingly lovestruck though his fresh-faced good looks make it hard to believe he has survived fifteen months in the gruelling US prison system even as a juvenile (one of the new narrative twists which is used to help explain his reluctance to re-enter the gang culture of his friends).

I came out of the cinema determined to get hold of the DVD when it is released.