A Word, If I May, in Defense of “West Side Story”

I thought I was done with “West Side Story.” When I saw the 2020 Broadway revival, I felt almost nothing and thought, well, I guess I’ve seen that show one too many times. I realized, of course, that director Ivo van Hove’s techno-centric production was extremely dissociative. He dwarfed his actors by projecting enormous filmed images of them on the walls behind and around them. At times actors filmed other actors using handheld cameras, and those projected images likewise overwhelmed the ant-like action on the stage. The point of this undoubtably had to do with how racism and poverty produce a dissociative environment, but, for me, the director’s choices seemed to undermine the art of theater itself. Or maybe, I thought, I’ve felt everything there is for me to feel about “West Side Story,” and now it’s like a cod cake, something I adored as a kid that I now go out of my way to avoid.

Growing up I loved, almost lived for, musicals. Like the Jews who created “West Side Story” and who adapted and directed the new film, I came from parents or grandparents who emigrated from places that did not want them and that they did not miss. By the time I was born, in 1958, the family had found safety and sanity in an all-Jewish suburb of Baltimore called Pikesville. Too much sanity, for my spoiled taste. Like so many members of my theater-loving tribe, I heard the siren song of the city. I listened to the cast albums in my parents’ collection and dreamed about a far-away place called New York where people were incredibly witty and lived vivid lives filled with adventure and art. Particularly alluring at that time were two shows written by a boy who grew up in similar circumstances in Jersey City whose name was Gerald Sheldon Herman. For kids like me the lyric “Out there! There’s a world outside of Yonkers!” called directly to us, and we prayed to Saint Bridget to deliver us to “Be-eee-eee-e-eeckman Place,” where we would learn to be unconventional and open a new window every day.

Like the Jews who created “West Side Story” and who adapted and directed the new film, I came from parents or grandparents who emigrated from places that did not want them and that they did not miss.

A childish dream, but not a bad one.

As we grew up, we might even, some days, be slightly embarrassed by embracing such lovable, daft whimsy, but usually we were proud of it. Because wrapped in that culture of the musical, where we were never bored, was a central tenet of progressive American thought in the twentieth century. You may not remember, but in the climax of Jerry Herman’s “Mame,” the glamorous heroine’s nephew Patrick, who she raised to be unconventional and life-loving, has somehow fallen in love with a young woman who is a boring snob and whose parents are well-heeled bigots. Mame throws a party for her potential in-laws, the Upsons, inviting all her flamboyant and creative friends, the kinds of people who the Upsons think are not “top drawer,” causing Patrick to realize he should not marry the girl Mame privately refers to as “the Aryan from Darien.”

When I read Yarimar Bonilla’s recent critique in The New York Times about the new “West Side Story” film directed by Steven Spielberg and adapted by Tony Kushner, a playwright who has dedicated his career to dissecting the overwhelming fact of oppression, it piqued some proprietary feeling in me. So I went to see the film, and I was moved and excited by the choreography and a new generation of stars. I cried copiously and recalled what I felt very strongly as a young person, that if we want to make a better world, our best tools are love and forgiveness—something that Spielberg underlines again and again by nestling Tony and Maria’s love scenes in a spectral white light that connotes holiness.

Bonilla confesses she never saw the original, and by that she means the 1961 film version starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer—for theater nerds, “the original” would mean the 1957 Broadway production.

She begins by saying that she didn’t know much about the musical except:

All I knew is that it somehow involved gang members dance-fighting and singing about how much they loved America. I wasn’t interested. But then, growing up in Puerto Rico, I never had to search for myself in the side plots of Hollywood or Broadway. I could watch the movies and television shows made by and for Puerto Ricans.

I think it’s safe to say that her capsule summary, though clearly an assumption, isn’t at all what “West Side Story” is about—yes there are gang members, and yes there is choreographed testosterone — but the film is clearly a critique of anti-immigrant sentiment. To miss that is to miss the essence of the piece. It’s also true that the movie was not made by and for Puerto Ricans. Pointing that out raises serious questions about the nature and meaning of art and audience, but let’s put a pin in that, for the moment, and move on to Bonilla’s theory as to why Puerto Ricans living here and in the homeland liked the film back in the day:

The 1961 film most likely was the first time they saw themselves represented on the big screen. Despite the convoluted plot, the dearth of actual Latino actors, the mishmash of Caribbean and Spanish culture and the deep stereotypes it trafficked in, it at least offered a recognition of the Puerto Rican presence in the United States and allowed us to be seen with some measure of grace and beauty.

Let me take a brief exception with the word “convoluted,” which “West Side Story” is not. This is an extremely fast-moving and straight-forward script. Every action that a character takes is the direct consequence of another action. Shakespeare’s audience had no trouble following the plot of “Romeo and Juliet,” and in the 9th century Ovid’s readers very much liked his tale of Pyramus and Thisby. Ovid himself adapted the story from an earlier myth. This is a story that’s stood the test of time. It’s a very clear story, Kushner and Spielberg’s version perhaps even more so than the original.

I think it’s safe to say that her capsule summary, though clearly an assumption, isn’t at all what “West Side Story” is about—yes there are gang members, and yes there is choreographed testosterone — but the film is clearly a critique of anti-immigrant sentiment.

But further, I would wager that, whatever else Puerto Rican viewers in the 1960s saw in the film, at least some of them embraced its central message—again, that love and compassion are the only things that can make this corrupt world lovely—a message of which we need to be constantly reminded in a powerful way. Leonard Bernstein’s music, to me, delivers that power. His emotional range as a composer was enormous, bigger than almost anyone else’s who wrote music for Broadway shows, and that includes Stephen Sondheim, who at the time was chafing to write both music and lyrics but who agreed to write only the lyrics for “West Side Story.”

The show’s summing up, its offered epiphany, can be found in the song “Somewhere,” which features the show’s simplest lyric:

Somewhere
We’ll find a new way of living
We’ll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere.

The melody starts with a cautious gravitas and wends its way upward to a place from which it wants to soar but can’t because of the heavy sense of loss that lies upon it. It’s a melody that gave the young Sondheim a chance to write his first song as momentous as those of his teacher and friend Oscar Hammerstein II. Like Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel,” “Somewhere” offers a shortcut to our spiritual self, to the being that emerges from within when our world falls apart and we must shoulder on. I have found, throughout my life, that these songs have the capacity to soothe me in my darkest moments, just as they can almost always be counted on to deliver audiences to a transcendent plane where we stand outside of our own mortality and assess our lives and life itself.

Politically, these songs and the shows that launched them come from an ethic of caring that belonged to a person who used to be called a “liberal”—i.e. a progressive who held a passionate belief in the improvability of the human condition and was dedicated to human rights for all. They were written largely for a burgeoning middle class—mostly white—who drank them in and bought cast albums by the millions. Both the songs and the shows sailed past cultural boundaries and were embraced by people around the globe. And the message of these shows and many others from the golden age of Broadway, taken together, is that if we are not all interconnected in some fundamental way, we are all lost.

And the message of these shows and many others from the golden age of Broadway, taken together, is that if we are not all interconnected in some fundamental way, we are all lost.

But I digress. Let me rewind a little and go back to Bonilla’s argument:

They say the devil is in the details, and there are many that this film gets right, from the pale blue of the Puerto Rican flag on the nationalist murals in the set, to the specificity of slang words. But just because a historical text is accurate, does that make it authentic? . . . The film is littered with symbols of Puerto Rico’s nationalist movements, but there is no recognition of how people who embraced these symbols have long been surveilled and criminalized by the federal and Puerto Rican governments. There is a particular irony to the scene in which the Sharks are singing the Puerto Rican revolutionary anthem as they walk away from the police. As the cultural critic Frances Negrón Muntaner has argued, in real life such an act would have likely landed them under F.B.I. surveillance.

It is true that the young men would probably not have sung the version of a song that might land them in jail. This was an over-correction on Kushner’s part as he tried to show the Sharks’ pride and love of their place of birth. It is also true that “West Side Story” is an historical text in that it was written at a certain time and so tells us something about that time. But “West Side Story” is first and foremost a musical play. Even if it were based on an actual series of murders, it would still be a work of fiction and its “authenticity” should not be judged in an accounting of whether or not its details are an adequate representation of actual history or contain the exact pieties of the moment. “War and Peace” is inadequate as history. “Hamilton” is inadequate as history. And while I understand how completely annoying and even harmful the success of “West Side Story” has been and still is for many Puerto Ricans, it’s also true that no one could find the infinite varieties of their experiences in one musical play.

The most startling anti-Spielberg rhetoric came from The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who rushes to the finish line before he is out of the gate. His piece (“Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ Remake is Worse than the Original”) begins:

A rich and famous artist spends a hundred million dollars to revive a corpse with the blood of young people. The creature is still alive, but barely, and the infusion leaves it deader than when it started. This is not the plot of the latest horror film from A24 but the unfortunate tale of Steven Spielberg’s efforts to remake “West Side Story.” 

Obvious from the headline, Brody dislikes every single change that Spielberg and Kushner made to the text, including the one whereby Tony’s decision to forgo gang life comes not from a simple change of heart but was inspired by a year’s stint in prison, where he was sent after nearly killing someone in a fight. Brody finds all the new storylines full of “facile psychologizing” and “flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology.” Clearly the critic stands against shortcuts that reduce complex human journeys to packaged insights, particularly ones that seem to bow to correct contemporary positions. So I was startled to learn that, for Brody, Tony’s confession that prison gave him time to think about his mistakes represents, in the view of the filmmakers, “an endorsement of incarceration.” Still scratching my head about that one.

Writers have objected to aspects of the musical since it was created and have built a robust and necessary dialogue about it. In his 1994 essay “‘West Side Story’: A Puerto Rican Reading of ‘America,’” Alberto Sandaval-Sanchez examines how the 1961 film projects “ethnic difference as a threat to the national, territorial, racial, and linguistic identity as well as to the national and imperial subjectivity of the Anglo-Americans.” Sandaval-Sanchez migrated from Puerto Rico to Wisconsin in 1973 to attend college, and he found that the film was “frequently imposed upon me as a ‘model of/for’ my Puerto Rican ethnic identity.” He continues:

Over and over again, to make me feel comfortable in their family rooms and to tell me of their knowledge about Puerto Ricans, they would start their conversations with WEST SIDE STORY: “Al, we loved WEST SIDE STORY.” “Have you seen the movie?” “Did you like it?” On other occasions, some people even sang parodically in my ears: “Alberto, I’ve just met a guy named Alberto.” And, how can I forget those who upon my arrival would start tapping flamenco steps and squealing: “I like to be in America! … Everything free in America.”

Sandaval-Sanchez at last sees the movie in the 1980s when he moves to New York, and he becomes particularly concerned about the song “America,” not only for what he believes it says, but because audiences love the number so much—it “constitutes one of the most rhythmic, energetic, and vital hists in the history of musical comedy.” It was this song that moved him to write about the film:

My interest on decentering, demythifying, and deconstructing ethnic, social, and racial stereotypes of Latinos inscribed in the musical film was the result of witnessing the reaction of an Anglo-American audience that applauded euphorically after the number “America.” Only then did I understand the power and vitality of the musical, not just as pure entertainment, but as an iconic ideological articulation of the stereotype and identity of Puerto Rican immigrants in the U.S.A. as well as for all other Latino immigrants. I also realized at the same time that in the musical number “America” there is a political campaign in favor of assimilation. Such assimilation is pronounced by a Puerto Rican herself, Rita Moreno, whose acting was awarded with the coveted Oscar Award.

But why did the show and movie become iconic? I do not believe it was because viewers subconsciously supported an imperialist argument for assimilation. I think first and foremost and despite what it gets historically right and wrong, “West Side Story” is a critique of racism in America and as such it holds the host side, the Jets, the more responsible party. In 2021 Kushner tried to address earlier criticisms of the musical by altering dialogue to underline the point that the Jets are even more infused with violent, toxic masculinity, and he suggests that they are direct forefathers of the white nationalists we see today. The police chief makes the point when he calls Riff, the leader of the Jets, “the last of the can’t-make-it Caucasians.” Then Riff complains that everything is being taken away from him and “the only thing I have is these guys who look like me.” Riff is the one who decides the gangs have to “rumble.” Riff is the one who brings a gun to a knife fight. When Riff tries to set the time for the fracas, Shark leader Bernardo rejects the first offer, saying with pointed anger, “We have jobs.” And, finally, as in the original, it is the Jets, not the Sharks, who turn out to be a bunch of group rapists.

I think first and foremost and despite what it gets historically right and wrong, “West Side Story” is a critique of racism in America and as such it holds the host side, the Jets, the more responsible party.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous criticism of “West Side Story,” remarked on by Santiago-Sanchez, has been included in almost every negative review of the film, and was echoed in Carina del Valle Schorske’s 2020 New York Times piece called “Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die:”

The show’s creators didn’t know, or didn’t seem to care to know much about their own material. The lyricist Stephen Sondheim at first expressed doubts about his fitness for the project: “I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even met a Puerto Rican.” The initial concept, an adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” recast with teenage street gangs, didn’t involve Puerto Ricans at all. The artists toyed with a number of ethnic possibilities—Jewish people? Mexicans?—before settling on the version we know now.

In the words of Leonard Bernstein, the show’s composer, “the Puerto Rican thing had just begun to explode.” For Mr. Bernstein, that “thing” was a fortuitous coincidence for his formal experiment, but in the real world, it was an enormous postwar migration from the island that had “nearly doubled” New York City’s Puerto Rican population in just two years, as the scholar Lorrin Thomas notes in her book “Puerto Rican Citizen.”

The suggestion is that the choice to make one of the warring factions a Puerto Rican gang was exploitative, and that, once chosen, the added current-events value of the scenario somehow relieved the creators of the responsibility of further research, or deep thinking or feeling about the characters involved. In fact, Sondheim and Bernstein’s comments describe only the start of their thinking on the project. And, as today’s critics are almost certainly aware, most works of art take circuitous paths before finding the right road. Once on that road, true artists commit to the story before them. This is not at all unusual, nor does it imply a lack of commitment to getting that story right, to give it cohesion and relevance.

One can’t help but detect, though, running through the new crop of critiques, an a-historical anger that we see directed at not only the art but also the artists of the 20th century who fail to live up to current standards, many of whom were among the most progressive artists of their times.

The new generation always schools the older generation; that is how it should be. One can’t help but detect, though, running through the new crop of critiques, an a-historical anger that we see directed at not only the art but also the artists of the 20th century who fail to live up to current standards, many of whom were among the most progressive artists of their times. In the Slate piece “Down with ‘West Side Story,’” Odie Henderson makes the argument that “West Side Story” is de facto irrelevant because it is old:

It’s a dusty, outdated, racist musical that hit the Great White Way when my mother was in grammar school. Sure, it has some great songs, but so does “Porgy and Bess,” the even more racist opera that also keeps getting restaged. At least the Gershwins had the wherewithal to ensure their work wasn’t going to be cast with a bunch of white people in blackface.

Reporting on the film’s mediocre box-office numbers, Henderson admits, “The schadenfreude I feel is delicious.”

Artists like George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and Oscar Hammerstein II are in the cross-hairs today because they wrote about cultures not their own without a full appreciation of the socioeconomic and cultural forces at play, but they did so because they cared about injustice and they cared about other cultures. Although their version of progressivism is not ours, they changed the country. Do the artists and activists of the past deserve the contempt of the new progressives because the world is still a mess? Before they wrote, it was worse. In September 1957, the month that “West Side Story” debuted on Broadway, nine Black students were prevented from attending their new high school by the governor of Arkansas, the National Guard, and a screaming mob. Inter-racial marriage was illegal in twenty-six states. Redlining, or “restrictive covenants” that excluded people of color from buying houses in certain neighborhoods, was legal. And nobody, but nobody, had a diversity, inclusion and equity officer on staff.

Meanwhile, the new “West Side Story” film has been banned in six Middle Eastern countries: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait. These countries, some of which implement the death penalty for men who engage in homosexual acts, asked Disney to cut out the character of Anybodys, a Jet-worshipping tomboy in the original who is now transgender. The company refused to make the cut. In response Kevin McCollum, one of the film’s producers, said he believes that “West Side Story” will overcome any border.

Someday, maybe. Maybe not.

A former drama critic for The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, Laurie Winer is a founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her book “Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical” will be published by Yale University Press in the fall.