Steven Spielberg, absolute master, responds to the impossible stake, to the ordago, go, to readapt one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history: West Side Story (1957) by Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jerome Robbins (choreography) and Arthur Laurents (screenplay). Behind him is a classic as categorical and insurmountable as West Side Story (1961) by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins -who readapted his choreographies to the language of cinema-, an icon of classic musical cinema and winner of 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actors: Rita Moreno (Anita) and George Chakiris (Bernardo) -the main ones, Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, left empty-. West Wide Story
Why?
To build such a complex company, we must try to face the following question: Why make a new West Side Story if there is already an insurmountable West Side Story? Why? Is it that people have abandoned classic cinema? Is it not available on the platforms (it is: in Filmín)?
We buy the fact that it is worth it, in fact, it is very worthwhile, to be able to see West Side Story on the big screen, but how does the play go better in business terms (those that matter to those above)? That is: How do we make more money? Producing a new movie (costs) with an undeniably popular director (Spielberg) in the hope that people flock to theaters (profits)? Or directly replacing the classic at Christmas while waiting for the nostalgic apparatus of the elders to push the young people to the cinemas? Questions thrown into the open sea of a society devoured by the entropy of the soft sofa and quick access to dramatically banal and aesthetically flattened content. Let's keep going.
Let me be understood: I would make the viewing of West Side Story compulsory in public schools, a new liturgy: the cinematographic, and this term only great musicals: Singin' in the Rain (1952), An American in Paris (1951), The Red Shoes (1948), Hoffman's Tales (1951), My Fair Lady (1964), Purple Rain (1984), The Muppet Movie (1979), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Cabaret (1972), Funny Girl( 1964), Smiles and Tears (1965), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Guys and Dolls (1955), Little Shop of Horrors(1986), Annette (2021)...
But, assuming my status as an older man who raises his cane to the sky with a sour gesture, I have to admit that I have been moved to the marrow by Steven Spielberg's West Side Story. For two basic reasons:
1. Because of the filmmaker's cinematographic class, where, in his first musical, he gives a lesson in staging the genre, always adhering to the basic codes laid down by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and who, in many moments, seeks to mimic the shot with the Wise and Robbins film (from which it retains its choreography)
2. For the frontal anti-hate message that the film recreates in its new adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet”. Spielberg's West Side Story is not only the beauty of the recreation of a classic musical, it is also a political film about how love should overthrow hate and, however, hate manages to feed itself until it takes everything ahead. That's why West Side Story is an anti-racist, anti-nationalist, anti-xenophobia... definitely anti-hate film, the kind of film that someone who votes for the far right won't understand.
