My History with West Side Story.

It began when I was about five.   I was in Mom's room watching the family TV, when over the white noise of the idiot's lantern, I heard a man singing in a voice that hinted at mischief and mockery.  I entered the living room where Mom was playing "Gee, Officer Krupke" from the motion picture soundtrack of West Side Story.  I imagined the singer in a rakish Elizabethan get up:  A garish red jacket ruffled shirt, tight leggings, and an audacious cap with a flamboyant feather as its centerpiece.  I didn't realize how off target I was with the time and place of the story, yet at the same time so close.

Not long after, West Side Story was playing on television.  My family was gathered in Mom's bedroom and I saw this world for the first time in my life.  It was New York City - MY city.  An aerial view swept over the blooming skyscrapers and rectlinear streets until it finally settled on the slums of what would one day become Lincoln Center.  My high school is behind Lincoln Center, next to the NYCHA project Amsterdam Houses, which is probably the last stand of the pre-gentrified West Side, but I digress...

The street gang known as the Jets appear first, with Russ Tamblyn as Riff as their leader.  They snap their fingers menacingly and are dressed in a technicolor version of fifties urban camouflage.  No, they weren't clad in rakish Elizabethan foppery, but these guys were no doubt the inheritors of that era.

Enter the Sharks, street tough with their hair slicked back in the ducktail style.  Bernardo is also snapping his fingers, his eyes slit with predatory ferocity.  Some dress more sharply than the Jets and others are just as grimy, but in a Broadway kind of grime.

Both factions burst into an angular, aggressive dance.  Now, I was five or six years new to this world, but even I knew that the bad boy counterparts in real life didn't leap and pirouette like ballet dancers.  What the hell, I told myself.  It's a movie.  It's a musical.  What did I expect?  Reality?  The ragazzi I would read about in Pier Paolo Pasolini's novels was years into my future.  These are the Hollywood mean streets.

The dance escalates into a brawl.  I ask myself:  Which side should I be rooting for?  I have an Irish working class Noo Yawk drawl when I get emotional that I inherited from my Mom.  So should I side with the Jets?  My Pop's genes blended with my Mom's which gives my flesh that beige in the winter, bronze in the summer hue.  So, I resemble the tan skinned Puerto Ricans in appearance.  So should I root for the Sharks?  I don't have a drop of Latino blood in me, but hey, neither did George Chakiris.

Lieutenant Schrank breaks up the brawl, and I'm a little disappointed.  Here we have this balletic mano a mano and this frumpy, plainclothes killjoy puts the kibosh on this display of youthful testosterone abandon?  Okay, pops.

Let's fast forward a few scenes to the school dance.  Again we have aggression through movement which  vanishes into the background when Tony and Maria first lock glances.  Tony knows the rough and tumble world of the West Side too well thanks to Riff, and virginal Maria has been protected from it by Bernardo. For those reasons you know that neither of them belong in this fucked up neighborhood.

So as the Jets and Sharks draw battle formations, Tony and Maria try desperately to brush aside the lines scrawled into the dirt.  They duet with "One Hand, One Heart."   An oasis of love forms in the middle of this grey and gritty battlefield.  Damn it to hell if this informal exchange of vows don't draw copious tears from my eyes.

The "Tonight Quintet" is the collision of the gangs' violence, Anita's carnality (this musical could sure use more of it), and Tony and Maria's snowy purity.  The piece pumps your blood and sends your feelings and thoughts into a thousand wild directions.  Will love or hate prevail?  And where's carnality in this fracas?  I want more of that!  Enough of the chaste arias between the two lovers already!

The Rumble, of course, is the point of no return.  Switchblades gleam in the muted red lighting!  Riff and Bernardo engage in a life or death scrap!  Tony tries to pull them apart!  Tony's friend dies!  Maria's brother dies!  Now Tony is on the run with only Anybodys to guide him through the back streets.

The final act is exchanges between love, hate, lies, grief, and the narrowly escaped rape of Anita.  Three misguided souls, Tony, Maria, and little Chino converge in a playground in the dark.  Fate condemns Tony to death.  Maria is destined to grief and probably lifelong spinsterhood.  Poor Chino?  He now has blood on his hands like nearly every other character and will probably spend decades if not life in prison.

In Pablo Casals I.S. 181, we are all assigned to read The Bard's Romeo and Juliet and do the obligatory screening of Zefferelli's adaptation of the same.  We all know that this is the progenitor of West Side Story, so we recognize the cast in both stories:  Tony is Romeo, Maria is Juliet, Riff is Mercutio, Bernardo is Tybalt, Anita is the Nurse, Doc is Friar Laurence, the Jets are the Montagues and the Sharks are the Capulets... and so forth.

Now as for the colorful jackets, ruffles, leg stockings and flamboyant feathered caps I envisioned the West Side Story cast wearing years before?  Now, now, it fits my imagination!  Michael York and John McEnery are duded up in the Renaissance / Elizabethan gear I imagined Bernardo and Riff wore when all I had for reference for WSS was the soundtrack!

I've seen various permutations of both WSS and R&J over the years, the most remarkable being Baz Lurhmann's Romeo and Juliet from 1997 or 1998.  This time Johnny Legs is Tybalt, armed with a Rapier 9mm.  Harold Perrineau's Mercutio offers Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo a ecstasy-like drug called "Queen Mab."  Baz went to town with this iteration!

Jump ahead to 2021.  Suze and I are settling in for a screening of the wrongfully overlooked adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights.  However, among the trailers I see one with a few leitmotifs of a musical I know all too well.  Then a visual, of the virginal, angelic Maria clad in white with a red sash beheld by an earthbound Tony.  The title card announces a remake of WSS directed by... Steven Spielberg.

My eyes roll heavenward and I groan.  Really, Hollywood?  Are you really out of any new ideas?  Let me rephrase that:  Are you totally immune to new ideas?  You're trying to remake perfection with a new West Side Story?  And with Steven "Jaws" Spielberg at the helm?  He's never directed a musical before!  Come on!  Hard pass!

Jump ahead again to December of the same year.  WSS is in theaters.  Suze tells me that the running time of the film is 2 hours and 35 minutes.  "No," I say grumpily.  "No, no, no!  My ass is still aching from Dune - Part One.  I have had enough epic length films for one god damned lifetime!  Hard pass, honey!  Enjoy watching it yourself!  You can tell me about all the damage Spielberg inflicted on it when you get back."

So I go with Susan to see West Side Story.

I was mightily impressed.  The dancing, music and singing still had me spellbound after all these years.  Riff and the Jets looked grungier and Bernardo and the Sharks looked like they just spent their time working up a sweat in the gym.  Now Bernardo is a boxer and nerdy Chino is going to night school for accountancy.  The scenery and choreography are radically different than Robert Wise's WSS and injects new life into this now old Broadway workhorse.  As I said earlier, the new Maria still wears her iconic white dress with red sash and Tony is still the former street tough trying to turn a new leaf.

And damn it, "One Hand, One Heart" still makes me turn on the waterworks.

At forty eight, I'm more experienced with love.  For Suze and I, it was love at first sight.  Yet it took me two years to work up the guts to court Susan in the late nineties.  It took another year to propose to her and marry her.  Twenty plus years later I consider us a testament to commitment and the truest love, even taking into account what a royal pain in the ass I can be.

So this frumpy old couple looked at Tony and Maria through a new lens.  On the drive home we both blurted out simultaneously, "Tony and Maria knew each other for only TWO DAYS!"

If West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet aren't the dumbest, most naive, most pandering testaments to what I call "wuv," I don't know what is.  How have these two adolescent fantasies weathered the test of time when they have as much substance of a gum snapping top 40 pop song?

Then we remember.

William Shakespeare, Robert Wise, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins don't create gum snapping top 40 pop songs.  They don't write adolescent fantasies.

They take adolescent fantasy and elevate it to American Opera.

And lest we forget, Steven Spielberg, though known for Jaws, is also celebrated for that black and white epic Schindler's List.   He may be new to musicals, but he's an old hat at making art.  Ain't it so, Chief Brody?

And I'm no stranger to enjoying dumb stories made for kids and adolescents.  Everyone knows I'm a big fan of Star Wars.  You take away Joseph Campbell's elevation of the series to the status of a modern myth and what are you left with?  Flash Gordon... with samurai... and a landfill's worth of plastic merchandise.  Don't get me started with anime.  I was a fan of anime when being a fan of anime got you a wedgie from the school bully and titters of derision from the girl you were crushing on.  Animated characters with ridiculously proportioned saucer eyes and jagged hair that would make Sid Vicious' jaw drop.  Anime has subgenres including giant robotic samurai punching the shit out of each other or girls in school uniforms that have the power of Olympian goddesses.  Oh, and several landfills of plastic merchandise.

So if I have room in my heart for that, surely there's room for West Side Story with all its treacle and operatic grandiosity.  As a plus, there's no plastic merch to clog up landfills or push my vast collection of books off my shelves!

Hey, did I mention that "One Hand, One Heart" makes me weep like Niagra Falls?  'Cuz I'm not sure if I did.

Just play it cool, boy.

Real cool.

Snap, snap, snap, snap...

-JJB

P.S.  Tristan and Isolde are the great grandparents to Romeo, Juliet, Tony, and Maria.  Give that epic romance a read, why don'tcha?