YOUNG LOVERS
Ansel Elgort
and Rachel Zegler
as star-crossed
Tony and Maria.Romeo and Juliet romance between Tony
and Maria over a contemporary story
of street gangs, racism, and violence
in the shadows of rising skyscrapers.
When director Robert Wise and chore-
ographer Jerome Robbins adapted it into
a lm in 1961 , West Side Story broke the
box oce record for musicals and dom-
inated the Oscars, winning 10 awards,
including best picture. Six decades later,
the stage show has toured the world and
been revived repeatedly. (A new produc-
tion, directed by Ivo van Hove, opened
on Broadway in February.) Of course,
it’s also so commonly performed at
high schools and community theaters
that if you haven’t seen it, it’s probably
because you were in it.
Threaded throughout the story is the
question of who has the right to call a
place home and why people who are
struggling look for reasons to turn on each
other. “This story is not only a product
of its time, but that time has returned, and
it’s returned with a kind of social fury,”
Spielberg says. “I really wanted to tell that
Puerto Rican, Nuyorican experience of
basically the migration to this country and
the struggle to make a living, and to have
children, and to battle against the obsta-
cles of xenophobia and racial prejudice.”
Like Fiddler on the Roof or The Sound of
Music, West Side Story locates the joys that
endure in hard times. For the new lm’sS
TEVEN SPIELBERG HAS been mak-
ing West Side Story in his head for
a very long time. As a boy in Phoe-
nix in the late 1950 s, he had only
the soundtrack, and he tried to picture the
action and dancing that might accompany
it. “My mom was a classical pianist,” says
the lmmaker. “Our entire home was fes-
tooned with classical musical albums, and
I grew up surrounded by classical music.
West Side Story was actually the rst piece
of popular music our family ever allowed
into the home. I absconded with it—this
was the cast album from the 1957 Broad-
way musical—and just fell completely in
love with it as a kid. West Side Story has
been that one haunting temptation that
I have nally given in to.”
The ilm, out December 18 , is both
a romance and a crime story. It’s about
dreams crashing into reality, young peo-
ple singing about the promise of their
lives ahead—then cutting each other
down in bursts of violence. It’s about hope
and desperation, pride and actual preju-
dice, and a star-crossed couple who nd
love amid it all on the streets of New York.
West Side Story became a global sen-
sation when it hit Broadway in 1957 ,
with a book by Arthur Laurents, music
by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by
Stephen Sondheim that made genera-
tions swoon, snap, and gasp. The show
was both dazzling and gritty, layering aVETERANS
Steven Spielberg
with Rita Moreno,
who won an
Oscar for playing
Anita in 1961.108 VANITY FAIRPHOT
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