12/17/2023 0 Comments West side story movie intermission![]() ![]() The show itself has been among the hardiest of theatrical perennials ever since its original galvanic Broadway premiere, when as legend has it, first-night audiences were so silent when the curtain went down that, for a few seconds, the cast had thought the show had failed. A 1996 all-star album, “The Songs of West Side Story” (RCA Victor), carries an eclectic list of performers that includes Aretha Franklin, Wynonna Judd, Phil Collins, Chick Corea, Natalie Cole, Kenny Loggins, Salt-n-Pepa, Brian Setzer and Little Richard doing – what else? – “I Feel Pretty.” After all, it’s not as if the Bernstein-Sondheim standards have ever strayed into obscurity, with pop vocalists across the spectrum incorporating them into their repertoires. Despite its status as a show that so many know from high school productions past, this new Broadway “West Side Story” – and the reactions to it, as well as the anticipation of the film that is to come – evoke a 21st century reality to an uncanny degree.Īsking “why now, why this show” is a fair question. ![]() ![]() Just who decided that this was a time for a show rooted in 1957 New York to reappear in shiny new configurations for 2020 audiences – and, more to the point, why are these remakes happening at all? A scan of social media or the comments section of articles about either of these productions shows plenty of people wondering. And this December, a new big-screen movie version of “West Side Story” will open with Steven Spielberg directing a young, predominantly unknown cast and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner adapting a screenplay based on the musical’s original book by Arthur Laurents.Ī scene from the 1961 movie, "West Side Story." Gjon Mili-Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images There’s a radically reimagined-for-the-new-Millennium production now playing on Broadway, complete with giant digital screens augmenting the on-stage action. In Tony’s case … well, if you know the story, you know what was coming for him in the end.īut if you’re one of the few who don’t, you’ve got two chances this year to see new versions of the classic musical retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as a teenage street gang melodrama. Tony, at that point, became the surrogate of those young and old theatergoers who didn’t know whether to hope for the best or brace for the worst. “Who knows?” To American audiences of the late 1950s and early 1960s who first encountered “West Side Story” on stage or screen, the lyrics (by Stephen Sondheim) and the music (by Leonard Bernstein) connected to the mid-20th-century’s collision of Cold War dread and socio-economic progress. ![]()
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