The Pulitzer-winning screenwriter on working side-by-side with the late Stephen Sondheim and how the 'anti-racist' musical hopes to sidestep 'In the Heights'-style casting controversies.
The first time I heard about it was when Steven and I had breakfast in New York around 2016. He said, “I have a project that I’d like to propose.” And he said he wanted to do. And my first thought was, “You’re out of your mind.” And I came home and told [my husband, author] Mark [Harris]. I said, “Steven wants to redo. I can’t think of anything harder, and I hope he drops it.” But he didn’t drop it. He kept bringing it up and talking about it.
You’ve mentioned that Arthur Laurents’ book is a classic and you wouldn’t change anything from the original film. So how do you go about taking something that you wouldn’t change and change it? at home. And like any good little gay boy, I listened to every original cast album I could get my hands on. And I listened to it a lot. So that more than anything else was whatAnd when I started working on the screenplay for this, I didn’t go back to the soundtrack album for the movie. I went to the ’57, the album that Sondheim produced, the original cast album. And I learned lots of things that I think are important to the heart of this musical from that.
I live in Lincoln Towers, right behind Lincoln Center. If you watch the ’61 film in the prologue, there’s a moment when I believe it’s the Jets running up an embankment. And right down below them, the Sharks are waiting, and they throw vegetables at the Jets. But if you look past the actors, and you look into the distance, you see what looks like Hiroshima after the bomb. It’s a completely devastated, what used to be obviously a big urban neighborhood, but nothing is still standing.
There are a couple of versions of some of the songs, like “America.” So we were able to do a kind of cherry-picking thing, working with him. I just followed the original cast album and gave Spielberg moment by moment what I thought was happening in each of the songs. One of the first things I did when I finished the screenplay, which has a lot of Spanish in it, I called a friend of mine, Julio Monge, who’s an actor and a choreographer and is Puerto Rican. And I asked him if he’d help me work on the Spanish. So we hired him to work on the Spanish, to make sure it was Puerto Rican inflected.
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