Directing his first musical, Spielberg moves into the big roomy space of a Broadway-meets-Hollywood classic, rearranges the furniture (the film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, has spiced up the dialo…
” has a brash effervescence. You can feel the joy he got out of making it, and the kick is infectious. Directing his first musical, Spielberg moves into the big roomy space of a Broadway-meets-Hollywood classic, rearranges the furniture , and gives it all a fresh coat of desaturated, bombed-out-city-block, gritty-as-reality paint. He makes it his own.
The Jets start off slathering paint on the mural of a Puerto Rican flag. As the boys move and groove to their inner thug, singing “Jet Song” Of course, at the center of “West Side Story” is something — maybe I should say “Somewhere” — softer and more tenderly lyrical. And Spielberg has done an ace job of casting his two romantic leads. Before now, I’ve never been a fan of. One’s first thought about him may be that he’s Ashton Kutcher without irony — and that you miss the irony. But in “West Side Story,” Elgort, with lips like Brando’s, has a brooding heart and personality that pop, and he’s a wonderfully expressive crooner.
That said, I’ve always had a love/gripe relationship with “West Side Story.” It has what may be the greatest set of songs in any American musical, composed by Leonard Bernstein as if he were the magic link between Richard Rodgers and Brian Wilson. The lyrics, by the late Stephen Sondheim, are as peerlessly playful as they are poetic, and the choreography remains a marvel of expressionistic street movement.
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