West Side Story is one of the most recognizable American works: it’s been placed in the National Film Registry, has had more than a handful of Broadway and West End reboots, and now has two film adaptations. Composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim worked together to create a riveting, modern-day take on Romeo and Juliet. It was released as a Broadway production in 1957 to critical acclaim: “Pooling imagination and virtuosity, they have written a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving,” the New York Times wrote that year. An equally successful film adaptation hit theatres in 1961. The musical and its subsequent Broadway revivals have taken home three Tony awards and were nominated for a grand total of fifteen. The film met even more critical acclaim: it took home ten Academy Awards, the most of any musical film, and featured the first Latina woman—Rita Moreno—to win an Oscar.
When it was announced that Steven Spielberg would be directing a new adaptation of the musical in January of 2018, it caused quite the commotion: Spielberg had never before directed a musical film, and critics were eager to see what would come of it. After a delay due to the pandemic, the film was finally scheduled for release on December 10th, 2021.
Hear two opposing reviews of the film from writers who attended a press screening to the release.
Dan’s Take: It Was… Eh.
This adaptation of West Side Story was, surprisingly, rather unremarkable. It was a good movie— nothing life-changing, nothing emotionally transformative, just exactly the quality you’d expect from a Disney-produced and Spielberg-directed film.
The acting through the first half of the movie was less than stellar and made it difficult to actually appreciate the scenes—it took at least an hour into the 2.5 hour-long film for me to feel any kind of connection with the characters. Riff seemed about as unconvinced in his role as one could get, and the actors of the various police officers played throughout the movie struck me as simply uninterested. However, that’s not to suggest the show didn’t impress at all.
In every scene, the choreography and dancing were clearly professional and very reminiscent of a typical Broadway production. The singing, likewise, didn’t disappoint. The performance of America immediately comes to mind – firstly, the costume designer certainly deserves recognition, the ensemble led by Anita Debose certainly performed well vocally and the scene was visually beautiful in no small part from the choreography. The casting of Ansel Elgort as Tony was a good choice, as he is an actor with both significant musical and acting experience – this is certainly seen in his performance of Cool around halfway through the movie. In fact, the majority of the lead cast, including Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo, and Mike Faist as Riff, consisted of Broadway actors and actresses, some of whom had never performed in front of a camera before. It was refreshing to see a cast of a musical film that had experience performing in musicals.
The racial diversity of the cast accurately reflected the tensions they explored as characters. Productions focusing on Latinx struggles often have a whitewashed cast: in the 1961 film, for example, Bernardo was played by George Chakiris—a white man—who won an Oscar for that role.
In fact, there were a few aspects of this movie in which Disney took a stand, and I wholeheartedly respect them for it. Disney cast a non-binary actor, Iris Menas, as a supporting role in the film—that kind of representation is needed in films. What really impressed me, though, is that Disney refused to cut scenes pertaining to gender expression for the Middle Eastern markets—for now, the film will not be shown in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar. That was a move that must have hurt financially, but I’m happy to see Disney standing their ground.
That wasn’t the only social aspect of this film that struck me—the extensive inclusion of Spanish was unique, but made the film inaccessible to many. Much of the charm and wit of the characters only comes through in Spanish, and I wondered if the audience members who couldn’t understand it had an even more difficult time connecting with the characters than I did. In the 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story, Lin-Manuel Miranda was hired to translate some of the lyrics to Spanish. Following criticism from audiences, some songs were translated back. The film featured Miranda’s translated versions, as well as some additional script changes to Spanish. According to an interview IGN conducted with Spielberg, the film consciously chose to not include English translations in the Spanish subtitles in order to “respect the [Spanish] language enough not to subtitle it”. While I understand the attempt at normalizing languages other than English in film and media, I believe it further ostracizes the Latinx community and paints the community as “the other.” There’s a clear double standard—the Spanish subtitles translate English dialog, but not vice versa.
The film is absolutely worth seeing for its modern interpretation of the classic, with diverse and inclusive casting. However, I wouldn’t consider it the best of the West Side Story renditions—the characters were hard to connect with, the language barrier alienated some audiences, and the plot itself was often lost in the singing and dancing.
Calvin’s Take: It Was… Wow.
I will be the first to admit that I have a poor taste in movies. I am a sucker for sappy rom-coms and perhaps even enjoyed the first time I watched the Twilight series. It was hard for me, then, not to enjoy the love presented in West Side Story. While the build-up for the pairing of Tony and Maria was shockingly brief, I still found myself invested in these partners by the time of their inevitable deaths.
It was the case that the pipeline between Tony and Maria’s first meeting to their engagement was startlingly fast, and this rendition seemed to take itself too seriously for this to be an ironic jab at Shakespeare’s tale. The characters in the story were supposed to be teenagers, something that was made suddenly apparent after a dance-fight at high school prom, and yet this aspect of the story was presented unfaithfully.
One of the reasons that Romeo and Juliet is such a tragic tale is that the lovers in the story died so young. In this respect, it was shocking to see the brutality of many scenes in the film, especially as a Disney movie intended for younger audiences: while blood was notably absent, the movie was home to frequent drug references and multiple cases of homicide. But these themes aided the conclusion of the story, imparting a deeper emotional capacity to these characters through a raw portrayal of the life as an adolescent in a gang. With the end of the film marked by the deaths of multiple main characters, just as is in the end of Romeo and Juliet, it helped to make these moments impactful in that they didn’t seem to come out of the blue thematically. I was notably impressed that Disney didn’t back down from references to these more mature themes.
However, it still felt like there was a missed opportunity in West Side Story to explore the incongruence between these children and the mature reality faced by them: gang violence, familial trauma, and, most impactfully, untimely deaths. After Anita’s lover Bernardo was killed by Tony, the fiance to her daughter, I expected the tension between Anita and her sister to be explored more thoroughly. Similarly, having the leader of the Jets be killed by Bernardo, it was disappointing to see West Side Story’s lackluster exploration of the tragedy in losing a friend. This failure is inevitably linked to this being a Disney movie, but for such an iconic reimagination of West Side Story, it was unsatisfying to see room for the film to explore these topics in more depth.
Regardless, the film deserves praise for its strategic choreography and incredible costume design. The tension between the Jets and the Sharks was reinforced in the difference between their dances: the Jets opted for classical American ballet, while the Sharks were influenced by Pueto Rican salsa dancing that has its roots in the culture of New York. It was fascinating to see how the film integrated dance as a pivotal complement to understanding the conflict between these rival gangs. This use of dance intentionally interacted with our understanding of gender roles, combining the fluid jumps of ballet and the rhythmic precision of salsa with the hyper-masculinity of stereotypical gang life, and I found myself enthralled at each flourish of ballroom dresses and each tap of ballroom shoes.
While there were some incredible moments within the film, my personal favorites being the expertly-crafted dance fights, Spielberg’s rendition of West Side Story is not life-changing. The movie left me wanting more: a deeper exploration into the theme of teenage gang violence, a more nuanced understanding of the trauma of losing a friend, or even a dramatic parody of Shakespeare’s original text. For me, the casting felt a bit off as well, highlighted in the age gap between the lovers played by Ansel Elgort at 27 and Rachel Zegler at 20 as well as them both supposedly depicting teenagers. However, for a Disney film, many of these faults were unavoidable, and for its cinematography alone, West Side Story is definitely deserving of a place on your watchlist.
Daniel Ennis ’25 (djennis@college.harvard.edu) is a slightly annoyed Latino.
Calvin Osborne ’25 (cosborne@college.harvard.edu) was a little too into the ballet.