To each his own preferences. I am not a lover of musicals, as I am not a lover of horror films. That is to say that this genre does not attract me so much, even if there are works that I know of course appreciate.
However, there is not a film that I saw more often, in my childhood, than The Sound of Music. I fell under the irresistible spell of Umbrellas of Cherbourg and I was moved by Dancer in the Dark. I know how to recognize the qualities of red Mill or from La La Land and differentiate a successful musical (Tick, Tick… Boom!) of a failed musical (Dear Evan Hansen).
“What I don’t like is when it sings and it dances…” I made this confession out loud when I arrived at the press screening of West Side Story Start of the week. Which obviously earned me a few laughs from colleagues. You might as well be aware of your prejudices.
Why am I not particularly fond of musicals? I watched Steven Spielberg’s new film trying to find answers to this question.
I much preferred this new adaptation of the famous Broadway show to the 1961 one, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, which won the Oscar for best picture. And not just because Spielberg’s achievement is superior in every way. It injects a good dose of cinema into what was originally more like a recording of a stage show.
Spielberg’s version, without denying that of 1961 to which it has remained rather faithful, offers more flesh around the bone. The characters are more believable and have more depth. Puerto Rican immigrants speak Spanish, and their Latin accent, when they try to speak English (to better integrate into the host society), is much less cartoonish. We understand better why the Sharks protect their community and where the Jets come from, their rivals of the neighborhood street gangs.
Screenwriter Tony Kushner added characters that bring some nuance to the narrative: a non-binary teenager who hopes to fit in with the Jets, a Puerto Rican owner (Rita Moreno herself, the revelation from the first film, who now runs a store at Doc’s, where she is is the widow).
the West Side Story de Spielberg takes a more direct approach to racial tensions and class issues in this gentrifying Manhattan neighborhood, even though “white privilege” was already mentioned in the original film 60 years ago.
This Romeo and Juliet 1950s, in a quadrangle of New York doomed to disappear – where Lincoln Center is now located, which houses the Metropolitan Opera in particular – does not take more liberties with the Shakespearean drama that inspired it. Two young people from different backgrounds fall in love at first sight. They do not need more than 48 hours to say they are ready to die for each other, almost impervious to the rivalries between their two clans and to the tragic consequences of the violence that their union, deemed impossible, generates.
They may only be teenagers, Maria (Rachel Zegler) as cute as Anton is magnetic – Ansel Elgort recalls the Stanley Kowalski of Marlon Brando – I hoped that Steven Spielberg succeeded in making me believe more in the intensity of that instant love that Wise and Robbins had with Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in 1961. This is not the case. I adhere more to the conventions of Greek tragedy on stage than in cinema, you have to believe.
That’s not the reason why I don’t particularly like musicals. If I can’t quite put my finger on it, it unfortunately comes down to what I admitted at the beginning.
The combination of song and dance in the cinema, in too strong a dose, upsets me. The cannon chants of throbbing tremolos in support of spinning choreographies with crescendos of jazz hands often seem to me to be interchangeable. And in the cinema, we hardly find this combination more often on the screen than in West Side Story.
Despite the mastery of Steven Spielberg, despite these characters better sketched, towards the end of West Side Story, I began to squirm in my seat, hoping for the end of hostilities. That is to say, not the end of the violence of rival gangs, but that of these sequences (endless in my opinion) where characters perform synchronized choreographies, twirling in the air, singing refrains while rolling ” R ”.
Sacrilege, you will say, in reference to the music of Leonard Bernstein and the words of Stephen Sondheim. I know well. I like better, all in all, West Side Story in a symphonic version. I couldn’t say why, but for me Bernstein’s music is spoiled when actors sing and dance.
Also, despite all its obvious and indisputable qualities, the West Side Story de Spielberg remains for me the rather conventional film adaptation of a Broadway stage production, with unusual, if not disproportionate, means.
If I dig this furrow a little more, it’s not so much the song and dance combo that irritates me on the big screen as the staging for the cinema of show tunes and typical Broadway choreography.