"West Side Story" - Shakespeare Meets Bernstein and Robbins . . . and Spielberg Too

Without a doubt, the 1961 production of West Side Story is one of the all-time great movie musicals.  Winner of an incredible 10 Academy Awards, it represents one of the most unique artistic amalgamations in the history of both Broadway and Hollywood.  Based in part on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it blends the musical genius of Leonard Bernstein, and choreographic brilliance of Jerome Robbins all under the watchful eye of Robert Wise, who directed a first-class script by Ernest Lehman and lyrics by one of the century’s truly great talents, the then 30-year old Stephen Sondheim.

Of course, even before it was an award-winning film, West Side Story was a tremendously successful Broadway musical.  On Broadway, the original cast included Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence as Tony and Maria, Chita Rivera and Ken LeRoy as Anita and Bernardo, and William Bramley and Arch Johnson as, respectively, Shrank and Office Krupke.  The Broadway production received 6 Tony Award nominations, winning two: Oliver Smith for Scenic Design and Jerome Robbins for Choreography.

When it came to casting the film version of West Side Story, few if any of the original Broadway folk were hired; there is a huge difference between performing on stage and in front of a camera. 

Many theater-goers who'd loved that 1957 Broadway musical were miffed that Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence weren't even considered to reprise the roles of Tony and Maria in the movie. But the producers wanted a cast that looked young enough to be teenagers, and the Broadway leads were both about 30. Nonetheless, while they ended up casting two 23-year-olds in the leads, most of the gangbangers and gals they hired were indeed close to 30.

   From the perspective of nearly 60 years, it is hard to believe that Elvis Presley was approached to play Tony.  However, Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s agent and alter-ego turned the studio down, favoring the anodyne musicals his client was already making over one that would have had him wielding a switchblade. (Though he'd already played a street kid driven to violence in such movies as 'Jailhouse Rock' and 'King Creole.'15) If Elvis had done the movie, he'd have ended up playing opposite Natalie Wood, with whom he’d engaged in a torrid affair in the mid-1950s.

Others who almost (16) played Tony: Marlon Brando & Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins & Russ Tamblyn, Burt Reynolds & Troy Donahue, Bobby Darin & Richard Chamberlain, Dennis Hopper and Gary Lockwood. Hunter (age 30), Reynolds (26) and Chamberlain (26) were all considered too old. The versatile Darin was too busy. Brando wanted to do it but figured that, at 34, he was way too old. Tamblyn, of course, ended up with the role of Jets leader Riff. Warren Beatty was co-director Robert Wise's first choice, and he even tested with his then lover/'Splendor in the Grass' co-star Wood. Ultimately, the filmmakers went with the little-known 23-year old Richard Beymer.

Then there was the question of who was going to play Maria. Among the actresses considered for the part were Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Luna, Jill St. John and Valery Harper, Diane Baker, Elizabeth Ashley and Suzanne Pleshette. Hepburn dropped out when she became pregnant.

Natalie Wood really wanted to do 'West Side Story,' but she knew if she turned down Warner Bros. forthcoming melodrama Parrish, set to star Claudette Colbert, Troy Donahue and Karl Malden, studio chief Jack Warner would never loan her to the rival United Artists. So she faked a bout of tonsillitis. That trick got her out of 'Parrish,' but it backfired when she contracted a serious case of pneumonia and almost had to drop out of 'West Side Story' as well. (Her part in Parrish went to Connie Stevens. Fortunately, Wood recovered in time to make West Side Story. (Pneumonia also struck cast member Eliot Feld, who played Baby John, during the New York shoot.) Feld was one of several veterans of the Broadway production who landed roles in the film.

Stefanie Powers, then going by the stage name Taffy Paul, was hired as a chorus dancer but had to drop out because she was underage and would have required an on-set tutor and a shorter work schedule. Years later, of course, she would co-star with Wood's husband, Robert Wagner, on TV's 'Hart to Hart.'

“Cool”

The scope of the project was so large that the studio decided to split the workload between two directors. Jerome Robbins, who directed and choreographed the Broadway show was hired despite never having directed a film before. Veteran movie director Robert Wise was hired despite never having made a musical. It was decided that Wise would handle the drama scenes and Robbins the musical numbers. But Robbins' perfectionism began to drag the movie down. His exacting demands and endless rehearsals took a toll on the dancers. ("They didn't dance out of joy, they danced out of fear," said music supervisor Saul Chaplin.") Soon the movie was behind schedule and $300,000 over budget. Wise defended Robbins, but he was soon asked to finish the movie by himself. Robbins' choreography remained, but the only completed numbers he shot that remain in the film were the prologue, 'America,' 'Cool,' and 'Something's Coming.'

Robbins worked Wood 16 hours a day, until she begged to be fired from the film. She also wanted Beymer fired, complaining about his lack of singing and dancing chops (even though her song-and-dance skills were - when all was said  and done -  just as limited). Eventually, she figured out how to get along with both Robbins and Beymer, while the directors figured out how to shoot around her dance limitations.

As for the stars' vocal limitations, most fans know that Wood's singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon (who would do the same for Audrey Hepburn three years later in 'My Fair Lady'). Wood herself didn't know, however. She had assumed her own singing voice would be used, at least for the lower-register parts, and didn't learn she'd be dubbed until the shoot was over. Beymer was dubbed by Jimmy Bryant.

There was other vocal doubling going on as well. Tucker Smith (“Ice”) also sang Tamblyn's part in 'The Jet Song,' though Tamblyn's own voice is heard during 'Gee, Officer Krupke' and 'Quintet.'The stage lyrics for the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" are "My father is a bastard, my ma's an s.o.b. My grandpa's always plastered..." The lyrics had to be changed for the movie to: "My daddy beats my mommy, my mommy clobbers me, my grandpa is a commie..." Also, the stage lyric was, "Dear kindly social worker, they say go earn a buck, like be a soda jerker, which means like be a schmuck." For the film, the lines were changed to "Dear kindly social worker, they say go get a job, like be a soda jerker, which means I'd be a slob." Remember. the movie was produced in the last days of the movie code when absolute Puritanism still held sway over the industry.

 George Chakiris was the only one of the main characters to not be dubbed. This was because he had no hard solo songs to sing.

 As Anita (Bernardo's sister and Maria's confidante), Rita Moreno sang on 'America,' but Betty Wand  was hired to dub her lower notes on 'A Boy Like That.' On the day the vocals for 'Quintet' were recorded, however, both Moreno and Ward were sick, so Marni Nixon stepped in, singing for both Anita and Maria. So on film, the song was really a quartet. For her work dubbing Moreno's vocals, Ward went uncredited on the album. She sued the film's producers and the CBS record label for $60,000 in damages. The suit was settled out of court.  Marnie Nixon was also denied royalties as well. She finally got some when Bernstein agreed to give her a portion of his percentage.
 

'West Side Story' was the No. 2 box office hit of 1961, behind only Disney's '101 Dalmatians.' The film, which cost $6 million to make, has earned back $43 million at the box office over the course of multiple releases through the years.

In 1962, the film won 10 Oscars, a record for a musical that stands to this day. Among the honors: Best Picture (a prize that went to Wise, as a producer), Best Director (shared by Robbins and Wise, who insisted that his fired collaborator remain credited as co-director), Best Supporting Actor (Chakiris) and Best Supporting Actress (Moreno). The only Oscar it was nominated for that it didn't win was Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Lehman). Wise and Robbins were the first pair ever to share a directing award (and the last, until Joel and Ethan Coen won for 2007's 'No Country for Old Men.') Robbins is the only director ever to win an Oscar for his sole feature directing credit; he never directed another film. Wise, however, went on to repeat his feat four years later, winning Best Picture and Best Director for 'The Sound of Music.'

Rita Moreno, the only actual Puerto Rican among the principal cast, became only the second Hispanic performer (after fellow Puerto Rican José Ferrer a decade earlier) to win an Oscar. But it didn't help her career the way she expected. "Ha, ha. I showed them. I didn't make another movie for seven years after winning the Oscar," she recalled in a 2008 interview. "Before 'West Side Story,' I was always offered the stereotypical Latina roles. The Conchitas and Lolitas in westerns. I was always barefoot. It was humiliating, embarrassing stuff. But I did it because there was nothing else. After 'West Side Story,' it was pretty much the same thing. A lot of gang stories." Today, Moreno is one of only 12 people who've won the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) grand slam of competitive entertainment awards and is the one who did it in the shortest span of time (16 years).  The others are Richard Rogers, Helen Hayes, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Jonathan Tunick, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopie Goldberg, Scott Rudin and Robert Lopez.  In addition, Moreno has received the SAG Lifetime Achievement Award.

These days, Russ Tamblyn is better known as the father of Amber Tamblyn, of the 'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' movies and TV's 'Joan of Arcadia' and 'House.' Richard Beymer, who most recently played Benjamin Horn in 6 episodes of Twin Peaks (2017), is going on 82 and lives in semi-retirement in his native state, Iowa.  George Chakiris, now 85 years old, made his last movie (Last of the Summer Wine) in 1996 and has been a jewelry designer for over 25 years.  Rumor has it that a movie he appears in (Not to Forget) is in post-production and will make its bow in early 2020. 

Throughout the movie, Natalie Wood wears a bracelet on her left wrist, not for any aesthetic reason, but because she had injured her wrist in the scene of 1949’s The Green Promise when she fell on the bridge that collapsed during the severe rainstorm, causing an unsightly bone protrusion on her wrist. She wore the bracelet to hide the injury. It became her trademark in all of her movies.

Contrary to popular belief, the prologue of West Side Story was not filmed where Lincoln Center is currently located (which is between 62nd and 66th streets). Rather, it was filmed in what is now an area called Lincoln Center Towers - a group of large residential towers - which is north and west of Lincoln Center, stretching between 66th and 69th Streets (filmed on west 68th street to be more specific). The street itself, west 68th between west end avenue and Amsterdam Avenue, no longer exists). This area was condemned and the buildings were in the process of being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center Towers. The demolition of these buildings was delayed so that the filming of these sequences could be completed.

The original stage version of Maria's song "I Feel Pretty" included the lyrics "I feel pretty and witty and bright / And I pity / Any girl who isn't me tonight." In the film this night scene was changed to the daytime, and presumably for this reason, the rhyming words "bright" and "tonight" were changed to "gay" and "today."

Richard Beymer later confessed in an interview that he wasn't happy with how his performance came out, saying that he wanted to play Tony as rougher and tougher, more like an actual street kid who used to run around with a gang starting fights for fun, but Robert Wise made him play Tony as the nicest guy around, which Beymer felt didn't mesh with the character's back story. He also said he had trouble saying some of his lines with a straight face, namely the more romantic lines. He even reportedly walked out on the London premier of the film - even though it ended up being his most famous role.

The stage version was originally planned as a story about a Catholic boy falling in love with a Jewish girl. The working title was "East Side Story.” After a boom of Puerto Rican immigration to New York in the late 1940’s and 50’s, the story was changed, and the show opened on Broadway in 1957 as "West Side Story.” The working title of 'East Side Story' was later used as the title to Mexican-American rapper Kid Frost's second album released in 1992 - with the placement of the 'East Side Story' title reminiscent of the West Side Story movie posters.

In 2010, Stephen Sondheim (who wrote the lyrics) told "Fresh Air" interviewer Terry Gross that while he was writing the stage musical, he originally wanted the show to be the first one in Broadway history to use the words "fuck" and "shit" in its song lyrics. He wanted the end of the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" to be "Gee, Officer Krupke/Fuck you!" (instead of what it became, which is "Gee, Officer Krupke/Krup you!"), and he wanted the lyrics in "The Jets Song" to be "When you're a Jet/If the shit hits the fan" instead of "When you're a Jet/If the spit hits the fan". However, the show's writers were informed that if the Original Cast Album contained those profanities, it would have been illegal to ship the record across state lines. So Sondheim made the substitutions for those words that appear in both the stage show and the movie.

During the Prologue, the Jets take a basketball from two kids and play with it. Before they walk away, Riff throws it back to one of the kids. That kid is Christopher Culkin, father of the Culkin brothers who were in movies of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

With its win of 10 Academy Awards, this became the biggest Oscar-winning musical of all time, beating the record Gigi (1958) set three years before with its nine Oscars.

"Cool" was such a demanding number for the performers, that the actors ritually burned their kneepads upon wrapping the scene.

The song "One Hand, One Heart" was written for the earlier musical "Candide," but later discarded by Leonard Bernstein and revived for "West Side Story."

Robert Wise wanted the film to have a single rising line of tension, with no light moments after the rumble. Therefore, "I Feel Pretty" was moved earlier, and the positions of "Cool" and "Gee, Officer Krupke" were reversed. Those who feel that the sassy, lighthearted tone of "Gee, Officer Krupke" is out of place following the deaths that end the first act prefer the film's ordering of the numbers. The placement of "I Feel Pretty" and "Gee, Officer Krumpke" after the Rumble in the stage version was meant to help cheer people up after the deaths of Bernardo and Riff, as audiences were not used to death occurring in Broadway musicals. This issue is still heatedly debated among the film's fans.

In December of next year, a West Side Story remake will hit the silver screen.  Directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner, this new version stars Ansel Egort as Tony, Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo (a far, far less important role than in the original version) and Mike Faist as Riff and Brian d’Arcy James as Officer Krupke (played by Simon Oakland [Isidor Simon Weiss] in the original). And, as a capstone to a long, long career, Rita Moreno will play “Valentina,” a cameo created specifically for the purpose of luring her into the remake.

Now in post-production, this will be Spielberg’s first musical.