West Side Story has long been one of my all-time favorite films. Sure, there were mistakes made. Few street gangs in 1957 were properly trained in modern dance, no less ballet. Rarely did they hang out on stoops and sing when they had nothing better to do. But it was a glorious musical, a brilliant story and a wonderful pageant.
Was it due to be remade? Perhaps. Without remakes, there wouldn’t be a lot of “makes” at all these days. And if so, who better to take on a project of such stature than Spielberg? Yet, it opened this weekend and its box officer was tepid. Worse than that, it seems that the people most inclined to go see this new and improved version were olds who, like me, adored the original movie.
In the United States and Canada, turnout for “West Side Story” was largest among ticket buyers over the age of 55. About 82 percent of the national audience came before 8 p.m., according to EntTelligence, a film research firm.
The movie may still turn a profit, to the extent any movie turns a “profit,” but the chance for it to have a blockbuster opening is done. It did worse than Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights,” which I saw and loved, although Miranda, despite this being an homage to Dominicans in Washington Heights, was denigrated for not using enough darker-skinned Hispanic actors.
Spielberg read the room and didn’t want to be the pale male who failed.
When we began this process a year ago, we announced that we would cast the roles of Maria, Anita, Bernardo, Chino and the Sharks with Latina and Latino actors. I’m so happy that we’ve assembled a cast that reflects the astonishing depth of talent in America’s multifaceted Hispanic community,” said Spielberg.
In the original, Maria was played by Natalie Wood, whose ethnicity was Russian, and yet here she was playing a Puerto Rican, That error would not be repeated.
“I am so thrilled to be playing the iconic role of Maria alongside this amazing cast,” said [Rachel] Zegler. “West Side Story was the first musical I encountered with a Latina lead character. As a Colombian-American, I am humbled by the opportunity to play a role that means so much to the Hispanic community.”
But Colombian isn’t Puerto Rican either. Sure, it’s Hispanic, but that’s akin to saying the Japanese and Vietnamese are interchangeable and all look alike. But it’s even worse than that.
Meanwhile, Zegler, it turns out, is only half-Columbia. “Her father is of Polish ancestry on his own father’s side, and of Irish, German, and Italian ancestry.” In fact, assuming all the Sharks are Puerto Rican, and the Jets a mix of European ancestries, Zegler’s ethnic background fits in better with the Jets than with the Sharks–unless, again, one assumes that all Latino subgroups are interchangeable. And for what it’s worth, on the 2000 census sixty-two percent of Colombian Americans marked their “race” as white, one of the higher percentages among Hispanic groups.
And indeed, Zegler is now being scrutinized for having not only been born in New Jersey, but for being Jets-adjacent.
When it comes to my identity, I highlight three things about myself above anything else: I’m a woman, I’m Puerto Rican, and I’m a full-fledged theater person. I grew up thinking that everyone, not just my family, ate arroz con gandules (rice and beans) and pernil (pork) at their holiday meals. And I was barely 9 years old when I had my first solo in a Philadelphia community theater production of Annie.
This is why when the casting news came out about Steven Spielberg’s film remake of the West Side Story musical I was ecstatic beyond belief, and then incredibly disappointed. Once again, the actress playing the character of Maria is not Puerto Rican, and I can’t understand why.
That’s from Mandy Velez, assistant managing editor of the Daily Beast, and it’s not just sour uvas. Then again, she probably fails to grasp the irony of her playing “Annie” while griping about Zegler not being Puerto Rican.
The Grand Dame of the original cast, Rita Moreno, cast in the new version to bring legitimacy, has now offered some criticism of the original production. The too-light-skinned actors (and actresses, as they were called back when) wore darkening make-up to make them look more exotically Latino.
Moreno wasn’t critical before about the role that made her a star, but after getting beaten up for supporting Miranda’s casting in “In the Heights,” she learned her lesson. Having been cast in the new movie, backing up its virtue is what one would expect of a smart actress. And, of course, Moreno is legit Puerto Rican.
It should be a piece of art we could point to and say, yes, this is us and our experiences and our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ experiences as Americans who weren’t and still aren’t fully accepted as such. What does it say about representation in film when the starring character is specifically supposed to be Puerto Rican, yet casting chooses someone who is not?
It should be a piece of art, but should it be piece of identity politics such that the specific ethnicity of the actors playing characters matters more than the art?
Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much if there was an abundance of stories told about Puerto Rican experiences, the experiences of people who make up an entire territory of this country, many of whom are fighting for it to become a state. But there isn’t. So I’ll tell you what this choice says to me: There were no Puerto Rican actresses good enough. You’re not good enough. But hey, at least this film doesn’t include the line “Let it sink back in the ocean.”
Maybe there is a need to remake West Side Story, but it’s not the need someone like Mandy Velez sees, the one where she would rather seek reasons to be outraged for its identity shortcomings than humbled by its message of overcoming discrimination and racial hatred rather than exacerbating it.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Have at least music and lyrics been rewritten by Puerto Ricans?
My understanding is that there have been some “corrections” to the original lyrics, but they largely remain the product of gay Jewish men.
And what of poor ole Will Shakespeare?
He’s been cancelled.
Several years ago Rito Moreno said that she had commented to the make-up person that they were all wearing the same shade, “Puerto Ricans are French and Spanish…’ And it’s true, we are very many different colors, we’re Taino indian, we are Black some of us.” She had a point.
Was that ever a question? Did we need Rita Moreno to tell us?
But as she noted then, it was a different time.
He had a point too.
If someone who looks like Mandy Velez had been hired to play Maria the outrage would have been through the roof.
Don’t be lookist.
Well, the NYT *did* demote it’s creators from Jews (all of them) and homosexuals (three) to “four white men”.
It seems the remake will go down as “the still not politically correct movie that sucked.”
Seems like a lot of the marketing for this recent remake involved heavy trashing of the 1961 version, not merely for “mistakes” like casting Natalie Wood as Maria, but wholesale condemnation as an outdated artifact in severe need of rehabilitation. There was a 60 Minutes special last week where Rita Moreno spoke disparagingly of the movie, focusing on the stereotyping and being treated poorly by white males in Hollywood. Like you said, and as the stats from the weekend bear out, the people most likely to be excited by the movie are older generations who grew up with the story and fondly remember it from childhood (my mom is of that generation, and West Side Story is still one of her favorite movies). So it should have been clear that marketing this movie by denigrating the classic that came before was a bad strategy.
[Also, am I allowed to post this]:
I watched that 60 Minutes segment as well, and was surprised to hear her go from her earlier anecdote about dark makeup to outright trashing of the original. It hadn’t occurred to me until you said, but I suspect you’re right, that trashing the original is very much part of the new movie’s marketing strategy. What a shame.
And it was a bad marketing strategy. Obviously older people who loved the original are a key demographic for the new movie. (You see that in the box office. And they are the most likely to want to go to a theater instead of streaming the thing.)
So if your marketing campaign is to tell all the people who loved this 1961 classic film that the film they loved so much (and probably saw as a groundbreaking advance for Hispanics in Hollywood) was in fact racist and needed correction, change, and updating to be more politically correct, it shouldn’t be surprising that this might hurt the box office numbers.
We might be the key audience for WSS, but we are surely not the target of its marketing campaign.
Pure armchair psychoanalysis here: the only people in my generation and younger who care about West Side Story are theater/choir/chorus kids, who may have even put on a WSS show in high school. Unsurprisingly, theater and music nerd types lean very left-liberal or further, and have for the most part fully bought into wokeness; some may even feel bad about the fact that they were white kids from the suburbs who pretended to be Puerto Ricans in a high school musical 10 years ago. So Hollywood and the PR and diversity consulting firms guiding the film’s marketing strategy likely want to cater to the mores of this demographic.
But that’s a small demographic (18-35 year old former theater kids) compared to the much broader older generations that grew up on the 1961 original, who are being told that the thing they loved is trash and even morally offensive.
The perpetual question is how that small demo manages it hold such outsized influence.
This production is beautiful. It’s certainly more movie-like than theatrical staging created by Robbins, Wise, et al. If you haven’t seen the new production, I recommend it. Mike Faist’s Riff is fantastic. Adriana DeBose is a stand out. The orchestration, the choreography, and the performances are top tier. Rachel Zegler, who plays Maria, has a beautiful voice, equal at least to Marni Nixon, maybe even better.
The city though isn’t as prominent a part of the new production. It’s too nostalgic a representation for my tastes — it tries to hard to be real. Ansel Egort’s Tony is professionally done, and his voice and acting are much better than Richard Beymer’s, but neither was a stand out in my mind.
Moreno’s role in the new film is awkward. I understand the sentimental value, and certainly there was no other way to shoehorn her into the new production.
I am not surprised the box office isn’t boffo. I saw an early afternoon show myself, and the theater was less than half full. The 1961 film is a masterpiece, but this is very much a remake and homage to the original. It’s just not gonna appeal to modern audiences, except for theater arts majors.
Yes, your review of the movie was exactly the point of this post. It was all about you.
It’s fascinating to me how long it took to correct the “ error” of casting Natalie Wood so long ago.
Maybe I’m Callow but Bernstein’s music and Sondheims lyrics soar above the petty intersectional battle about whose got the right ethnic cred
There had always been rumblings about Natalie Wood because her singing was dubbed, but to question her ethnicity would have been racist, until now when it’s racist not to.
I’m not sure about the casting choices in this one, but, I for one, was appalled that they failed to cast actual Hobbits in any of the Hobbit/LotR movies. Absolutely astounding.
Think of how the Hobbits felt.
Must have been belittling not to even make the short list for callbacks.
In Age of the Hobbits, there was a casting preference for actors who were Bai Lingual.
Obviously, the fix to this problem of using actors of the wrong ethnicity is to only make documentaries with the actual people only in the cast. Also, everything in a movie should be real time only. Kind of like the Merzbau…
(“Dada was very rock-and-roll.” – Tonio K)