“Frustrated Musical Director” Steven Spielberg Calls New Version Of West Side Story “A Cautionary Tale”

George Lucas once called his pal Steven Spielberg “a frustrated musical director.”

“I don’t know where he got that idea,” says Spielberg, 75, with a chuckle.

“I think it was because I was always talking about [legendary musical figures] Busby Berkeley, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen and Vincent Minnelli and it got to a point where he just said, ‘Well, why don’t I create a musical number at the beginning of [Indiana Jones and the] Temple of Doom and we’ll put the titles over it and you can shoot a musical number.”

The result: a cover of Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’ by Kate Capshaw (aka Mrs Steven Spielberg). The song was done in Mandarin (because the scene took place in a 1930s Shanghai club), or rather what sounded like Mandarin. In fact, we still have no idea what language she sang in. Anyhoo, but that’s another question for another time.

For Spielberg, it wasn’t until nearly four decades later that he would attempt another musical  — his career first — on the big screen: a remake of Robert Wise and Robbins’ West Side Story, the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winner (and in nine other categories, including Best Director), in turn inspired by William Shakespeare’s  Romeo and Juliet and featuring the unforgettable music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

The story follows two youngsters, Tony (The Fault in our Stars’ Ansel Egort), and Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler) from rival New York City gangs — the Jets and the Sharks, respectively — fall in love, but tensions between their respective friends build toward tragedy. Rita Moreno, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the original film, also appears in the latest iteration.

Why would Spielberg tamper with a classic? (FYI: The ‘Berg is no stranger to remakes: 1989’s Always, starring Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss, is a re-do of 1943’s Spencer Tracy-headlined A Guy Named Joe. Besides the aforementioned Temple of Doom sequence, Spielberg was also a producer on the musical-themed series Smash.)

For a few reasons. First, this West Side Story isn’t a remake of the 1961 version. Well, not directly. Instead, Spielberg and his Lincoln and Munich collaborator, screenwriter Tony Kushner, took inspiration from the 1957 Broadway musical that started it all.

Second, Spielberg grew up listening to West Side Story. “‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ was the first song I memories when I was a 10-year-old kid,” Spielberg tells 8days.sg and other journos over Zoom from Los Angeles of him being mesmerised by the soundtrack. “Just listening to that New York Philharmonic play those huge orchestral themes that almost sounded like a celebration, and on the other hand a funeral, a memorial — the music went from joy to deep tragic sorrow.”

“When I started having children, I have all these home movies of my kids growing up and we’re all running around the house on weekends doing on the numbers from West Side Story,” says Spielberg who has seven children. “I’ve got all my kids playing [the main characters] and lip-synching to the original Broadway score!”

And three, Spielberg got to right a few wrongs committed by his predecessor. While the West Side Story 1.0 was critically acclaimed, it was far from perfect: it drew a lot of flak for casting white actors — including Natalie Wood — to play the Puerto Rican characters. In Spielberg’s version, however, all the Sharks boys and girls were 100 percent Latinx.

Elsewhere, while West Side Story is still set in 1957, Spielberg hopes the film’s issues — such as racism, xenophobia, the legacies of colonialism, the effects of poverty, gang warfare and disillusionment with the American Dream — will resonate with younger audiences, especially those have heard of neither the 1957 stage production nor the 1961 adaptation.

Here are three takeaways about West Side Story from our 15-minute roundtable — which took place a few weeks before Sondheim's passing at age 91— with the Oscar-feted filmmaker.