Musicals Blog

West Side Story (1961)

by Claire J Rottenberg


The movie version of "West Side Story" won a record number of Academy Awards (10), but, surprisingly, the play did not win the Tony award for Best Musical (it lost to "The Music Man"). The play opened in 1957 and it ran for almost two years. None of the lead performers from the play appeared in the movie but several of the performers who played smaller parts recreated their roles or played similar parts in the movie. For example, Tony Mordente played a Jet, A-Rab, in the play and then later played a different Jet, Action, in the film version of "West Side Story."

Jerome Robbins was the director and choreographer of both the Broadway and movie versions of "West Side Story" and he received a Tony award for Best Choreography and an Academy Award for Best Director (shared with his co-director, Robert Wise). The book for the stage version was written by Arthur Laurents but the screenplay was adapted by Ernest Lehman.

A few changes were made to some of the songs in the movie version of "West Side Story," but all of the songs from the Broadway play were included in the film version and no new songs were added. Several songs appeared in different points in the movie - "Cool" and "Officer Krupke" were switched and "I Feel Pretty" and "Somewhere" were moved. "America" was sung by both the Sharks and their girlfriends in the film version but only sung by the females in the stage version.

Although many film versions of Broadway musicals have used dubbing for some of the singing in the film, "West Side Story" probably holds the record for dubbing. Four out of five lead players were dubbed for at least one song - Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer for all of their songs, Russ Tamblyn for "The Jet Song" and Rita Moreno for "A Boy Like That."

"West Side Story" is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it more times than any other film (at least 15 times). I was fortunate enough to see a wonderful revival of "West Side Story" at City Center in New York with Julia Migenes as Maria and I loved the play as much as the movie.