Tony Kushner gives Spielberg's West Side Story a depth you will never tire of.

The opening images of West Side Story (2021) already tell a whole story. It is contained in a few frames. A billboard showing a grandiose new housing project. The camera glides past it almost casually as we glide over rubble of a New York slum, not with the characteristic fire escapes along the facade, as in the first film adaptation (1961) of this 1957 musical theatre piece, but as old rust of steps, lying among the rubble.

On that Billboard not just any random gentrification project, as was reported in Dutch newspapers. This is Lincoln Center, the home of The Met, or the New York Metropolitan Opera, one of the most important and prestigious opera houses in the world.

Urban Renewal

Why is this so significant? Because New York's 'West Side' was actually demolished as part of this urban renewal project, which was already heavily controversial at the time, because an opera and concert hall was built at the expense of an old working-class neighbourhood, from which the original residents were not exactly gently driven out.

The project dragged on for years. When West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957, the old Metropolitan Opera House was still around the corner from 52nd Street. In 1961, when the first film adaptation took the cinemas by storm, city planners and public participationists were still hotly debating the shape of the stained-glass windows in Lincoln Center where the opera, theatre school, art school, concert hall and much more would be located. The neighbourhood long in ruins by then. Its residents, with their culture and their past, had been driven out to other slums with a tip of a few dollars. While they had thus become the subject of one of the greatest and most classic musicals in history, thanks to composer Leonard Bernstein. The hero of the 'Met'.

Golden duo

So much meaning already in those opening images, and then it's all yet to begin. We owe this to the golden duo who revamped things for the remake of the 1961 film. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the man who can dream in images like no other, got writer Tony Kushner on his side. Tony Kushner is at least as great a genius as Spielberg.

Indeed, I dare call Kushner the equal of Shakespeare. After all, with Angels In America, he already wrote an all-encompassing play about the world after the AIDS outbreak in the 1980s. Now, with his adaptation of West Side Story, he adds the post-war years.

Flesh and blood

It is about racism, but also about a society indifferent to class and race struggles in an urban district that in their minds has long since ceased to exist. And if all this sounds very abstract: Kushner translates that into real-life characters, flesh-and-blood people in a world that is otherwise as theatrical as it gets.

The ill-fated love story was given a few razor-sharp edges. This made everything, from the sudden blossoming infatuation between two young people, to the murders at the end, extremely believable. Tony, the boy who falls in love with Maria ("Maria, Maria, Maria!") has been given a black side by Kushner, and that is yet another great deepening of the story.

Theatrical

The youth gang he is a part of is more criminal than you would like, and Anita, Maria's unfortunate girlfriend, is given a rather gruesome reason to deeply hate those white pussy boys. Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the previous film adaptation and is now co-producer of the current one, stars as Tony's (and Anita's) patroness in a supporting role that is much more than a supporting role. When she sings 'There's a place for us', it is suddenly about that slum again, that outcast of all those little souls fighting for every square metre, while the ground under their feet is already evaporating.

So this Kushner can write, and is also a stage actor, which awakened the theatrical talent in Spielberg too. The film is realistic in dressing and approach, but hyper-theatrical in the elaboration of some scenes. It works so terribly well, I can only talk about it in superlatives. Kushner and Spielberg give a totally new interpretation to the worn-out dramaturgy concept of 'layering'. This is high-concept with allure.

So just go and watch. Once, twice, a hundred times. You're guaranteed to go flat out every time.