How Steven Spielberg Unlocks ‘West Side Story’ for Film

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a potentially dangerous text: It just might encourage every big studio in Hollywood to keep working on all those remakes or reboots of all your favorite childhood films.

But the key word there is favorite: Compared to other successful American musicals, and despite its 10 Oscars, the 1961 adaptation of Jerome Robbins’s play doesn’t have many fans today. Perhaps it’s blasphemous to admit, but Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story doesn’t really work, turning Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s quality tunes into irritating moments of filmed musical theater. Yet perhaps what makes the movie such an intriguing subject is its obvious untapped potential: much like the protagonists at the end of the film, spectators have been left dreaming of what could have been. Now 60 years later, Spielberg has offered his own version of the classic tale, and what feels—almost uncomfortably so—like a correction of the original.