‘West Side Story’ review: Spielberg’s take on musical not as bad as you’d think

The best part of Steven Spielberg’s new film of🌊 “West Side Story” isn’t the dance at the gym, or the Sharks and Jets’ scuffle in the prologue, or Tony and Maria’s love duet.

Oddly enough, it’s the jazzy song “Cool” that’s performed ahead of the rumble. “Got a rocket in your pocket. Keep coolly cool, boy!” the antsy Jets sing before their battle with their rౠival Puerto Rican gang.

This is show-queen blasph♔emy, I know, but the jolti🎐ng number tops Jerome Robbins’ iconic original choreography and Robert Wise’s Oscar-winning 1961 film. 

It’s absolutely ferocious.

Spielberg transplants the sparky scene to a decrepit dock by the river — it has the bleak look of the final scene of “On the Waterfront🍰” — and choreographer Justin Peck has Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Riff (Mike Faist) fight in glorious dance over a loaded gun. 

Those shifts in locale, subtly updating the tunes’ drives and motivation, are what make Spielberg’s very good adaptation of Leonard♒ Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’ musical memorable. It’🌠s the “ET” director’s most visualღly exciting film in a zillion years.

Still, it’s not gonna become a classic in the way the 1961 original movie adaptation did. Where this “Story” occasionally walks into West Side Highway traffic is screenwriter Tony Kushner’s many needless additions to the script. The “Angels in America” scribe has never met a plot he couldn’t stretch out like a medieval torture victim. 

Now, young lover Tony is an ex-convict. Maria’s (Rachel Zegler) parents are dead (clearly to avoid any i꧂mplication that they’re absent). There’s a gentrification subplot about how the neighborhood is about to be de♚molished to build Lincoln Center and the streets are covered in rubble. It’s too much.  

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Getting uber-specific and justifying every single choice that dumb teens make saps the 🌠story of its magic and universality. There’s no ironclad equation for why we fall in love or why we hate. 

There is a gorgeous line in the 1957 sh𒅌ow that’s naturally been cut. Doc admonishes the boys and tells them, “You make the world lousy.”

“That’s the way we found it, Doc.” 

A lot more compelling than blaming a construc🅷tion project, no?

Kushner doesn’t totally derail the movie, tho🗹ugh, which is a great pick to bring your famඣily to over the holidays. Ninety percent of it is the “West Side” you know and love. 

It’s the classic tale based on “Romeo and Juliet” — Did Shakespeare tell us the reason the Capulets and Montagues are feud🎉ing? Nope! — in which Polish Tony, one of the Jets, falls in love with Puerto Rican Maria, the little sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks.

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So begins a whirlwind romance that, over the course of just one day, has its leading man sing, “Always you, every thought I’ll ever know! Everywhere I go, you’ll be!” That’d be a dating red flag in 2021,ꦡ but here i꧟t makes your heart soar. 

Or it’s supposed to. Unfortunately we don’t fall in love with Elgort like we should. There are a lot of choices an actor can make with Tony — puppy dog, sexual, obsessive, whatever — but Elgort, who was excellent in “Baby Driver,” picked “stoner needs a nap.” “Maria” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written in a musical, yet here it’s a shrug. That’s a shame, because Broadway audiences were briefly treated to Isaac Powell’s interpretation in 2020, which was as good as it gets.

The mood is instantly lifted, however, when Elgort meets up with the wonderful Zegl꧃er on a fire escape. Smart Spielberg locks it, so there is a sexy barrier between them. Zegler shows us her sweet singing voice and radiating goodness that evokes Maria the singing nun.

It’s the ensemble that wows most, though. Faist makes an unusually spindly Riff, yet he is scarier than any I’ve seen. Bernardo, the best role in th🦹e show, is given real intensity by David Alvarez, and Ariana DeBo﷽se dances the dickens out of “America” as Anita.

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And then there’s Rita Moreno. The original Anita plays a new role, Valentina, the owner of Doc’s 👍Drugstore. The late Doc was her husband and she takes Tony in as a tenant. At 89, there is pathos and tenderness in every word, breath and note. In the song “Somewhere,” she sings “there’s a place for us.”

Be glad Spielberg found a place for her.