'West Side Story': Entertaining backstage story on the making of the movie

The Jets are due to land in December, the Sharks right with them. But where? In theaters retooled for socially distanced viewing (Coronascope?) or in the super-safety of our streamed-into homes?

We're talking about the Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner version of what originated in the 1950s as a Broadway play with several striking features. There was the chutzpah of converting the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet" into a musical; the topicality of replacing the Montagues and Capulets with finger-snapping, street-dancing New York juvenile delinquents; and the stature of the show's masterminds —composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer and director Jerome Robbins and playwright Arthur Laurents.

After doing boffo business and winning multiple Tonys, "West Side Story" was made into a 1961 movie, which did boffo business and won multiple Oscars. It's this incarnation that film historian Richard Barrios elucidates in his informative and engaging new book, a co-production of Turner Classic Movies and Running Press.

Barrios traces "West Side Story" back to a 1948 conversation between Robbins and his then-boyfriend, Montgomery Clift. Just as Cole Porter had played fast and loose with Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" in concocting the Broadway hit "Kiss Me Kate," so, Robbins and Clift thought, something exhilarating might be made of "Romeo and Juliet." Robbins floated the idea of an update centering on tensions between Jews and Catholics, but Bernstein and Laurents had the aha moment: Both were visiting Los Angeles in the summer of 1955 when articles about street-gang warfare ran in the Los Angeles Times.

What started out as "East Side Story" and slouched through its adolescence as "Gangway" grew up to be "West Side Story," with a pre-Broadway premiere in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 19, 1957.

For the film, casting proved to be a drawn-out and fraught process. Larry Kert, the Broadway Tony, "was apparently never under serious consideration," but Elvis Presley was. With Carol Lawrence, the Maria of the original cast, deemed now too old for the role, Natalie Wood was chosen for her star power.

For all his dreamboating, the Iowa-born Beymer has admitted that he wasn't right for Tony. Wood worked hard on her dancing, even harder on her singing. She was led to believe that her voice would be used for all but the highest notes, which Marni Nixon would dub. In fact, management knew all along that Maria's vocals would be all-Nixon, all the time. Wood had to live with what Barrios calls "a sour conclusion to a difficult professional experience."

At any rate, the Wised-up "West Side Story" was a hit, grossing $44 million; winning 10 Oscars plus a special honorary award for Robbins; and pleasing the critics. Most of them, anyway. Two of the greats, Pauline Kael and David Thomson, later filed dissents, she dismissing the film as "frenzied hokum," he as "pedestrian."

So there's room for improvement by Messrs. Spielberg and Kushner. As we wait for their "West Side Story" to arrive via one technology or another, reading Barrios will make us better equipped to reach our own verdict.