The Score | A Place for Us

Director Steven Spielberg’s film of West Side Story, based on the 1957 Broadway musical, was slated for release a year ago, but the pandemic halted that. Now the film—featuring Leonard Bernstein’s iconic score performed by the New York Philharmonic and led by Gustavo Dudamel—will open in theaters this December and appear on Disney Plus. The musical—book by Arthur Laurents, music by Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim—transposed Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, which seethed with racial conflict. Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, a frequent Bernstein collaborator, the musical revolves around turf wars between rival gangs: the Sharks, recent immigrants from Puerto Rico, and the Jets, a White gang whose members loathe new arrivals. Tony Kushner (Angels in America) adapted Laurents’s script, and Justin Peck choreographed the film—with a nod to Robbins’s original dances. Unlike the 1961 film, this West Side Story features Puerto Rican and Latinx actors, plus one notable return: Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her Anita in the 1961 film, appears as Valentina, a new character.