Review – West Side Story

Romeo and Juliet. Street gang wars. Choreography-intensive Broadway musical. How on earth did Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim ever get these elements to function together? In truth, often it doesn’t. The picture leads off with the sight of actors prancing around the war zones of Manhattan, setting the “is this ironic or not?” tone for the rest of the picture. I expect that this was radical stuff back in the early 1960s, though much of it is dated by current standards. Still, the “America” number is fun. Mildly amusing