In a year filled with musicals – In The Heights, Netflix’s animated Vivo, the upcoming tick, tick... BOOM!, and several others not associated with Lin-Manuel Miranda – there’s one looming larger than all the others. If Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Dear Evan Hansen are warming audiences up, it’s Steven Spielberg’s new take on West Side Story that’s the headline act – the legendary filmmaker taking on his first musical movie, in a revival of the legendary Stephen Sondheim Romeo And Juliet-inspired stage show. The first teaser dropped a few months back – and now we have a fully-fledged trailer, giving us our best look yet at the ‘berg’s upcoming adaptation. Watch it here:
For anyone who doesn’t know, West Side Story takes place in 1950s Manhattan, as Puerto Rican girl María (here played by newcomer and one-to-watch Rachel Zegler) and white American kid Tony (Baby Driver’s Ansel Elgort) fall in love – the problem being, they’re (loosely) affiliated with rival gangs the Sharks and the Jets. Cue much finger-clicking knife-fights, singing on fire escapes, and syncopated Sondheim-ian rhythms. This new version comes from an adapted screenplay by Tony Kushner, latter-day Spielberg’s regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, and a cast elsewhere including Ariana DeBose, Corey Stoll, and Rita Moreno – who played Anita in the beloved 1961 Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins film, and here takes on the role of Valentina.
Having been pushed back amid the pandemic, Spielberg’s West Side Story is currently set for UK cinemas on 10 December – slap-bang in the middle of awards-contender season. It should be a hell of a show.