A Piffany About West Side Story

Wait a second. Why don't these lovers just wait a Gee Officer Krupke second?!

Many folks consider West Side Story a musical theater masterpiece.

That, despite the 1961 Best Picture Oscar-winning film casting a daughter of Russian immigrants who didn’t sing (Natalie Wood, dubbed by Marni Nixon) to play the singing Puerto Rican immigrant, Maria, and darkened Rita Moreno’s skin.

Some, too, love the 2021 movie version, praising director Steven Spielberg for his adaptation of the source material, and including actual Spanish dialogue without subtitles. Even if he also cast a problematic bad boy, Ansel Engort, to play the musical’s star-crossed bad-boy lover, Tony.

But why, oh why, do we keep sleeping on the biggest problem with the whole story? It’s not the street gangs nor their race war. It’s not the police. It’s not even the city of New York. It’s this psychologically disturbed, sociologically sick timeline! Tony and Maria meet at the neighborhood dance and immediately fall in love. They profess their love for each other later that night. They go on one date the next afternoon, where they improvise pretend wedding vows, witnessed by no one. Then that night, tragedy! I mean, c’mon. There’s love at first sight, but even would-be reality-TV lovers wait a few months to satisfy the ridiculous premise of 90 Day Fiancé. The true crime show The First 48 would take up more time than Tony and Maria’s relationship together. HOW ARE WE OK WITH THIS? HOW HAVE WE BEEN OK WITH THIS FOR DECADES?

Yeah, yeah, you want to remind me West Side Story is a modern-day Broadway musical update on Romeo & Juliet.

Shakespeare’s take on the ill-fated young lovers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, winds up its tragic plot over the course of four to six days. And just to make it extra creepy, he wrote his Juliet at only 13 years old. BUT, YOUNG LOVE! Sorry, but no thank you to child sex trafficking. Even in the 1500s, women customarily waited until their late teens to marry.

Jeez, us.

I don’t know what it was about Spielberg’s film that made the insanely quick timeline sink into my skull. Perhaps when I saw previous stage versions of West Side Story or Romeo & Juliet, I thought each change of scenery represented a different day, so it all took longer? I honestly don’t know what I was thinking then, because these star-crossed lovers have never given their actions a second thought. Maybe if Tony took some time to win over Bernardo instead of joining a rumble, there might have been a proper courtship?

Or maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be celebrating this love story at all. At least not like this.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the songs of West Side Story. Have loved them since singing them myself in high school chorus. And who doesn’t love a street gang with synchronized balletic dance moves?

I suppose we weren’t supposed to stop and think about the madness of young love, much as these young lovers never stopped to think about what they were doing.

But now that I’ve stopped and thought, I can’t get it out of my head.

The only way out I think is to go back in time. Before Bernstein and Sondheim. Before Shakespeare. Back to at least Arthur Brooke, who wrote “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” as an epic poem in 1562, based in turn on a translation from Italian novelist Matteo Bandello. Back then, they at least had the good sense to make the lovers the same age and gave their relationship months to build tension and actual merit to give the characters and the tragedy some real pathos.

In the meantime, I won’t shed any more tears for Tony or Maria or Romeo or Juliet.