Steven Spielberg directed this newest West Side Story with passion and integrity using cinematic tools not available in the 1961 film version co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. But be forewarned, one must get past an expectation that the 2021 production mirrors the 1961 version adorned simply with new technological accouterments.
An excited full house eagerly anticipated this Opening Night of West Side Story, its pathos intensified by today’s passing of our beloved bard Stephen Sondheim. As such, we were honored to participate in what became a celebration of West Side Story’s depiction of a doomed couple we love, akin to Romeo and Juliet, Aida and Radames, and Tristan and Isolde.
The Largo creates a virtual world within itself through its formal structures, expressing feelings associated with nostalgia, homesickness, death, and a yearning for the afterlife and, perhaps, better times. According to Anton Seidl, conductor of the NY Philharmonic Society orchestra for the 1893 world premiere of the work at Carnegie Hall, “it is not a good name, New World Symphony — it is homesickness, home longing (Biancolli 1947, 240).”