[imagesource: Amblin Entertainment]

Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited adaptation of the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story has received stellar reviews.

The “poignant American fairytale of doomed love” has appeared everywhere, in movie houses, concert halls, school plays, and even a couple of different Broadway stages over the years.

But it seems as though the musical has really come alive in Spielberg’s film version.

While the 1961 adaptation of West Side Story received 10 Acadamy Awards, Spielberg’s rendition, written by Tony Kushner (Lincoln, Fences), will be sticking closer to the original Broadway script.

“Spielberg’s West Side Story 2.0 is an ecstatic act of ancestor-worship: a vividly dreamed, cunningly modified and visually staggering revival,” writes The Guardian, who gave the film a five-star rating.

Trailer time:

Inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the story follows two teenagers from different ethnic backgrounds as they fall in love:

Tony [played by The Fault In Our Stars‘ Ansel Elgort] and Maria [played by Rachel Zegler, known for her role in Shazam! Fury Of The Gods] meet and fall for each other at a local dance and their transgressive affair for a microsecond shows everyone the possibility of a modern, non-sectarian future – but ends in violence.

And in fact, the tragedy of errors that concludes the drama is more plausibly plotted than anything Shakespeare wrote.

The film brings the best of both Broadway and Hollywood together in a magical way, and Spielberg “quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins”:

This new West Side Story isn’t updated historically yet neither is it a shot-for-shot remake. But daringly, and maybe almost defiantly, it reproduces the original period ambience with stunning digital fabrications of late-50s New York whose authentic detail co-exists with an unashamed theatricality.

On the big screen the effect is hyperreal, as if you have somehow hallucinated your way back 70 years on to both the musical stage for the Broadway opening night and also the city streets outside.

The “hothouse flower of musical theatre” will be on the big screen from December 10.

[source:guardian]