'I felt I had permission to dig into every corner of 'West Side Story,'' writer Kushner says of talking with Stephen Sondheim before putting his mark on the remake.
, and I’ve come to realize that my writerly self-respect is tangled up in scaring myself. I had never written the book for a big screen musical, and a cherished classic at that. So how could I say no?
I began to understand that my task was basically the same as that faced by every writer: to figure out the bare-bones structure of a world, to assemble the topography that rests upon it, and then to populate it. Armed with this job description, I stopped regarding Leonard Bernstein’s and Sondheim’s magnificent score as a string of immortal, immutable moments I had to connect with dialogue.
I wanted to know more about Bernardo’s friend Chino, who becomes María’s shy, awkward suitor and then Bernardo’s avenger. So I wrote a scene in which we learn that Bernardo admires Chino’s brains and won’t allow him to fight. In the dance at the gym, toward the end of the mambo section, there’s a musical passage that struck me as reckless and goofy. I thought it would be a perfect moment for Chino to risk embarrassing himself by taking to the dance floor to impress María.
I moved “America” from the nighttime rooftop where it was set in the 1961 film to the morning streets of San Juan Hill; it’s a debate about racism, discrimination and economic opportunity that comes to include the entire community. Gimbel’s department store became the setting for “I Feel Pretty,” which we restored to its original position after the rumble, where the joy María is announcing gains a terrible poignancy.
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