Jeffrey Gale

The remake of West Side Story, on the whole, is superior to the original movie in 1961. The characters are better developed and the dialogue is crisper and more realistic for contemporary audiences. As a clergyman who had worked in Washington Heights for eleven years, I found the movie to be particularly relevant as it touches on such themes as gentrification, mass incarceration, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and hatred of "the other". i loved the treatment of "Tonight", Rachel Zegler sang like an angel. Tony and Maria pivoted about the fire escape until Tony finally jumped over. The body language pointed to longing and the passion of first love. Some critics indicated that both Tony and Maria were rather shallow. So were Romeo and Juliet. Just as Shakespeare portrayed them as teenagers who behaved recklessly, so the same applies to the star-crossed lovers in West Side Story. I connected to the scene around the Cloisters as I used to work near there. Also ironically, I saw "The Nutcracker" at the Lincoln Center four days later and reaped the fruit of the gentrification as portrayed in the movie. Both the original and the remake motivate me to work for a community which is diametrically opposite to what I saw on the big screen.