You get all the emotional impact of Rita Moreno (who won an Oscar playing Anita in 1962) singing this ballad, but it also brings you into the place of not necessarily two lovers imagining their own future, but Valentina mourning, on a generational level, the missed opportunities for the young people in the movie.
In this version, Doc, who’s white, has died, and his widow Valentina is Puerto Rican. It’s sung in the 2021 film by Rita Moreno, playing a new character named Valentina, the wife of Doc, the drug-store proprietor in the original show. (In the stage version, it’s usually sung by a Shark woman who is offstage during a dream ballet as everyone imagines their “place for us,” et cetera.) In the 1961 film version, Tony and María sing “Somewhere” together. There’s a place for us, a time and a place for us Jackson McHenry: I think the most striking change came with the song “Somewhere,” in what’s basically the second act of the new movie.
(It seems wild to say about a show that is more than 60 years old, but spoilers ahead.) Here, Vulture’s theater desk, Helen Shaw and Jackson McHenry, discuss the 2021 version, how it alters a hugely familiar piece of art, and how and where those changes worked.
The book too has been radically overhauled: Kushner set aside much of Laurents’s script to rework motivations, reimagine backstory, and revisit the original’s glancing and stereotypical approach to its Puerto Rican characters. Spielberg largely restores the original Broadway sequencing, though he also rethinks the logic beneath those numbers, making changes (in casting, in context, in who sings which song) that critique its antecedents and, occasionally, itself. The 1961 movie, directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, reordered songs, often placing numbers in frankly weird positions. (The original was sentimental and tragic the new one, while still lushly beautiful, is clear-eyed and bleak.) Neither a remake of the 1961 film nor a dutiful filming of the Arthur Laurents–Stephen Sondheim–Leonard Bernstein 1957 Broadway musical, it’s actually a deep reenvisioning, a way of resetting by-now familiar material in a way that actually changes some of its core qualities. Steven Spielberg and playwright Tony Kushner’s 2021 film West Side Story is a movie in conversation with its own history. Vulture’s theater desk considers Tony Kushner’s song reordering as a deep reenvision that changes the musical’s core qualities.
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