A TALE OF TWO MUSICALS: WEST SIDE STORY and MAMMA MIA!

By Joel Johnson

It was pure serendipity to have seen Mamma Mia!-the most recent film to make the trek from Broadway to a Cineplex near you-and the Oscar-winning West Side Story in the same week. What makes this so remarkable is that both were seen on the big screen! United Artists, to celebrate their ninetieth anniversary, has decided to dust off the storage tins, refurbish the prints, and send out a handful of their classics, such as Goldfinger, Annie Hall, Some Like It Hot, Raging Bull, The Magnificent Seven, and West Side Story, to thrill audiences once again in movie theaters around the country. Our favorite movie theater happened to be one of the theaters taking advantage of United Artists’s self-congratulatory promotion. It may not be easy to find theaters showing these films, but Mamma Mia! is-as I write this-showing almost anywhere there’s a movie theater. These two films are very definitely musicals, but similarities begin to peter out pretty quickly after that.

West Side Story was developed for the Broadway stage during 1950s and was first performed there in 1957. The postwar era is frequently considered the Golden Age for Broadway musicals, with many classic musicals such as The Sound of Music, South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Camelot, The King and I, Fiddler on the Roof, and-famously playing a significant role in the Pixar film WALL-E-Hello, Dolly! Despite being created at the same time and all sharing the good fortune of being made into films, West Side Story is quite distinct from the others.

Dance plays a major role and is not used simply to buttress the musical and emotional exuberance in the production. It serves as a medium for expressing dark and brooding emotions as well as lighter, joyous ones. Much of the choreography is harsh, jerky, and inelegant in counterpoint to the pleasing, flowing aesthetic generally sought in dance. The late Leonard Bernstein, best known as the long-time conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, composed the music, though Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, Sid Ramin, and Irwin Kostal received the Oscar credit for scoring of a musical picture. This score is inextricably linked to this intense choreography. Whereas the music of a typical musical theater production usually consists of a series of songs performed by various constellations of characters and also includes innocuous “traveling music” to help move the action from scene to scene, the instrumental segments between the vocal music in West Side Story are essential to the choreography and clearly stand out as more than bridges from one scene to the next.

It has long been acknowledged that the storyline for West Side Story was borrowed from Shakespeare’s classic romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The white native-born American Jets and the Puerto Rican immigrant Sharks rival street gangs are mid-twentieth-century equivalents of Renaissance Verona’s Montague and Capulet feuding clans. Lovers Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood), like Romeo and Juliet, have a love that is unable to survive the tribal hatred of their ethnic groups. By the end of the film, Tony will join rival gang leaders Riff (Russ Tamblyn) and Bernardo (George Chakiris) in paying the ultimate price for this hatred. Astute observers will quickly note that West Side Story’s “Juliet” does not die. Shakespeare purists may chafe at this deviation from the cruel symmetry devised by the Bard, but there are some key differences in West Side Story’s construction that makes this appropriate. Shakespeare directed the message of Romeo and Juliet to adults. The play tells them that their mistrust of and failure to make peace with others could poison their children, who were not responsible for creating the ill will. This message is crystallized in the final address of the prince and in the response of the grieving parents, Capulet and Montague. West Side Story is directed to youth. Only a handful of adults appear in the film. They uniformly disapprove of the growing conflict between the Jets and the Sharks but are woefully ineffectual in their efforts to curb it. There are, however, no parents portrayed in the film. They play no role in either teaching hatred or in discouraging the violence. The film’s youth own their conflict and its violence. No Lieutenant Schrank (Simon Oakland) or Officer Krupke (William Bramley) can sum up the cost of their hatred. That must be done by one of their own. Maria is an amalgamation of both Juliet and the prince in his role of passing judgment on what the hatred has wrought.

West Side Story dominated the Academy Awards in 1962 accumulating a Titanic-like ten Oscars out of eleven nominations (only Ernest Lehman’s adapted screenplay failed to deliver a statuette) including Best Picture, Best Director (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins), Best Supporting Actor (George Chakiris), and actress (Rita Moreno). One might have expected audiences to have loved this film the same way that they did James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). It is hard to view the film with 1961 eyes, but the film does pose some difficulties for audiences. Interpretive dance-hardly an art form embraced by John and Jane Q. Public in 1961 or since-is central to the overall storytelling. The introduction of the rival street toughs through a balletic dance through the back alleys and vacant lots of New York City is a challenge because it is so incongruous with our image of youth gangs. Most of the action is primarily confined to soundstages and dance floors. The film never feels as if it has been opened up into real exteriors and interiors as much as it feels like one is watching a filmed stage play-albeit with the benefit of multiple cameras. Credit Thomas Stanford’s Oscar-winning editing for helping to overcome this sense of being confined and stage bound through brisk cutting. The two most memorable performances in the film are turned in by supporting performers. Chakiris and Moreno were solid working actors already having accumulated several credits in both film and television, but West Side Story established them as stars. Richard Beymer has continued to work in film and television but was never able to establish himself as a household name, despite being the male lead in such an Oscar juggernaut. Natalie Wood brought her established star power and delicate beauty to the film but needed the help of Marni Nixon’s singing voice to fulfill it. Unfortunately, no one was able to “dub” her dancing for her. The musical does boast several memorable songs (”Tonight,” “Maria,” “Somewhere,” “America,” and “I Feel Pretty”) that have established an identity that allows them to have life (to be played and performed) independent of the musical even if the Latin motifs seem pallid when immersed in the heavily symphonic orchestration. Ultimately, the compelling power of this musical is based on its Shakespearean roots in a tragic story of love trying to survive in a sea of hate. This theme has proven universal appeal.

On the other hand, the genesis of first the stage play Mamma Mia!, and now the film, is entirely different. Instead of creating a story and writing music to tell that story, the starting point is an established portfolio of ABBA hits. The challenge is to select a group of songs from that portfolio around which a story can coalesce. It should come as no surprise that the story that has emerged is much lighter than West Side Story’s. The set-up is that Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) is about to get married. Her mom Donna (Meryl Streep) is a free-spirited American expatriate straight from the Summer of Love (or thereabouts). Donna has raised Sophie as a single mother operating a small hotel on an idyllic Greek island. Despite having never known a father, Sophie wants her daddy to escort her down the aisle. Within the film’s first ten minutes, Sophie has not only explained to her friends how she has narrowed the potential fathers down to three and invited all them to the wedding, but the three might-be daddies (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård) meet up and travel together to the island. So how does Sophie figure out which one is her real father? (Her initial conception that she would just “know” which one is her dad doesn’t seem to be working.) Then there’s answering the question about which of the old flames can still generate sparks with romance-resistant Donna. Add Donna’s fellow now middle-aged free-spirit gal pals Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski), and the elements for a romantic comedy that wistfully challenges conventional marriage are in place.

Clearly, the willful suspension of disbelief is challenged quite a bit, too. The film’s ethos comes from the 1970s (which was ABBA’s heyday), and this era would have been formative to all of the older actors and actresses, but eighteen-year-old Sophie is not a product of a 1970s liaison. That is only the beginning of its departure from reality, as the entire story is simply and categorically fantastical. Not that anyone who had seen the film’s trailer, had seen the stage musical on which it is based, or had only listened to the ABBA songs that are the film’s soundtrack would have had any expectation of a film firmly rooted in anything remotely like gritty and grubby reality. Its absence from this type of film is not sound criticism. The film’s story needs, however, to make the audience care about the outcomes for its characters, and this did not happen for me. Perhaps it’s a gender thing, and men just don’t get into “jumping for joy” at the prospect of a wedding as much as women do (the gender make-up of the audience I saw it with skewed heavily female). I found the musical’s book (script between the songs) as something to be endured, waiting for the next ABBA number. I would have preferred just to listen to the film’s soundtrack or, better yet, to ABBA’s original recordings. This is not to say that there wasn’t any effort made to entertain the audience nor that this effort seemed as wasted on my movie-going companions as it was on me. The actors put everything they had (and in the case of Pierce Brosnan’s singing voice sometimes things they didn’t have) into delivering no holds barred campy and crude fun. The film clearly has the makings for achieving cult status in the same vein as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This is, indeed, the ideal film for that as yet unrealized entertainment venue-the combination movie theater and swimming pool-for all its splashing and thrashing in the water that clearly invites the audience to join in.

Despite their flaws, these musicals will continue to hold special-if very different-places in the imagination of film audiences. One based on its classic story, classic music, and innovative use of dance. The other based on packaging a film around one group’s library of popular music and inviting the audience to share the free-flowing, campy joy like an audience at a rock concert. Take your pick, or enjoy them both as the mood fits.