I haven’t seen Les Miserables, the musical based on Victor Hugo’s classic novel that is up for eight Academy Awards. If someone asked why, I would probably say I don’t like musicals, but on closer reflection I realize that isn’t entirely true.
Some of the earliest movies I saw and enjoyed were musicals, but Jailhouse Rock, Viva Las Vegas, and the like are rarely considered “musicals” by those who consider such things. They starred Elvis Presley, after all, whose rise in the mid-1950s was seen as a threat to the style of music associated with Broadway. Certainly, most of the songs in an Elvis flick had little to do with the plot. They were an excuse to let Elvis sing. Since he made no personal appearances between 1960 and 1969, the musical breaks in his movies were the closest thing to a concert his fans were going to get.
The first musical that I saw that did not star the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll was one that he was offered but turned down (or had turned down for him by his manager). I was still a kid when I caught up with 1961’s West Side Story during its 1968 re-issue. I wouldn’t have admitted it to any of my so-called “peers,” but I thoroughly enjoyed this musical update of Romeo and Juliet. A street gang doing ballet leaps may be kind of silly, but so was a lot of what I saw in movies at the time (James Bond facing danger with a quip, and rotting corpses prowling about in Night of the Living Dead). It was a movie, after all. You either got into the spirit of the thing or you didn’t. At the conclusion, when Maria clasped hands with her dying lover, Tony, and sang “There’s a place for us,” I felt a lump in my throat, and the lump would have been even bigger if the lovely Natalie Wood had been shot to death instead of wimpy (and miscast) Richard Beymer. The film’s screenplay was credited to Ernest Lehman who adapted it from Arthur Laurents’ book for the Broadway show, but the story came from Shakespeare. With the right talent in place to bring the story to life, West Side Story would fail only if the music was not up to par.
The music!
If there is another Broadway score equal to the one composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, I have yet to hear it. Each song does what a song in a musical is supposed to do: advance the story. But the songs in West Side Story are strong enough that they don’t need the play. Each can stand on its own and has in dozens of cover versions, including a few that became hits for Johnny Mathis (“Maria”), Ferrante and Teicher (“Tonight”), and Barbra Streisand (“Somewhere”).
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