Come, death, and welcome

The Verona project, part XVII, West Side Story

Who (how old), when, how long? Richard Beymer (22) and Natalie Wood (22), 1961, 2½hrs.

What sort of R&J? He's more convincing as a dancer than as a romancer, and her deficiencies of accent, voice, and dance have been catalogued at length, but they can still be an affecting pair at times, and Wood's love-addled-schoolgirl performance on "I Feel Pretty," notwithstanding the looped Marnie Nixon on the soundtrack, is indeed alarmingly charming.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 6 or 7--comedy is understated but present.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Not directly applicable, but the lovers waste little time fretting the star-crossedness of their love.

Carrion flies? NA.

Body count? Three: Riff/Mercutio, Bernardo/Tybalt, and Tony/Romeo; Chino/Paris (whose correspondence is less exact than the others') kills Tony and survives, Maria/Juliet survives, and Tony's mother/Lady Montague is only an offscreen presence, though to be fair, she will not hear about her son's death until after the action of the film ends, so at best things will be unpleasant for her.

What (else) is missing, changed, odd? See below for a wrap-up of these issues.

End-of-the-play exposition? No exposition, but a too long, too obvious sermon on the Wages of Hate.

I've seen this a few times before but have never watched it from this perspective: just how R&J is it, exactly? It's far from a great film (and I wasn't around for the original stage version), but it's pretty darned close to great in terms of adapting Shakespeare. Most of the key characters and narrative elements have equivalents ranging from thematically akin (say, Doc for Friar Laurence, or Anita's tormented lie about Maria's death for the miscommunication of the play) to nearly exact (the officious peacekeeper Lieutenant Schrank for the Prince, the fire escape for the balcony). It's about as complete an adaptation of the source material as can be imagined. Unfortunately, what's missing is the language. Sondheim's lyrics are very good, but the book is mostly pedestrian. And with all due respect to Leonard Bernstein's music and Jerome Robbins's choreography, without the language, you may have a fine musical, but you ain't got Shakespeare.