NEW YORK, NY.- It’s been days since I watched the Steven Spielberg reboot of “West Side Story,” and I still can’t get a scene out of my head: the fateful meeting of Tony and Maria at the gym.

In the 1961 film, the pair lock eyes and move closer and closer as bodies spin around them, and the background, a rich red, envelops them. When they stop, they’re face to face, swaying softly. Suddenly, their arms lift to either side and they begin to dance. In the new movie, they spot each other in the gym and meet behind the bleachers. Tony (Ansel Elgort), staring hard at Maria (Rachel Zegler), casually drapes an arm on the metal structure. But before he can speak, Maria stretches her arms out and gives a little snap.

This dance — Justin Peck’s reframing of the original choreography by Jerome Robbins — may not be as luminous, but it is a surprise: a slice of unexpected loveliness that speaks to the subtle power of movement. Tony raises an eyebrow but joins Maria fluidly without questioning the strangeness of it all.

Here, in a rare instance, they communicate without words. Yet throughout this film, when there is a right turn, a wrong one tends to follow. More than movement, words are the dominant language of this “West Side Story.” So, brace yourself. Something’s coming — a conversation.

“I wasn’t planning on showing up tonight,” Tony says.

“You don’t like dancing?” Maria asks.

“No, I mean, yeah,” he says. “I like it. I like it a lot. Dancing with you. It’s just you’re— —”

Maria interrupts his thought with an observation. Staring up at him wistfully, she says, “You’re tall.”

You’re tall? It’s as if “Riverdale” met “The Bachelor” — or “The Bachelorette” — and you know there’s plenty more drama to come. “West Side Story,” an updated “Romeo and Juliet,” used to be a musical told through movement. Now it is a musical, full of back stories, told through words. So many, many words.

For this “West Side Story,” the screenplay, originally by playwright Arthur Laurents, is by Tony Kushner. Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are still here to guide the Sharks and the Jets along as they war it out in the streets of New York City. And then there are Peck’s dances, which have their own life yet can come off as breezy excursions from the story — and sometimes as reminiscent of numbers from “In the Heights” or “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — instead of being authoritatively knitted into the whole.

With so much emphasis on dialogue and character development, the tension — the very glue of “West Side Story” — seeps away. Tony, we learn, is on parole for almost killing a kid. Who cares? He talks about how he first saw the Cloisters, where he takes Maria on a date, while being carted off to prison. It’s hard to imagine how that could have happened, yet again, who cares? It’s like watching dancers with lead in their shoes.

It’s not as if back stories weren’t important to Robbins, who conceived, directed and choreographed the stage musical. (He choreographed the 1961 film and directed it, with Robert Wise.) He wanted his actors and dancers to flesh out their characters’ pasts in order to give them greater dimension. But in the new version, there’s another war raging as action and sensation battle a continual need for context.




In a 1985 symposium with the four collaborators — Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein and Sondheim — the subject of Cheryl Crawford came up. She was a producer who ultimately dropped out of the original stage production because, Sondheim said, “She wanted us to explain more why these kids were the way they were, and the more we tried to explain to her that this was not a sociological treatise,” but rather “a poetic interpretation of a social situation, the less she understood what we were saying.”

She wanted, he said, for “West Side Story” to be more realistically grounded. “If we had gone that way,” Sondheim added, “we would’ve killed the piece.”

The new movie hasn’t killed “West Side Story,” but it has muted it considerably — and packed it full of starts and stops. Now when the dances come, they’re less a part of the show’s fabric than an escape.

At least they’re there. But how could they not be? Robbins has always been an influence on Peck, the resident choreographer and artistic adviser of New York City Ballet, where, as a dancer, he performed Robbins’ works — including the role of Bernardo in “West Side Story Suite.” In an interview, Peck said the experience of working on the film made him realize “how much dance is built into the DNA and the structure of this musical.”

“You can’t really derail that,” he added. “It’s like dance has to be a part of it. And I think that really speaks to his belief in it and his innovation with it.”

But in Spielberg’s film, the choreography doesn’t drive the action with the same force. So where does the dancing fit in? Certainly, there are moments of beauty and energy in Peck’s contributions, yet often the impetus behind the dances seem to be more about camerawork than choreography. It’s out of his control.

One of the biggest changes is confusing. It was critical to Robbins that the Jets had a different dance language than the Sharks. He even enlisted choreographer Peter Gennaro — he was credited as co-choreographer — to help create the Latin numbers. In the new film, it’s hard to put a finger on just how the Sharks move differently than the Jets. Peck brought on Patricia Delgado, his wife and a former principal at Miami City Ballet, and Craig Salstein, a former soloist at American Ballet Theater, as associate choreographers. Delgado helped with the Latin influence, but as the groups dance together, what’s clear is that they are dancing together — it’s one language, not two.

Peck said he was more interested in creating a cohesive company of dancers, to build camaraderie among them. And if you know Peck’s work, that makes sense. The group aesthetic of “West Side Story” reflects the dance communities that Peck builds onstage, too, at City Ballet and beyond. (Peck is an in-demand choreographer who makes works for many ballet companies and won a Tony for “Carousel.”) This is “West Side Story” as seen through the eyes of a choreographer who started out making dances on his friends.

That brings a different kind of velocity to “West Side Story.” Sometimes the dancing is so joyful, so light, that the performers seem to forget who they are. As the brooding Bernardo, David Alvarez is spectacular. Yet when he is dancing, should his expression be so full of bliss? He is the leader of a gang — and, sigh, here re-imagined as a boxer.

Watching the back stories unfold — and, later, trying to keep track of them — made me think of the way this movie could really have leaned into dance. What if the dream ballet, part of the original musical, had been included? In it, Tony and Maria sing “Somewhere” in her bedroom until the walls open up and the room disappears; now members of both gangs unite, dancing together in harmony “in a world,” as the script reads, “of space and air and sun.”

The dream ballet probably never stood a chance. To most, the language of dance can be trusted only to a point. But what if it had been included — and updated? Now that would have been a thrill, a progressive act.

That sense of harmony echoes how many of Peck’s dances look on the stage. When they work — the two I love are “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes” and “The Times Are Racing” — they rise beyond steps and structure to land in a place of feeling, sweep and scope. That is what you think of when you think of the poetic, elusive “Somewhere.”

But there’s another scene that follows in the stage musical, which is even more rarely performed: The dream turns into a nightmare. Riff and Bernardo appear, their deaths are reenacted, and Maria and Tony are separated amid chaos and violence. They end up back in the bedroom, where they sing together, “Hold my hand and we’re halfway there. Some day, Somehow, Somewhere!” I would have voted for the dream ballet — all the way to the nightmare. It had so much more to say. Maria and Tony, after all, are desperate. They're holding onto air, and that calls for a dance.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.