earticle

영어

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner’s screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version of West Side Story constitutes neither a remake of the critically acclaimed 1961 film nor a slavishly faithful adaptation of Arthur Laurents’s book for the 1957 stage musical on which it is based. Instead, Kushner’s screenplay can be viewed as an often radical reimagining of the stage play that enhances its characters’ backstories and motivations while simultaneously drawing the work closer to the source of the original West Side Story: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. While observing the basic structure of the 1957 stage play, Kushner’s screenplay makes substantial changes to Laurents’s characterizations and dialogue, the latter of which he has rewritten almost in its entirety, creating an arguably more Shakespearean adaptation in the process. This article examines the numerous differences between Kushner’s screenplay and the 1957 stage book, addressing in particular how the former pays homage not only to its Shakespearean origins through the paraphrasing of a number of lines from Romeo and Juliet, but, more significantly, how it more closely resembles its 16th century precursor in terms of several of its central characters, including Riff and Valentina (Mercutio and Father Lawrence, respectively), as well as in certain plot and thematic aspects.