But an ending that's even more catastrophic is in store, despite the best efforts of both Egort and Ziegler, and the local Puerto Rican storekeeper portrayed by Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar in 1961 for portraying Anita in the original. The problem, of course, is that their romance is only serving to exacerbate the feud between the two gangs, a feud that finally turns deadly when the Sharks' leader Bernardo (David Alvarez) shoots and kills the Jets' leader Riff (Mike Faist), forcing Egort's hand with devastating results. Both remind one another of their racial and ethnic differences, but both realize that there is a genuine love in trying to overcome such differences. And then it happens: Egort locks eyes with Maria (Rachel Zegler), the sister of one of the Sharks and the emotional sparks start to go off. Ansel Egort's Tony, originally played by Richard Beymer, has to keep his distance from his former Jets because he is on parole after a one-year sentence for attempted murder but they invite him to a dance being held in a gymnasium, which almost erupts into a rumble between them and the Sharks and all their respective girlfriends. The tensions, however, are even more volatile in Spielberg's 2021 version than they were in the 1961 Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins original. The original musical (and film)'s setting remains roughly the same, as does the confrontation between the largely all-White Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks the only change is that the neighborhood being fought over between these two warring gangs is the one being razed for the construction of Lincoln Center. Incredibly enough, however, he has done so, with flying colors, with his 2021 remake of WEST SIDE STORY. Following THE POST and READY PLAYER ONE in 2017-18, Spielberg next tried to tackle this one genre he had never really done before, and then had the nerve to rework a musical that was a modern-day "Romeo And Juliet". But then maybe nobody had reckoned with Steven Spielberg, for whom WEST SIDE STORY, both as a Broadway musical and as a film, was a childhood favorite, with its brilliant Leonard Bernstein score, Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, and Jerome Robbins' choreography. This is the case with the 1961 classic WEST SIDE STORY, which, following its 1957 Broadway debut, went on to not only win all those Oscars, but also made a mind-busting $60 million at the box office. And when we get to a reworking of a musical that had won a jaw-dropping ten Academy Awards, then it gets infinitely trickier. It is never easy to make a truly convincing Hollywood musical these days, even when the multi-Oscar winning 2016 film LA LA LAND is taken to account. 15 December 2021 - 24 out of 47 users found this review helpful.