by Nathaniel R
You may recall that we were briefly very excited about Rita Moreno's return to her home genre, the movie musical. News broke but then was quickly retracted that she had landed a wonderful part in the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony-winning debut In the Heights which ran on Broadway from 2008 through 2011. Now, the news is for real but with a different film. She'll play "Valentina" in Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story. That's the "Doc" role, in a bit of racial and gender-flipped casting...
Doc (Ned Glass) and Tony (Richard Beymer) in the 1961 classic
Doc is the sympathetic corner store owner and lone voice of reason in the mad mad world of the warring teen gangs. They've expanded the role for her but even if they hadn't it would be a wonderful place for Moreno in the film and a way to tie it to the original in a respectful way. Given that the role is expanded, it seems likely that this new interpretation of the musical will concentrate more on The Sharks than on the Jets since the corner store where a few of the key scenes take place will obviously have to be on the Puerto Rican side of town and, thus, a hangout for the Sharks instead. But does Tony still work there? So many questions.
But the big question is... will Moreno get a snippet of one of the group songs somehow? Bernstein isn't around to write new material and West Side Story already has the greatest musical score of all time so it'd be insane to mess with it much apart from new arrangements.
Read our three-part retrospective of West Side Story in case you missed it.