Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season FINAL_BSO_Overture_May_June | Page 31

MOVIE WITH ORCHESTRA: WEST SIDE STORY
it 10 Oscars, the most ever to a film
musical. Among them were Best Film,
Best Director to Wise and Robbins, a
special Choreography Oscar to Robbins,
Best Supporting Actress to Moreno
and Best Supporting Actor to George
Chakiris as Bernardo. Unfortunately,
Bernstein was ineligible for the Oscar
for Best Score because his music was not
original music written for the screen.
Ramin and Kostal had made a new
arrangement of the music for the film,
scored for a large studio orchestra rather
than the reduced pit band used on
Broadway; Bernstein disliked it, calling
it “overbearing and lacking in texture
and subtlety.” When the movie was re-
released for its 50 th anniversary in 2011,
Garth Edwin Sunderland of Bernstein’s
offices created a new arrangement closer
to the stage original and intended for
live performance at showings of the
film. It is this version we’ll hear at these
performances of one of the great classics
of American film and American music.
Production Credits
Producer: Paul H. Epstein for The Leonard Bernstein
Office, Inc.
Associate Producer: Eleonor M. Sandresky for
The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.
Production Supervisor: Steven A. Linder
Technical Director: Mike Runice
Sound Engineer: Matt Yelton
Music Supervision: Garth Edwin Sunderland
Original Orchestrations: Leonard Bernstein,
Sid Ramin, Irwin Kostal
Additional orchestrations: Garth Edwin Sunderland
& Peter West
Music Preparation: Peter West
Original manuscript reconstruction:
Eleonor M. Sandresky
Technical Consultant: Laura Gibson
Soundtrack Adaptation—Chace Audio by Deluxe:
Robert Heiber, Chris Reynolds, Andrew Starbin,
Alice Taylor
Sound Separation Technology provided by
Audionamix
Click Tracks and Streamers created by:
Kristopher Carter and Mako Sujishi
With special thanks to: Arthur Laurents and his Estate,
Stephen Sondheim, The Robbins Rights Trust, The
Johnny Green Collection at Harvard University, The Sid
Ramin Collection at Columbia University, The Robert
Wise Collection at the University of Southern California,
Lawrence A. Mirisch, David Newman, Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer Studios Inc., MGM HD, Twentieth Century Fox
Home Entertainment LLC, Ken Hahn and Sync Sound
West Side Story is a registered trademark of The Leonard Bernstein
Office, Inc. in the US and other countries.
Notes by Janet E. Bedell, © 2019
then-girlfriend Natalie Wood to read
with him; the upshot was that Wise chose
Wood to be Maria and bypassed Beatty
for the 21-year-old Richard Beymer, a
former child actor. Rita Moreno, a native
Puerto Rican, replaced Chita Rivera as
Anita, the girlfriend of Bernardo, the
leader of the Sharks. Though Wood and
Beymer wanted to do their own singing,
their voices were ultimately dubbed by
Marni Nixon and Jimmy Bryant.
Ernest Lehman adapted Laurents’
original book for the screen. Though
there were some adjustments to the order
of events and the sequence of songs,
the film screenplay stayed very close
to the original. Bernstein himself had
little to do with the making of the film.
West Side Story opened in New York on
October 18, 1961 and became that year’s
second-highest-grossing film.
Strangely, the stage version of West
Side Story had been largely bypassed—
in favor of the more conventional The
Music Man—by the 1958 Tony Awards.
However, the Academy Awards were
much more generous to the film, giving

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