LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — Steven Spielberg has been remaking common musical “West Aspect Story” in his head for many years but claims that last but not least getting it on was his riskiest challenge in a occupation that has spanned 50 years.

50 percent a century immediately after the musical published by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim won 10 Oscars, Spielberg has reimagined the really like story established between rival avenue gangs for a new generation but with the reverence of a correct enthusiast.

“The lyrics have been portion of my lifestyle for 65 decades,” he reported. “All my kids memorized the album and I have residence videos of my young children executing ‘West Facet Story’ in our residing space.”

Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for the musical, died at age 91, a few days just before the entire world premiere of the new film.

“West Side Story,” Spielberg’s initially shot at directing a musical, opens in motion picture theaters around the globe this week with all the Latino characters played by Latinx actors and choreography that offers an affectionate nod to the ground-breaking authentic with out specifically reproducing it.

“No-one participating in a Shark, woman or boy, is not of Latino or Latinx descent… We did not want to have to set make up on anyone’s confront to influence an viewers that they have been Puerto Rican,” Spielberg said.

Based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the new movie places additional emphasis on difficulties of race, immigration, poverty and marginalization that dominate lifestyle in a 1950s slum community of New York.

“Even however we even now set our movie in 1957, it was extremely significant to place it in the vernacular of the way this generation speaks and interacts with just about every other currently,” Spielberg claimed.

“We needed to update the enjoy to make it satisfactory to the complexities that men and women have with just about every other in present day culture, from faculty campuses to politics to the ideological divide.”

Spielberg said it was an overwhelming activity, but he needn’t have nervous. The movie, which sees authentic Puerto Rican star Rita Moreno, now 89, bridging the generations by using on a unique position, has received rave critiques.

Britain’s Day by day Telegraph termed it…