Favorite musical numbers?
Mine is Quintet and Cool
shareWow!! Due to my intense love for this film, I have a very tough time picking out favorite musical numbers, scenes and characters from the film West Side Story.
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MovieChat Forums > West Side Story (1961) Discussion > Favorite musical numbers?
My favorite numbers are. "America" love the energy and "Tonight" beautiful
shareThe music, singing and dancing of America in combo still blows me away.🐭
shareThe music, singing and dancing of America in combo still blows me away.🐭
Yup! Adding Bernardo and the rest of the Shark guys really brought the "America" scene "to the Heavens", as Rita Moreno said, afterwards. share
Totally agree, spookyrat. 'America' was absolutely brilliant in every respect. I love watching it whenever the movie comes back on cable. Best all-around number in any show I've ever seen.
share'Something's Coming' really caught my ears. It's that creeping ominous insinuation about the music that really help the lyrics come to life.
shareA Boy Like That/I have a Love is actually my favorite song in the musical. It's at the height of WSS's emotional intensity, but it's also a great stand-alone song. It's also a greatly directed scene. Moreno is flawless in bringing out emotion, but this is also one of the few scenes that I don't mind from Wood (I know she's not singing)
The Jet Song is also fingerly snappingly good.
And Somewhere is my favorite rendition of the song-something about the slightly muffled, dated quality of the music makes it more haunting than something that was recorded 5 years ago. It's hard to describe. Maybe it's the cello.
All of the musical events in the film West Side Story are finger-snappingly good, plus they're all vital and integral parts of the very story behind West Side Story, to boot.
To be truthful, due to West Side Story's strengths as a movie, as well as a stage musical, I'm not bothered by the fact that both Natalie Wood's and Richard Beymer's singing voices were dubbed. Nor do I mind that Natalie Wood looked like a light-skinned Puerto Rican, either. In real life, there are different ways for Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic people to look; like Caucasians and African-Americans, they, too, tend to range from being very light to being very dark-complected.
My favorites are "Tonight" duet and ensemble versions. And "Somewhere". I love Rita Moreno, but giving her the song was
an unfortunate change.