The lyrics, I wasn’t as involved with. The late Stephen Sondheim was the original lyricist. The team working on Spielberg’s movie changed the lyrics here and there. Sondheim was, throughout his career, famously willing to allow artists to adjust his lyrics. That said, it’s not like changing a lyric to a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical where everyone is now deceased. If the lyrics had to change, it was with the blessing of the original lyricist with Spielberg, writer Tony Kushner and Sondheim collaborating together.

The Boys of West Side: Leonard Bernstein, left, Stephen Sondheim, right.

My job was to make sure we didn’t go off the reservation. I did do some underscore cues. I pulled them from incidental music in the show or the movie. There is an arrangement of a song that is different, but there is a precedent for it being a bit different. It’s one of the most famous songs, but in the Broadway show, it’s not sung by a main character. It’s in the middle of a ballet. So, in the 1961 movie, it was done in another way, and then we did it another way in our movie. That’s the farthest afield that we went. The music needed to be the north star of the whole process.

SW: There is a phenomenally talented vocal cast involved in the new film, including breakouts like Rachel Zegler. When it came to working with the vocalists, were those responsibilities split between you and the other production members?

DN: Yeah, there was a big team. I was doing the orchestra stuff and then Jeanine Tesori did the vocal coaching. Matt Sullivan was the music supervisor. Shawn Murphy, the mixer, has been John Williams’ engineer forever and Steven knows him really well. And then David Channing was our vocal editor. There was also Garth Sunderland acting for the Bernstein estate. This project emanated from the Bernstein estate, which is run by Bernstein’s children. Everyone weighed in a lot.

Again, it’s not something I normally do. It was a bit of a learning curve. But it turned out, to my mind, and I’m not prone to hyperbole, magnificently. It feels like West Side Story, but it’s a movie. I was trying to think of a metaphor. If you a production of a Verdi opera, or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, it’s going to be the same music and essentially the same words. Our movie is slightly different but 90% of the lyrics are the same. But the hundreds and thousands of productions of Tristan und Isolde are wildly different. You can see Tristan und Isolde in an old medieval setting, spun as an old Nordic tale, or on a bare stage with nothing. It really changes your experience as an audience member. But the point is that it’s a great work of art and it needs to be performed for each new generation.

This is the whole idea of Western art. The reason why music, be it concert, opera or whatever, is played over and over again is to show it to different generations in an attempt to try to clarify what it is. I thought Spielberg clarified this for our generation and how we live now. The political nuttiness that we’re in right now and clarifying the motivation of the Jets and the Sharks. Why they do what they do. It’s still set in the era that it was always set in. It’s not even changed the setting. There’s just much more motivation to everything. Maria has much more agency, more like Shakespeare. But they didn’t pull from anything without there being a precedent.

Everything in the movie feels authentic. There’s a lot of Spanish in it that, instead of feeling cynical, just feels real and authentic. You can understand why the gangs do what they do. It still has that sense of it being a beautiful love story, and everyone lives in a tempest. The choreography’s a little different, even though it still looks like Jerome Robbins’ choreography. It’s just much better suited to a movie. I love the 1961 movie passionately. I know that movie backwards and forwards almost to a fault. But this is like a fresh take on it, and it’s thrilling. Also, it sounds, if I may say so, magnificent. It’s better than any West Side Story album out there. I know all of them, and of course, I’m maybe not objective.

Spielberg is also a genius with the Foley and the dubbing, which is essentially the mixing of the movie. They are just the best. They’ve dubbed all of Spielberg’s movies and they totally understand his vision for the music. They know how to use music. They don’t just whack up the music and then turn down the effects. In most dubs, everything is so rigid. Here, everything is used to tell the story. Obviously, the music in West Side Story is hegemonic, but the way they use the sound effects to increase the drama is just thrilling. I focused on it because we in the music department are naturally focused on the sound elements. It is also the most beautiful cinematography, a gorgeous looking film. I normally can’t sit through anything in which I was involved. I just see too many mistakes. I’ve now seen it twice and both times I’ve lost myself in it. None of the music makes me cringe.

The New Team: Jeanine Tesori, left, Gustavo Dudamel, right.

It was a lot of hard work for all of us in the music department. The movie was prepped and shot in 2019. Post-production started at the end of 2019. We still hadn’t recorded everything, we did a lot of post-recording. That’s when the conductor Gustavo Dudamel came in and we had to re-record everything anyway. And in March 2020, we were going to go back to New York and finish it with the New York Philharmonic. And boom—March 2020, New York shut down. We shut down for six months. So, to finish it was a nightmare. We had to do it in Los Angeles, although fortunately, we could use Dudamel’s orchestra, the L.A. Philharmonic. He’s the music director of that orchestra and they’re fantastic. But we could only have strings in the room at any one time because of COVID. It made post-production a nightmare. We started mixing the soundtrack and we couldn’t be together. We had to do it over Zoom and, finally, it let up and we could all get in the room to finish everything. It was just impossible to finish the movie via Zoom. Jeanine Tesori was in New York and I was here in L.A. I was in my home and Matt Sullivan was present at the mix. I would never go through that experience again. You can do lots of things but you cannot mix over Zoom.

SW: Did that experience accentuate the sense of achievement when you did all get back in the room together?

DN: It did because we’re all very experienced and we’ve all worked together in the past, excepting Jeanine. That said, she’s fantastic. Jeanine was on the film the longest out of any of us. She was in on casting for obvious reasons. They’ve got to ensure that the actors can sing. Finally, Jeanine could fly out here to L.A. and we all got together. Then it was easy to do. It was literally impossible without us all being in the same room. You can’t hear enough nuance.