West Side Story's Anybodys: From Tomboy to Trans Character

When Tony Kushner, Steven Spielberg, and actor iris menas reexamined the 64-year-old musical, they found a trans character in plain sight.

When Steven Spielberg first approached Tony Kushner about making a new film of West Side Story, Kushner was wary of the project. “I thought it was kind of crazy,” the playwright, screenwriter, and frequent Spielberg collaborator told me. “It just seemed like a surefire way to make something that was going to fail.” But soon, Kushner found himself, “casually reading bits and pieces of 1957 history.” He became fascinated with the slum clearance projects of the late 1950s and the destruction of Lincoln Square to make way for Lincoln Center. He began thinking about the lives of street kids and Puerto Rican immigrants. Soon, “it got exciting to me.”

The original West Side Story was indifferently researched and focused far more on the mechanics of its plot than on the real world in which it was set. For much of the rest of his career, lyricist Stephen Sondheim would criticize the show for not containing any real characters and for leaning too hard on melodrama. Although Kushner disagreed with Sondheim’s assessment—the two men argued about it while the former was writing the new screenplay—his revision of the show stacks sociopolitical context, historical research, and character detail so densely that each moment resonates on multiple levels at once. That the musical is also fleet on its feet, and only five minutes longer than the original, feels nothing short of miraculous.

Of all the updates, though, perhaps the most fascinating is the new film’s treatment of the minor character of Anybodys, and the ways in which the revision of the role knits together so many of the themes of Kushner’s screenplay. If you are not a serious West Side Story fan, or if you know the musical primarily through its songs, you could be forgiven for not even knowing who Anybodys is. The role is a small one, a “tomboy” in the original who yearns to be one of the Jets but is shut out on account of being a girl.

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