Somehow, I avoided the 1961 film version of West Side Story until one night last summer, when, looking for something to watch with the kids, we settled on it. It was wonderful — especially Rita Moreno’s performance. Movie musicals aren’t exactly my cup of tea, but the exuberance of that one was completely charming.

Naturally, the wokesters hate it, and want it cancelled. To be woke is to live in perpetual fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying life. Here’s Carina del Valle Schorske writing in — where else? — The New York Times, about why West Side Story ought to be put out of its misery. Excerpts:

My mother taught me to resist the cartoonish stereotypes of macho teenage gangsters and hysterical lovers in “West Side Story.” But I also know that when the 1961 movie version came out, she and her friends went to see it twice at the local theater in Washington Heights and cheered when the Sharks came onscreen. If this musical is still our narrative ghetto, then the least we can do is make noise about what it feels like to live in it.

In 2020, it feels exhausting.

Gosh, lady. Thoughts and prayers. More:

Right from the beginning, these recent [Puerto Rican immigrant] arrivals didn’t like what they saw on Broadway. New York’s most widely circulated Spanish-language newspaper at the time, La Prensa, called for a picket at the premiere, and the Puerto Rican journalist and labor organizer Jesús Colón lamented that the show was “superficial and sentimental” and “always out of context with the real history, culture, and traditions of my people.” In subsequent decades, this tradition of protest and critique has only grown richer and more collectively exasperated.

Mr. Bernstein’s music and Jerome Robbins’s choreography are often cited as the musical’s redeeming features by its liberal defenders; a critical Los Angeles Times review of the 2009 Broadway revival nonetheless praised the “extraordinary variety and operatic fullness” of the score and the “ecstasy” of the dance numbers. But I’ve always been baffled by how the musical’s creators squandered the opportunity to engage the genius of Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms. The gym scene “mambo” is not, rhythmically, a mambo, and the famous rooftop number “America” has the Sharks dancing a Spanish-from-Spain paso doble mishmashed with whitewashed showbiz jazz.

That’s almost as bad as Puccini not utilizing gagaku music in Madame Butterfly! Cancel him!

Read it all. It’s a great hate-read. The sheer joylessness of these people, the woke, is a thing to behold. These politicized miserabilists should be kept as far away from cultural power as possible.

(Readers, I’m going to be driving all day, and won’t be able to approve comments till I get back home.)