The new revival of “West Side Story” is so much more exciting, more powerful and engaging than the previous Lyric Opera of Chicago’s bland production of 2019. This time, Lyric has restaged the musical into a mesmerizing presentation that fully lives up to expectations. Although the show opened on Broadway in 1957, it not only…

Hollywood tends to ruin its remakes of classic movies with clumsy attempts to update them and make them “relevant.” Two examples are the cheesy 1976 “King Kong” and Amazon’s current desecration of “Cinderella.” So, like many others, I cringed when I heard that Steven Spielberg was filming a new “West Side Story.”  The 1961 original…