Ahhhh....the most memorable moviegoing experience(s). I love all the stories here, and I'll add one or two of my own.
I'm still savoring the Saturday night back in early October 2001 when I had the honor and good fortune to go down to the Big Apple to attend a special 40th-year anniversary screening of....y'all guessed it....the great, venerable golden-oldie-but-goody classic fi lm
West Side Story at NYC's renowned Radio City Music Hall. This wonderful experience was less than a month after the horrific 9/11 attacks on the WTC Towers down in NYC, too!
Some friends of mine who 'd previously lived in Boston but had moved down to NYC some years before, and who knew that WSS is my alltiime favorite flick, called me during mid-summer of 2001 to ask me if I wanted them to send off for some free tickets to the special 40th anniversary screening of WSS. I immediately said yes, and, despite some snafus, it turned out to be a wonderful evening that has not been forgotten. Leaving Boston at around 7:00 that Saturday morning, I drove down to the Big Apple specially to see WSS, and to see old friends as well.
Radio City Music Hall was packed with an exuberant, friendly crowd, and there was much fingersnapping and applause from the audience. There was a beautiful new print of the film WSS, which had been cleaned up, remastered and restored to its former glory.
Shown on the great big, wide movie theatre screen, West Side Story seemed to take on a magical, almost 3-dimensional quality. The Bernstein musical score seemed more intense and brighter, as do the richly-colored costumes and photography. The scenery seemed more expansive, and all the characters in WSS, from the romancing Tony & Maria to the warring Jets & Sharks, and from Doc to Officer Krupke and Lt. Schrank, seemed to move more freely and fluidly, in a much wider, more open space. The fantastically-choreographed dancing by Jerome Robbins, seemed much more intense also, as did everything else.
West Side Story is a wonderful film which is even more vital when seen on a great big wide movie theatre screen, with the lights down low--and I mean in a real movie theatre, to boot. It was a wonderful experience, and it was great sharing it with about 5-6 thousand other people who also had a great time.
Five years later, in mid-October 2006, I drove down to the Big Apple again for a screening of West Side Story, this time at NYC's Ziegfeld Clearview Theatre. This, too was a wonderful experience, well attended, in a very palatial-looking movie theatre, to boot. Although the Ziegfeld Theatre, too, had a great big wide screen, unlike the movie screen at Radio City Music Hall, which was also big and wide, the screen at the Ziegfeld was long and narrow. Both experiences were wonderful, but I sometimes think that a film such as WSS is even better when it's shown on a long, narrow movie screen, as opposed to one that's just plain expansive. In either case, it's exciting, and there's something special about having seen it both times in NYC theatres, as much as I love all the screenings of WSS that I attend.
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