Actually, although you are correct about the gayness of quite a few people connected with West Side Story (including Kert), you have somewhat mischaracterized Jerome Robbins, the director/choreographer who shaped the entire enterprise.

Jerome Robbins had one of the most complex and active love/sex lives of anyone I’ve ever read about. Quite the extraordinary guy, and apparently tremendously difficult as a director but tremendously charismatic in private life, he not only was bisexual but seriously bisexual in that he had meaningful, long-lasting love affairs (not just sexual affairs) with many women and many men. I read a very lengthy biography of Robbins and decided he defies classification in this regard. “Bisexual” doesn’t exactly cover it, either. In a previous post I wrote this about Robbins:

It is often said that Robbins was homosexual, but if there is such a thing as bisexuality he certainly exhibited it. He must have been an exceptionally compelling human being, because the list of men and women with whom he had affairs—and many of them were real love affairs, not shallow dalliances—reads like a list of the most creative people of the 20th century. What’s more, his lovers usually continued to love him as friends long after the affair had ended…

Let’s forget it because it isn’t true.

2. Let’s not forget how precious/pretensious West Side Story was back in the 60s – hard to see then because its assumptions dovetailed with white liberal beliefs of the time. I am surprised that West Side Story even gets produced in this “woke” decade.

3. Does not pay to compare books, stage shows, and movies. Each one is its own medium. The best example of that for me is “Little Shop of Horrors” – which started as an indie film by Roger Corman, and was adapted into a firecracker of a musical that regularly threated to blow the roof off its tiny off-off-Broadway theater. Then the musical was successfully (IMHO) adapted into a film directed by Muppets pupeteer Frank Oz, who preserved the manic energy in that tiny theater while opening up the mise en scene to cinematic possibilities.

I also agree with LJ that “Kert is telling you about the love he has met, while to other two are singing an ode to a name.” But I think it’s the visual of his acting that achieves that effect.

As for myself, Andy Williams 1967 “Maria” is… IMO unmatched.

I suspect that Bernstein’s “Maria” was inspired by Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and in support of that speculation I offer; Russell Watson`s performance of Ave Maria at Bridgewater 2002

Ironically, Kert had no amatory interest in women. Neither did the author or the lyricist of the original production. The director and choreographer had hardly any. Such interests were limited to Leonard Bernstein (on alternate weeks) and the producers.