West Side Story

Leonard Bernstein’s parents, like millions who made the crossing from Europe, dreamed of escaping persecution in the old country to build a better life in America. While they and their family succeeded, many discovered that American reality fell far short of the American Dream. West Side Story, among the 20th century’s greatest stage works and a landmark in the development of musical theatre, draws its dramatic force from the tensions between migrant communities, the often deadly passions stirred by gang rivalry and a timeless love story that transcends them. The idea for a musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet translated to the streets of New York was hatched in the late 1940s by Jerome Robbins, choreographer of Bernstein’s Broadway musical comedy On the Town. Its plot was developed by the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who pitted the Puerto Rican Sharks against the Jets, working-class New Yorkers battling to rule San Juan Hill in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and converted Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers into Tony, a former Jet, and Maria, whose brother leads the Sharks. The show’s lyrics were written by Stephen Sondheim, a Broadway novice in his early twenties who launched his career with West Side Story. Bernstein’s score, completed in the summer of 1957 in time for the opening of a long run at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City, contains a sophisticated mix of Latin rhythms, big band dance numbers, songs that exude the intensity of opera and set-piece Broadway numbers rarely equalled since. The 1961 film version and soundtrack recording inspired a generation to sing “I like to be in America” and introduced a massive global audience to numbers like “Maria”, “Somewhere” and “Tonight”.