West Side Story

• 1. Introduction

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  West Side Story arrived on Broadway on the 26th of September, 1957, and the critic Walter Kerr wrote the next morning that its radioactive fallout must still be descending on the theater world. That image captures something real. Here was a musical about teenage gang warfare, a love story ending in death, a score that audiences were told no one would be able to sing. Producers had turned it down one after another, calling it too dark and too depressing. One backer pulled out entirely just two months before rehearsals were due to begin. And yet, when the lights went up at the Winter Garden Theatre, something happened that the American musical had not quite seen before. The questions the show raises go deeper than whether Tony and Maria will survive. They reach into how an artwork gets made when its creators are barely speaking to each other, how a Shakespeare play becomes a New York street fight, and what it means when a piece of theater is so willing to let its audience leave without comfort.

• 2. From East Side to West

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  Jerome Robbins first brought the idea to Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents in 1949. His original concept placed a Catholic family and a Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the Easter-Passover season, the conflict centered on antisemitism. The Jewish heroine had survived the Holocaust. The gang opposing the Emeralds was called the Jets. Laurents drafted a version he called East Side Story, and only after finishing it did the group recognize they had essentially musicalized themes already covered in plays like Abie's Irish Rose. Robbins stepped away, and the project sat untouched for nearly five years.

  The revival came accidentally, in a hotel lobby in Hollywood. Laurents was in Los Angeles to write the screenplay for a remake of the 1934 Greta Garbo film The Painted Veil, starring Ava Gardner. He contacted Bernstein, who was conducting at the Hollywood Bowl, and the two met at The Beverly Hills Hotel. The front pages of the morning newspapers were full of stories about a Chicano turf war, and the conversation turned to juvenile delinquent gangs. Bernstein suggested setting the musical in Los Angeles, but Laurents felt he knew Puerto Ricans in New York and Harlem better than Mexican Americans and Olvera Street. Robbins arrived in Hollywood to choreograph the 1956 film The King and I, and the three began reshaping the idea around a Puerto Rican-white conflict in Manhattan.

  Getting Stephen Sondheim onto the project required a push from Oscar Hammerstein himself. Sondheim had auditioned by playing the score for his unproduced musical Saturday Night, and Laurents liked his lyrics but was unimpressed by the music. When Sondheim was asked to join West Side Story purely as lyricist, he resisted; he had decided his next project would be one he wrote entirely himself. Hammerstein convinced him the experience was worth having. Sondheim accepted, and his name would ultimately be the one that appeared on the lyric credits, after Bernstein, in a gesture of generosity, removed his own name as co-lyricist during the out-of-town tryout.

• 3. Building the Script

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  Arthur Laurents faced a specific problem when adapting Romeo and Juliet: language. Profanity was uncommon on the Broadway stage of the mid-1950s, and slang risked sounding dated before the production even opened. His solution was to invent street talk that sounded authentic but was not. The phrase "cut the frabba-jabba" exists nowhere in any real gang vocabulary. It exists only in West Side Story.

  The relationship between Laurents' book and Shakespeare's play was close at the start and grew looser through revision. Characters based on Rosaline and the parents of the lovers were cut early. Juliet's faked death and suicide were removed later. Songs reshuffled the emotional architecture: "One Hand, One Heart" was moved from the balcony scene to the bridal shop because Laurents considered it too pristine for the outdoor setting, and "Tonight" was written to take its place. Comic relief arrived in the second act in the form of Officer Krupke, added specifically because Laurents felt the building tension needed somewhere to release before the play's tragic conclusion.

  Not every creative decision went Laurents' way. He believed the lyrics to "America" and "I Feel Pretty" were too witty for the characters who sang them. He lost that argument, and both songs became audience favorites. He also lost the argument against "Kid Stuff", a song added during the Washington tryout, though he eventually convinced the group it was pulling the show toward typical musical comedy, and it was cut. Bernstein, meanwhile, was composing West Side Story and Candide at the same time, and material drifted between the two. The duet "One Hand, One Heart" was originally written for a character in Candide. The music of "Gee, Officer Krupke" was pulled from the Venice scene in that same show.

• 4. The Score's Architecture

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  Bernstein's music for West Side Story blends jazz, Latin rhythms, symphonic sweep, and musical-comedy conventions in ways that were new for Broadway. The original orchestra consisted of 31 players, an unusually large pit orchestra for the time, enhanced to include five percussionists. The score was orchestrated by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal following detailed instructions from Bernstein, who then wrote revisions on their manuscript; the original, heavily annotated by all three, is held at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia University.

  Critics could hear that the score was doing something unusual. Walter Kerr noted in the New York Herald Tribune that Bernstein had permitted himself only a few moments of "graceful, lingering melody" - citing "Maria", "Tonight", and "I Have a Love" - and that for most of the show he had served the needs of what Kerr called the "onstage threshing machine". Time magazine went further, suggesting that the show's prioritizing of choreography over the love story might prove a milestone in musical-drama history. Columbia Records initially declined to record the cast album, citing the score as too depressing and too difficult.

  In 1960, three years after the Broadway opening, Bernstein assembled a suite of orchestral music from the show titled Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. It runs nine movements, from the Prologue through to a concluding Adagio. The suite premiered on the 13th of February, 1961, at Carnegie Hall, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Lukas Foss. A 1985 studio recording of the full score, conducted by Bernstein himself with the New York Philharmonic and featuring opera singers Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa, won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in 1986. A television documentary about the making of that album won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary the same year.

• 5. Getting It On Stage

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  Producer Cheryl Crawford pulled out of West Side Story in the spring of 1957, just two months before rehearsals were supposed to begin, after a backers' audition failed to raise any money. Every other producer had already said no. Sondheim contacted his friend Hal Prince, who was in Boston overseeing the out-of-town tryout of a new George Abbott musical called New Girl in Town. Prince read the script, liked it, and consulted Abbott, his longtime mentor. Abbott advised him to decline. Prince, who believed Abbott was the primary reason New Girl in Town was in trouble, decided to ignore him. He and his producing partner Robert E. Griffith flew to New York to hear Sondheim and Bernstein play through the score. In his memoirs, Prince recalled: "Sondheim and Bernstein sat at the piano playing through the music, and soon I was singing along with them."

  Robbins then announced he did not want to choreograph the show, but changed his mind when Prince agreed to an eight-week dance rehearsal period instead of the customary four. Robbins also hired Peter Gennaro as his assistant, since West Side Story was to contain more dancing than any previous Broadway production. Casting was its own challenge. Bernstein later described the difficulty: the characters had to sing, dance, act, and be credible as teenagers. Some of the cast were teenagers; some were twenty-one; some were thirty but looked sixteen. Some were excellent singers who could not dance, or vice versa.

  Robbins kept the actors playing the Jets and the Sharks separated throughout rehearsals, posting newspaper stories about real gang violence on the backstage bulletin board. He gave each dancer a unique gesture repertoire specific to their character alone. The pre-Broadway run in Washington, D.C., was a critical and commercial success. Sondheim, listed as co-lyricist, received no mention in any of the Washington reviews, overshadowed entirely by the better-known Bernstein. By opening night on Broadway, none of the collaborators were speaking to Robbins, who had demanded and received a "Conceived by" credit and used it to justify making major decisions without consulting the others.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  The original Broadway production ran for 732 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre before a national tour launched on the 1st of July, 1959, in Denver. The tour returned the show to New York in April 1960 for another 249 performances. In 1958, the production was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Musical; it won two, for Best Choreography (Robbins) and Best Scenic Design (Oliver Smith).

  The West End production, which opened at Her Majesty's Theatre on the 12th of December, 1958, ran longer than the original Broadway production, with a total of 1,039 performances through June 1961. George Chakiris, who played Riff in that London production, went on to play Bernardo in the 1961 film adaptation and won the Academy Award for that role.

  The 1961 film, co-directed by Robert Wise and Robbins, won ten Academy Awards from eleven nominations, including Best Picture. Rita Moreno, as Anita, became the first Latina actress ever to win an Oscar. The soundtrack album reached number one on the Billboard chart and held that position for a record 54 weeks. Stan Kenton's jazz adaptation, Kenton's West Side Story, won the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.

  The 2009 Broadway revival, which incorporated Spanish lyrics and dialogue translated by Lin-Manuel Miranda, ran for 748 performances and sold more than a million tickets. The cast recording won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album. The 2020 revival, directed by Ivo van Hove and staged without an intermission in one hour and forty-five minutes, closed after only 24 performances when the COVID-19 pandemic shut Broadway on the 11th of March, 2020. Steven Spielberg's 2021 film adaptation brought Ariana DeBose the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and Rita Moreno, who had won that same award for the 1961 film, appeared in the new version as a reconceived character named Valentina.