The first idea of this musical version of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet came from Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents. They had planned to call it East Side Story and "center it around a star-crossed romance between a Jewish boy and an ItalianCatholic girl. But each of these men were so busy with other things that this musical was put on hold for six years. Once they returned to work on this project, they decided that this "idea had lost its social relevancy". They decided to do a story of a Polish boy and a Puerto Rican girl that had just arrived in America. They would "set it against the backdrop of clashing street gangs on the city's West side. The play was set in the mid-1950's in New York.
"The play reworked the traditional love story material and translated it, in a radical, novel and revolutionary style for a musical, to include racial strife between rival New York street gangs, juvenile delinquency and inner-city problems of the mid-twentieth century - in exhilarating musical and dane form." West Side Story opened on Broadway in 1957. The film version came out in 1961 and won 10 Academy Awards.
DH
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