West Side Story

Composer: Leonard Bernstein
Librettist: Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim
Company: Houston Grand Opera

Synopsis

It is widely known that West Side Story (WSS) is based directly on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (R&J). Far less well known is the fact that Shakespeare based his play (1594) on other material, particularly a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). The theme of two lovers thwarted by circumstances beyond their control, however, had long before been established in Western legend: Troilus and Cressida, Tristan and Isolde, to name only two such pairs. In more recent times, American folklore had assimilated the myth into the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. Brooke's description of R&J as an "vnfortunate coople" displays a puritanical streak:

" . . . louers, thrilling themselves to vnhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and aduise of parents and frendes."

Shakespeare transcended the question of morality, though he borrowed freely from the earlier poem, and in fact, he replicated Brooke's actual words in at least three instances. But Brooke pales by comparison. Shakespeare rapturously expanded the soliloquies, and fashioned new personages endowing them with nobility.

Although there are many borrowings of plot and content from R&J to WSS, Arthur Laurents, author of the book for the musical, did not verbally borrow from Shakespeare. But just as Shakespeare transformed Brook's "Drunken gossypes, superstitious friers, vnchastitie, the shame of stolne contractes hastyng to more vnhappye deathe," so Laurents replaces the second half of Shakespeare's play, which he tells us, "rests on Juliet's swallowing a magic potion, a device that would not be swallowed in a modern play." He continues:

"In the book (why are the spoken words for a musical show called this?) . . . the dialogue is my translation of adolescent street talk into theater: it may sound real, but it isn't."

That he succeeded, and did so brilliantly, is attested to by his companion-in-arms Alan Jay Lerner:

"Arthur Laurent's book, with its moving re-telling of the Romeo and Juliet tale. . . is a triumph of style and model of its genre. As a fellow tradesman, I was filled with the deepest admiration."

Jerome Robbins had at first envisioned Juliet as a Jewish girl and Romeo as an Italian Catholic. The action, set during the Easter-Passover season, was to have occurred on the Lower East Side of New York City. Hence the title might have been EAST Side Story. (Another working title was Gangway!) That was in 1949. Six years later, Laurents and Leonard Bernstein were working (independently) in Hollywood, where they conferred on the aborted project. The newspapers were filled with reports of street riots by Chicano Americans in Los Angeles.

Those headlines turned the trick, triggering the imaginations of the collaborators. The locale swiftly shifted to New York's West Side, and in 1957 WSS exploded onto the American State. In the decades that have passed, WSS has become a contemporary classic.