1. West Side Story
Great Plays

2. West Side Story Opened as a staged Musical play in 1957 by writer
Arthur Laurents and director/choreographer Jerome Robbins
Story about a racial strife between rival New York street gangs
(newly-arrived Puerto Ricans and second-generation Americans
from white European immigrant families)

3. West Side Story is a Musical!
Musical drama was on of the most popular forms of theater
in America in the 1950s. It attracted the mass audience.
Musical theater is a form of theater combining
music, songs, spoken dialogue and dance.
In 1957, it won the Tony award for Best Musical!

4. Author Information Arthur Laurents Jerome Robbins (Rabinowitz)
Wrote the script
An American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.
Jerome Robbins (Rabinowitz)
-Theater producer, director and choreographer
-Choreographed for West Side Story
Then
Now
Born in 1918

5. West Side Story -The Novel-
1960, Irving Shulman wrote a novelization of West Side Story-you may sometimes hear him as the author.
We are reading the script by Arthur Laurents!

6. Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents
originally planned to call it East Side Story
and center it around a star-crossed romance
between Jewish boy and an Italian Catholic girl.
The project was set aside, and then the idea was no longer socially relevant.
They changed it to a story of an “American” boy of Polish Descent and a
Puerto Rican girl with the backdrop on the clashing street gangs on
the city’s West side.

7. ROMEO & JULIET
VS.
WEST SIDE STORY

8. The setting took place in the Upper West Side of New York City
in the late 1950s

9. New York in the 1950s
The largest migration of Puerto Ricans to New York happened in the 1950s, known as “The Great Migration” with the advent of air travel.
Puerto Ricans began to form their own small “Barrios” (neighborhoods) in the Bronx, Brooklyn and in Easter Harlem.
Huge discrimination!
Signs read “No dogs or Puerto Ricans allowed”
The plot with Puerto Ricans against 2nd Generation Americans
In West Side Story was extremely relevant for the times!
It made Romeo and Juliet come to a modern day life.