As a dramaturg who specialises in adaptations for the stage, Jane Barnette considers West Side Story in light of its source, Romeo and Juliet. There are many different ways to focus dramaturgical work for theatrical adaptations, depending on the specific needs of the work in question. Although the entirety of any dramaturgical approach for West Side Story ultimately depends on the approach taken by the director and creative team behind a particular production, in this essay, Barnette grounds her initial inquiry regarding the relationship of West Side Story to Romeo and Juliet in questions central to adapturgy itself. Specifically, she examines the ‘spirit of the source’, as well as the pleasures available for spectators familiar with the source material. Finally, she questions the geography of adaptation–how questions of time and space figure into comparisons between the texts–as well as their production histories.

The production of West Side Story at the Vienna Volksoper in 1968 contributed to the rise of the Austrian metropolis as a European centre of American musical theatre. As this chapter shows, the main link between Bernstein, Broadway, and Vienna was Marcel Prawy (1911–2003), a well-known Austrian dramaturg, opera connoisseur, and critic. Prawy created a German adaptation of West Side Story, and in it he imputed Central European cultural viewpoints and preferences into the American artform, particularly in its representation of ethnic conflicts. The differences between Prawy’s German adaptation and the English original suggest that Prawy was concerned about making the American work more understandable for Viennese audiences not only through his approach to language and the poetic properties of the lyrics, but also by subtle but significant changes of the work’s meaning. Most prominently, Prawy aimed at increasing the Broadway work’s exoticist elements.

Bernstein wrote for the voice with a keen understanding of how drama becomes heightened through music. Since West Side Story broke the mould of traditional musical theatre, the vocal demands are equally non-traditional. By examining the vocal writing, one can understand Bernstein’s sense of character and how each musical number propels the story through song. This chapter begins by exploring the vocal writing in depth, specifically the roles of Maria, Tony, Anita, and Riff. The vocal lines reveal the need for specific vocal production, including classical, mix, and belt styles. The second part of the chapter analyses specific performances of those roles in the original Broadway cast recording, the 1984 recording conducted by Bernstein himself with opera singers, the 2009 bilingual Broadway revival, and briefly considers vocal performances from the 2021 film adaptation. The chapter further explores the artists’ stylistic vocal choices and their process for creating these sounds.

For Jerome Robbins, musical theatre dance provided spectacle, but its primary function was to communicate story, acting as a cohesive thread between visual, aural, and textual elements. Robbins turned dance into a common language in the world of the play, an extension of a character’s vocabulary. For West Side Story, Jerome Robbins envisioned a prominent ensemble comprised of singing–acting dancers responsible for conveying essential narrative elements. By centering the action of the ensemble, movement and music lead lyrics, book, and design in translating given circumstances and character action. He enhanced aesthetic unity, thematic synthesis, and flow by developing a choreo-direction process which integrated American Stanislavski-based method acting principles with staging and dance composition. This ultimately contributed to the legacy left by West Side Story on film, Broadway, and concert dance.

A principal reason for the continuing significance of West Side Story in the musical theatre repertory is the quality of the score, with memorable songs and dance music that are intimately tied to the plot. This chapter opens with brief consideration of significant matters for Bernstein and Sondheim as they created the score. Description of the orchestration, which Bernstein accomplished with the assistance of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, includes the process and a description of the show’s three major soundscapes and how they interact in the score. Bernstein’s unification of the score involves shared melodic and rhythmic motives, identified here and documented through musical examples. The approach to individual numbers involves important material concerning their composition and significant aspects of lyrics and music, documented with many references to the 1957 and 2009 original cast recordings and Bernstein’s 1984 studio recording of the score.

Sondheim was an unknown and untested man of the professional theatre when Arthur Laurents suggested him as a possible collaborator on West Side Story. Sondheim had hoped to bring his music and lyrics to the Broadway stage, but Saturday Night (1955, with book by Julius and Philip Epstein) stalled after its main producer, Lemuel Ayers, died in August 1955. With this project stalled, Sondheim heeded the recommendation from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, to seize the opportunity to work with Laurents, Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins. This article attempts to explain the opinions of Laurents and others in the mid-1950s that Sondheim’s lyrics were brilliant but his music left them cold. Sampling his early lyrics and Sondheim’s recordings of himself singing his songs, I show how his music might be considered challenging but would nevertheless propel his words and musical theatre in general to a greater understanding of music’s dramatic possibilities.

The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

West Side Story has long been important in the international market. This chapter provides four vignettes of its presence outside of the United States. Attempts to make the show one of the pieces of American culture that the US State Department allowed to tour in the USSR in the 1950s were unsuccessful, but the 1961 film helped make West Side Story known there and its sense of integration between various elements aligned closely with Soviet artistic conceptions. The film became very popular in Spain, where staged versions did not appear until tours in the 1980s. The first two professional Spanish productions premiered in Barcelona in 1996 and Madrid in 2018. Jerome Robbins took an American cast to England in 1958, creating a sensation first in Manchester and then in London. A Finnish production in Tampere Theater in 1963 proved popular and played briefly in Vienna in 1965.

In working with Stephen Sondheim as lyricist on West Side Story, Bernstein seemed to have forged an important new collaboration with an edgy young writer to contrast with his previous musicals with musical comedy writers Comden and Green. Yet the young Sondheim saw himself as a composer-lyricist, perhaps even with more of an emphasis on the music than the words, so the success of the team was short-lived. This chapter examines primary source accounts of their work together, considering how they met, what they thought of each other, and how productive their creative tensions were. The chapter also briefly addresses their other short-lived projects, including the abandoned The Exception and the Rule.

No one so inspired the generation of American musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s as did Bernstein, an ‘inescapable’ and ‘incontroverible’ icon of the 1960s and beyond. His celebrity was particularly linked to the explosive growth of television, beginning with appearances on Omnibus (from 1954) and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts (from 1958). Two texts complicate his reputation as Wunderkind of American music: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970) and Leon Botstein’s ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’ (1983). But by the time of his 100th birthday celebrations in 2018, Bernstein’s stature as cultural icon seemed intact and secure, resting largely on West Side Story.

Bernstein’s later Broadway shows, West Side Story and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, represent his greatest smash hit success and his biggest flop. This chapter focuses on the music of these two shows, and more specifically on what happened to the music after the initial runs were over, when the theatres went dark, and how, in both cases, the music became abstracted from its original context through arrangements, cover versions, and use in advertising, film, and television, sometimes reframing the meaning of the original material. As is to be expected, the two stories are quite different: West Side Story has become deeply embedded in the culture while 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was nearly banished to obscurity. The reception of both shows, however, reveals something about the enduring nature of Bernstein’s music.

Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins shared mutual desires to innovate and create in their individual fields and to create truly ‘American’ art of the twentieth century. Their collaborations for ballet (Fancy Free, On the Town, Facsimile, Age of Anxiety, Dybbuk) and musical theatre and film (West Side Story) propelled each into defining their specific style and artistic voices. Their aim to synthesize classical, symphonic aesthetics with rhythms and movements of Black and Latinx vernacular dance and music; their mutual interest in translating character, intention, emotion, mood, and narrative circumstances through non-textual mediums; and their active integration of music and movement in the creative process cinched their artistic connection. Even after the two went their separate ways, their legacies are forever entwined.

Bernstein mentioned Kurt Weill on only a few occasions, and yet his career as a composer for the stage followed a similar path. In particular, he created works that transcend the boundaries between opera and commercial theatre, tackling socio-political topics while writing melodies that reached the mainstream. This chapter traces the influence of Weill on Bernstein, who encountered Die Dreigroschenoper as a college student and would go on to conduct the premiere of Marc Blitzstein’s English adaptation, The Threepenny Opera, in 1952. The specific aesthetic traits which Bernstein absorbed from Weill’s scores are illustrated through comparative analyses of numbers from Trouble in Tahiti, Candide and West Side Story with, respectively, Lady in the Dark, Die Dreigroschenoper and Street Scene. Motivic, harmonic and structural elements of intertextuality reveal that Weill’s formal experimentation tilled the soil for works of music theatre that could be both indigenous and worldly, sophisticated and accessible.

Before mainly focussing on Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s musical to examine relevant correspondences with Shakespeare’s play (such as the sustained rhythm of physical confrontations, or the poetic stasis of pure love, or the hectic reactions induced by loss and despair, or other emotional archetypes), this chapter will examine former screen adaptations in relation with either music or singing or dancing (including George Cukor’s 1936 version, with Agnes de Mille as a choreographer; André Cayatte’s 1949 Les Amants de Vérone, with Isabelle Aubret as a singer and Renato Castellani’s 1954 version, with Roman Vlad as a composer), so as to consider how and when emotional intensity is added to the play-text, and how West Side Story takes after and also increases such emotional intensity, as it wonderfully combines its screenplay with songs, symphonic orchestra, melodic and rhythmic variations, the dramatic device of leitmotifs and choreography.