No Broadway team setting out to write songs and music for a show – not even Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim – can decide to compose an iconic score. Only posterity accords such status, when the music and lyrics remain ubiquitous for later generations. Numerous scores from the 1940s through the 1960s are iconic – Oklahoma! (1943), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), My Fair Lady (1956), The Sound of Music (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964), to name several – their popularity driven by successful original cast albums, film versions, and songs that have remained well known outside of productions. Certainly, these three conditions exist for West Side Story. The original cast album is still famous, what Nigel Simeone calls ‘ … the most enduring representation of the show in its “original” form … ’¹ After the musical played on Broadway for over two years – interrupted by a national tour – it was seen as a memorable, artistic show with ground-breaking use of dance and a score that featured unusually effective musico-dramatic unification. The guarantee of its future came from the first, spectacularly successful film (United Artists, 1961), which won ten Academy Awards and grossed $44,061,777 worldwide.² Several songs in the score are still popular, especially ‘Maria’, ‘Tonight’, and ‘Somewhere’. These three factors, plus the work’s effective modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet and its striking commentary on racism in the United States, have helped keep the work current. West Side Story artistically shines a bright light on some serious problems in the United States and calls upon its citizens to be better versions of themselves, a challenge that retains as much resonance today as it had in 1957. The property’s appeal has been enhanced by Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version, which features an intelligent, sensitive rendering of the music.

In this chapter we focus on the score – music and lyrics – that lies at any show’s heart, but in West Side Story the importance of dance raises music to an even more significant position. Unlike the case in most Broadway scores, Bernstein the songwriter wrote the dance music. Bernstein’s hand in West Side Story also included the orchestration, in which he supervised the efforts of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. Then, as if the composer were not already sufficiently encumbered, Bernstein also played a major role in teaching the challenging music to the cast. With Stephen Sondheim, he formed a memorable song-writing team that combined Bernstein’s melodic and rhythmic invention with Sondheim’s mastery of language and rhyme. The lyricist aired his dislike for some of his work for West Side Story, but he did not dampen the world’s enthusiasm for the show’s score.³ This chapter approaches West Side Story’s score from four different angles: its creation, orchestrations, Bernstein’s efforts to unify the work through musical associations, and description of individual numbers. Important sources on the show’s score include books by Nigel Simeone, Elizabeth A. Wells, and chapters in books by Joseph P. Swain, Geoffrey Block, Katherine Baber, Helen Smith, and Paul R. Laird.⁴

Creation

Seeds for the West Side Story score were sown in Bernstein’s earlier collaborations with Jerome Robbins. In 1943–44, they created the sparkling ballet Fancy Free, a humorous look at three sailors on leave in New York City. Its similarity with West Side Story comes in the use of various social dances in both choreography and music along with jazz and blues references, but Fancy Free includes only swing references while Bernstein accessed later jazz styles in West Side Story.⁵ The two collaborators joined forces with Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and George Abbott to develop the Broadway musical On the Town, which opened on 28 December 1944 and, like Fancy Free, demonstrated how effectively the artists could reference popular culture in wartime America.⁶ Robbins and Bernstein collaborated on the ballet Facsimile in 1947, a serious, introspective work that did not land with audiences, who were probably hoping for a repeat of Fancy Free’s high spirits. In subsequent years, Robbins choreographed Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety (1950), and provided uncredited choreography to his music in Wonderful Town (1953).⁷ By the time they collaborated on West Side Story, Bernstein understood intuitively what Robbins wanted from music to inspire movements and the choreographer had a deep knowledge of Bernstein’s musical style and affective range.

It is not only the works that Bernstein wrote for choreography by Robbins that foreshadow his music for West Side Story. His ability to compose a melody that would fit into a score for musical theatre dates back to his Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah (1942), heard in the second movement, ‘Profanation’. Beginning seven measures before rehearsal 20, one hears a lyrical, compelling theme in mixed meters. With appropriate text, the melody would fit into a scene featuring Tony and Maria. Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety (1949), foreshadows West Side Story in the ‘Masque’ with aspects of bop in both solo piano and orchestra, every bit as evocative as the composer’s references to cool jazz and bop in ‘Cool’. The gritty score to West Side Story includes dissonant harmonies, syncopations, and cross-rhythms, such as in the ‘Prologue’ and ‘The Rumble’, similar to what one hears often in Bernstein’s film score to On the Waterfront. This music effectively underscores urban life in the 1950s, an association described in detail by Anthony Bushard.⁸ The film also includes music for lovers that resembles ‘Tonight’ and ‘Somewhere’. Bernstein’s use of Latin musical tropes in West Side Story also appeared earlier in his output, including the ‘Danzon’ [sic] variation from Fancy Free and Conchtown (1941), a sketch for a ballet that became the song ‘America’.

Robbins conceived the idea of updating Romeo and Juliet in January 1949 and interested Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents in the project.⁹ Laurents sent the composer a draft of four scenes for East Side Story (focusing on Jewish/Catholic tensions) in May, but work stalled and they abandoned the project for six years. In 1955, Laurents and Bernstein pitched another idea to Robbins, but he held out for an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.¹⁰ In August 1955, the two writers realized that the show’s plot could involve youth gangs in New York City, an idea that Robbins liked, and progress resumed. Bernstein planned to write the lyrics, but with simultaneous work on Candide, guest conducting, and his television shows for Omnibus, he needed assistance. Laurents had a young friend, Stephen Sondheim, whom he suggested as a possible lyricist. Bernstein and Sondheim hit it off, sharing their love for difficult word puzzles when they reached a creative impasse. Sondheim wanted to write music, not just lyrics, but his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II and agent Flora Roberts advised him to work with such Broadway successes as Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins.¹¹ Sondheim and Bernstein began as co-lyricists; the composer later allowed his collaborator full credit. Extensive work began between the four men about November 1955 and lasted until March 1956, when Bernstein concentrated on Candide before it opened in December. Progress ceased on West Side Story for about a year, but most of the Act 1 music had been written.

Candide closed in February 1957, the month that the collaborators resumed work on West Side Story. Some of Bernstein’s music travelled between the two scores; for example, the material that became the songs ‘One Hand, One Heart’ and ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ started in Candide.¹² Work on music for Act 2 continued into the summer. Auditions occurred in the spring and rehearsals lasted from June to August; Simeone shows the score’s state before rehearsals with a list of numbers from perhaps May.¹³ The score changed considerably during rehearsals, but the music was pretty much set before they opened in Washington, DC on 19 August. Bernstein and Sondheim wrote their last song, ‘Something’s Coming’, in early August, when the collaborators determined that Tony needed a song that would define his character.¹⁴

Robbins allowed that the romantic leads might be singers but insisted that the remainder of the cast be dancers first.¹⁵ Bernstein did not spare the performers with his score, which was more difficult to sing than the typical Broadway fare of the 1950s. Bernstein (and perhaps Sondheim)¹⁶ helped alleviate the challenge by aiding in teaching the cast material like the vocal intricacies of the ‘Tonight’ (Quintet) and ‘A Boy Like That’. Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, reports that Bernstein ‘ … would work with each of us on an individual basis for hours … ’,¹⁷ and Chita Rivera, the original Anita, has also recalled working personally with Bernstein on ‘A Boy Like That’: ‘ … he taught me how to hit those notes … ’¹⁸ The composer did this while continuing to provide needed revisions and new music, and while working on the show’s orchestrations with Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal.

Orchestrations

Bernstein asked his friend Sid Ramin to help him with the show’s orchestrations on 20 June 1957.¹⁹ Bernstein was five months older; they had met in their Boston neighbourhood at about age 12, bonding over their love for music. In their teens, Ramin for a time studied piano and music theory with Bernstein, and later music theory, especially related to jazz, starting in March 1937 when Bernstein was a student at Harvard.²⁰ Ramin spent World War II in the US Army scoring music for instrumental ensembles and then entered the field after the war, becoming a leading arranger for radio, television, and recordings. He orchestrated occasionally for theatre when called into projects by friends, assisting for example with Bernstein’s score for Wonderful Town (1953), pulled in by Robert ‘Red’ Ginzler, his collaborator in arranging music for Milton Berle’s television show. Ramin was wary of Bernstein’s invitation to work on West Side Story because he doubted that he could adequately cope with Bernstein’s classical influences. Ramin asked Irwin Kostal if he might be interested in joining the team. Kostal was similarly a successful arranger of commercial music, but he had also studied classical scores. Bernstein welcomed Kostal, and the three met for the first time on 26 June. The credit line for the show reads ‘Orchestrations by Leonard Bernstein with Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal’, a process executed through what Ramin described as ‘pre-orchestration’ and ‘post-orchestration’ meetings. For each number that Bernstein wrote, the three men looked through the piano/vocal score, discussing possibilities and noting places where he provided instrumental suggestions. Ramin has called the scores and instructions that the composer provided them ‘ … the most complete and detailed he ever worked with in the theater’.²¹ Ramin and Kostal would then prepare an orchestrated draft for Bernstein, who ‘ … literally proofread what we wrote’.²² Bernstein reviewed their work in detail, as may be seen in numerous manuscripts in the Sid Ramin Papers at the Columbia University Archive. All of the scores are written in the hands of Ramin and Kostal and most include Bernstein’s changes in red and green pencil. Two drafts that are especially revelatory are of ‘America’ and ‘The Rumble’, manuscripts that are smaller than most of the scores and appear to be earlier versions with copious marking in the composer’s hand.²³ Kostal remembered Bernstein’s great interest in the process: ‘He took keen delight in his own creativity and jumped for joy whenever Sid or I added a little originality of our own. He sometimes would look at one of our scores and say, “Who said orchestration couldn’t be creative?”’²⁴

One of the most important aspects of orchestrating for a show is deciding what instruments to use. Bernstein’s contract for West Side Story stated that there would be twenty-six to thirty musicians; the final number was twenty-eight.²⁵ Extant documentation shows Bernstein trying out various possibilities of twenty-eight instrumentalists; the final configuration included: a wide palette of reed sounds with the unusual provision for bassoon only in the fifth reed book, played by Bernstein’s friend Sanford Sharoff (a friend from their student days at Curtis); seven brass instruments for a score full of jazz references and loud, violent moments in the dances; parts for two percussionists, one handling the trap set and the other playing a plethora of other instruments, including numerous Latin sounds; keyboard; guitarist; and a string section without violas.²⁶

In a musical like West Side Story, where the goal was an organic whole in service of story and characterization, the orchestration must contribute to that process. There are three basic soundscapes: (1) the Jets, based on various types of modern jazz and irregular rhythms and dissonances of twentieth-century concert music, often heard in brass, saxophones, and appropriate percussion; (2) the Sharks with various types of Latin music, dominated by winds and appropriate percussion instruments; and (3) Tony and Maria with rich use of strings, woodwinds for colour, and muted brass. These soundscapes pervade songs and dances associated with these characters, as may be seen in this brief review of the score. The ‘Prologue’ offers the Jets soundscape with prominent use of saxophones, brass, double bass, piano, and sinister sounds from pitched drums. The ‘Jet Song’ features similar accompaniment, but ‘Something’s Coming’ carries a more subtle effect. In this, Tony’s ‘I Want’ song, one hears an approximation of a big band but more use of strings, a combination of the first and third soundscapes. An example of specific word-painting by the orchestra occurs under the text ‘The air is humming … ’ (OCR57, track 2, 1′56″), accompanied by tremolo in the first four violin parts and harmonics in the other three. The ‘Dance at the Gym’ includes a contrast of soundscapes: the first in the opening ‘Blues’ to accompany the Jets dancing, the second dominating the ‘Mambo’ and the gentle ‘Cha-Cha’. The ‘Meeting Scene’, ‘Maria’, and ‘Balcony Scene’ mostly evoke the third soundscape, but perhaps because Tony’s lover is Hispanic, Bernstein also introduced elements of Latin music: for example, the tresillo rhythm in ‘Maria’ played by bassoon, electric guitar, and string bass; and the pulsating eighth notes of a beguine rhythm in strings and woodwinds in ‘Tonight’. ‘America’ offers the Latin soundscape with appropriate percussion. The orchestra reacts to such lines as ‘tropical breezes’ (OCR57, track 6, 0′26″) and ‘tropic diseases’ (0′45″) and provides sarcastic laughter supporting Anita in staccato eighth notes in two flutes, B-flat clarinet, bassoon, all of the brass, trap set, and piano (1′42″). ‘Cool’, marked ‘Solid and boppy’, is in the Jets soundscape with muted brass, restrained use of woodwinds, vibraphone, and trap set when imitating cool jazz and more of a bop big band in the aggressive moments. ‘One Hand, One Heart’ returns to the soundscape intended for the lovers with touching use of the orchestra in the underscoring. Orchestration in the ‘Tonight’ (Quintet) includes material from all three soundscapes describing various characters as they sing. For example, the music for the gangs constitutes a complex march accompanied by brief fanfare interjections in the brass, a bass line in 3/4 in the low strings, and staccato eighth notes in woodwind and upper strings. Just before Anita enters at 1′07″, ascending lip smears in alto and tenor saxophone underscore her anticipation of a romantic rendezvous with Bernardo. When Tony at 1′25″ begins his solo verse of ‘Tonight’, aspects of the accompaniment are reminiscent of what one hears in the earlier ‘Balcony Scene’, but the pulsating rhythm played in several instruments is different, built instead from syncopations and off-beats. ‘The Rumble’, which concludes Act 1, returns to the violence of the gang world with a harshness that is striking in a Broadway musical and pushes the pit orchestra to its limits. Here Bernstein approaches some of the most violent music that he ever wrote, like the ‘Din-Torah’ from Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, and shocking moments from On the Waterfront.

‘I Feel Pretty’ opens Act 2 with striking contrast to ‘The Rumble’. Strings and high woodwinds carry a heavy load here, with trumpets for emphasis and some Iberian/flamenco sounds: Spanish guitar, castanets, tambourine, and onstage clapping. The ‘Ballet Sequence’ includes ‘Somewhere’, in which the accompaniment returns to the third soundscape, but the segment also draws from ‘Maria’, the ‘Cha-Cha’, ‘Prologue’, and ‘The Rumble’, referencing other soundscapes. Bernstein placed ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ in a unique soundscape for the show, identified by the rubric ‘Fast, vaudeville style’. The song’s accompaniment includes an oom-pah pattern in strings, piano, and percussion with the vocal melody sometimes doubled and harmonized in thirds and punctuated by moments of full orchestra and slapstick effects. The final song is the double number ‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’, another collision between soundscapes. Anita has spent the show surrounded with Latin music, but as she tears into Maria the music is reminiscent of ‘The Rumble’ with similar dissonance and rhythmic irregularity. The orchestration offers deep sonorities: three bass clarinets, bassoon, seven muted brass instruments growling low in their ranges, and marcato strings. A distinctive moment occurs in the song’s B section as various instruments double Anita’s vocal line – bassoon, and later flute, violin, and cello – driving her to the climax of her line on the words ‘heart’ and ‘smart’ (OCR57, track 14, 0′40″-0′42″). When Maria interrupts Anita at 1′09”, the soprano is doubled by flute and three violins – not unlike her typical soundscape – but Anita’s accompaniment with lighter scoring continues as they sing in counterpoint. The heavier scoring returns for a moment just before 1′47″ as Maria stops her friend with the words ‘You should know better … ’ The accompaniment of ‘I Have a Love’ is similar to what sounds in Maria’s solo sections of the ‘Balcony Scene’, pulsating with restrained syncopations or long chords in woodwinds and strings or doubling the melody. Instruments state snippets of her melody during long notes at the ends of phrases, like horn 1 at 0′28″ (OCR57, track 15). The orchestra effectively supports the number’s climax and Maria’s final duet with Anita. The ‘Taunting Scene’ resides within Anita’s usual soundscape based on Latin music. The show’s finale is a lightly scored version of the close of the ‘Ballet Sequence’, a restrained close for a show where the orchestra often provides considerable dramatic punch.

Musico-Dramatic Unification in the Score

The notion of a musical idea returning to underline a textual or dramatic association when words have been set by a composer is a venerable practice. It was an important part of Renaissance madrigals and motets and continued throughout the Baroque, assuming a structural significance in nineteenth-century opera in Wagner’s systematic use of leitmotifs, which made the orchestra a powerful force in plot development. Broadway composers occasionally used such unifying devices in their scores in the first half of the twentieth century. Geoffrey Block, for example, has described Jerome Kern’s use of the perfect fourth to describe the Mississippi River and tie together a number of the songs in Show Boat (1927).²⁷ Reprises of songs at dramatically appropriate moments were common, but greater concern for systematic manipulation of musical motives was a rare feature in Broadway musicals before West Side Story, even in the scores by Rodgers and Hammerstein, writers lauded for their level of integration between music and plot. Jim Lovensheimer, for example, has demonstrated musical association between the music for Emile de Becque and Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, but the association forms little more than an interesting sidelight to the score as a whole, certainly not as prominent as some of the repeated motives in West Side Story.²⁸ Kurt Weill, however, coming from a conservatory-trained background, tended to use leitmotifs in his Broadway works, such as Johnny Johnson (1936) and Lady in the Dark (1941).²⁹

Bernstein’s Broadway scores always included efforts at musico-dramatic unification. Jerome Robbins remembers the composer’s disappointment when ‘Gabey’s Coming’ was cut from On the Town because he had made material from that song prominent in the score, as has been demonstrated by Helen Smith.³⁰ She has also shown the prominence of the perfect fifth and fourth in Wonderful Town in the songs ‘A Little Bit in Love’, ‘A Quiet Girl’, ‘Conversation Piece’, ‘Conquering the City’, and ‘What a Waste’.³¹ The show also features motivic repetitions at dramatically important moments, such as music from ‘Ohio’ in the introduction to ‘What a Waste’ when Baker sings ‘Why did you ever leave Ohio?’ Smith and others have made similar points about Trouble in Tahiti and Candide. Bernstein tended to make comparable efforts in his concert music; indeed, Jack Gottlieb, in the first extended study of Bernstein’s musical style, stated: ‘ … it can be said that he actually composes with intervals as his main source materials’.³² Given these factors, it is strange that Bernstein once stated, concerning his apparently careful efforts to unify the score of West Side Story, ‘I didn’t do all this on purpose.’³³

Is this possible? Simeone states: ‘ … this apparent motivic or intervallic consistency [in West Side Story] was never a planned decision on Bernstein’s part and it seems simply to have evolved as one of the work’s defining musical characteristics’.³⁴ The author cites several pieces of evidence: the ‘haphazard way’ that Broadway scores tend to be assembled, a reminiscence from Irwin Kostal about how Bernstein discovered the repeated intervals and motives during a rehearsal break, Ramin’s confirmation of this anecdote, and Stephen Sondheim’s statement that he pointed out to the composer the many tritones he used in the songs.³⁵ These conversations all came after the vast majority of the score had been written. In what Simeone describes as a later document,³⁶ Bernstein jotted down nine leitmotifs from West Side Story (Library of Congress 1079/19; see Example 7.1), perhaps proof for himself of these unifying elements. (Of the nine motives Bernstein provides, some are repeated in the score more than others, as will be shown below.) Simeone might be correct that Bernstein did not plan the recurring motives in the score, but it is tempting to suggest that the composer at some earlier point knew what he was doing. As noted above, this is how the man worked. All of his musicals were written in the same piecemeal way with his collaborators: songs and dances composed, revised, sometimes replaced, and then perhaps re-inserted elsewhere in the score. However, each of the shows demonstrates some sense of musico-dramatic unity. It would not be surprising if Bernstein at some point realized that he was using the tritone prominently in West Side Story, inspiring him to continue. Maybe he was surprised to note the extent of his motivic unification when speaking to Kostal and Ramin at that rehearsal, but would a musician like Bernstein have missed the prominence of the tritone in the openings of both ‘Maria’ and ‘Cool’? Geoffrey Block simply ignores Bernstein’s suggestion that he didn’t intend the score’s sense of unity and notes that the first songs that Bernstein drafted were ‘Maria’ and ‘Somewhere’, both featuring prominent motives in the score.³⁷

Example 7.1 Page of leitmotifs for West Side Story that Bernstein wrote at some point, including: (1) the ‘shofar call’ that sounds often in ‘Prologue’ and ‘The Rumble’ and sometimes opens the show; (2) first melodic motive in the ‘Prologue’, which also appears in B section of the ‘Jet Song’; (3) rhythmic diminution of (2) heard in ‘Prologue’ and ‘The Rumble’; (4) opening of ‘Maria’ with tritone (‘Maria’ motive) as the first interval; (5) opening of ‘Cool’, also with tritone as first interval; (6) opening of verse of ‘Tonight’ from the ‘Balcony Scene’; (7) opening of chorus of ‘Tonight’; (8) bass ostinato from ‘Cha-Cha’; and (9) opening ostinato from ‘Something’s Coming’.

(Library of Congress, Leonard Bernstein Collection, 1079/19. Typeset version produced by Adrian Hartsough.)

The tritone is ubiquitous, appearing in the opening phrases of ‘Maria’, ‘Blues’, ‘Cha-Cha’, ‘Cool’, ‘Something’s Coming’, and in the motive that Jack Gottlieb compares to a shofar call, the rising perfect fourth followed by the tritone heard often in the ‘Prologue’, ‘The Rumble’, and elsewhere. (This motive at one point carried the text ‘This turf is ours!’) The tritone makes many other appearances, from the clearly significant such as when F♯ sounds against the C major chord at the show’s end, to tiny moments such as when one hears a tritone between the voice and bass line in the vamps that open each verse of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’. The tritone seems to be related to gang violence and the volcanic love that Tony and Maria share. The perfect fourth, besides opening the ‘shofar call’, also appears prominently in the opening of ‘Something’s Coming’, ‘Tonight’ – both the ‘Balcony Scene’ (see Example 7.2) and ‘Tonight’ (Quintet) – ‘America’, and the ‘Taunting Scene’.³⁸ Another interval that plays a significant role is the evocative minor seventh that opens ‘Somewhere’ (see Example 7.3), which also helps close the ‘Balcony Scene’ (foreshadowing the ‘Ballet Sequence’), and ‘Somewhere’ recurs in the final scene. The ascending minor seventh is also heard in the ‘Cool’ fugue subject and on the words ‘I love him’ in ‘I Have a Love’. Another recurring element is the short–long rhythmic pattern that sets the title word in ‘Somewhere’. Short–long rhythms, with the first note of various lengths, pervade the ‘Ballet Sequence’ (see Example 7.4) and elsewhere, for example often heard on the word ‘pretty’ in ‘I Feel Pretty’. Joseph P. Swain notes that hemiola effects recur in the score, including in the ‘Prologue’, ‘Jet Song’, ‘Something’s Coming’, ‘America’, and the ‘Taunting Music’.³⁹

Example 7.2 ‘Balcony Scene’, mm. 51–54, with opening ascending perfect fourth in the melody and beguine rhythms in eighth notes of the right hand

Example 7.3 ‘Ballet Sequence’, mm. 86–89, ‘Somewhere’, with opening ascending minor seventh in melody and various accompanimental voices

Example 7.4 ‘Ballet Sequence’, mm. 45–54, ‘Transition to Scherzo’, with various evocations of short–long rhythms, later heard in title text of ‘Somewhere’

Melodic and rhythmic motives are not the only elements that help unify Bernstein’s score. As is usually the case in his works, West Side Story is an eclectic mixture of styles, with influences from various types of jazz and Latin music being especially significant, both prominent in American urban life in the late 1950s. Katherine Baber has written persuasively about the sounds of modern jazz in the show, noting that Bernstein’s blend of bop and cool jazz would have been heard as what some called ‘crime jazz’ because of their associations with film noir soundtracks, such as Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Henry Mancini’s A Touch of Evil (1958).⁴⁰ Jazz helps establish the affect for gang violence and would have sounded strikingly different from typical Broadway fare. One hears influence from bop in the ‘Prologue’, ‘Jet Song’, louder sections of ‘Cool’, and ‘The Rumble’, and much of the remainder of ‘Cool’ is a musical pun on the style. It was in keeping with the tendency of musicians in the United States that Bernstein made few distinctions between various types of ‘Latin music’, applying an Afro-Cuban rumba rhythm in ‘Maria’, a Puerto Rican tempo di seis and an allegedly Mexican huapango in ‘America’, the Cuban mambo and cha-cha in ‘Dance at the Gym’, and what could be described as an Aragonese jota in ‘I Feel Pretty’. Elizabeth A. Wells provides a varied look at Hispanic elements in West Side Story, including the music, in her West Side Story: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical.⁴¹

Individual Numbers

Consideration of individual songs and numbers will include a summary of what preceded that musical placement in the show and an overview of distinctive musical and lyrical qualities. Nigel Simeone in his Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story provides the most coverage in one volume of how the show developed in terms of numbers that were removed and changed.⁴² Numbers cut from the show, such as ‘Mix!’ and ‘Like Everybody Else’, will not be considered unless they were replaced by other songs. In addition to the musical examples provided in this chapter, the reader will be directed to tracks and time indices on the 1957 and 2009 original cast recordings (OCR57 and OCR09) or Bernstein’s 1984 studio recording (SR).⁴³

‘Prologue’

The opening scene was finalized late in the show’s development. At one point, it was to occur in the Jets’ hideout. The violent songs ‘Mix!’ and ‘This Turf Is Ours!’ were intended for later in the scene.⁴⁴ The music now heard in the ‘Prologue’ and ‘Jet Song’ appears in other guises in manuscripts.⁴⁵ There was indecision as to whether or not the show should open with the ‘shofar-call’, as does OCR57 (tr. 1); it does not appear in the published piano/vocal or orchestral scores.⁴⁶ The motive pervades the ‘Prologue’, such as the strong unison statement at 1′55″. The number’s affect is edgy, building to chaos at 3′27″ when the gangs fight before the police arrive. The ‘Prologue’ includes the following distinctive ideas or moments: a preponderance of major/minor triads; ties between the eighth notes and downbeats in 6/8, disguising the meter (e.g., 0′07″); frequent eighth-note duplets and ties to further disrupt the beat; the iconic finger snaps (0′14″); a wide-ranging theme (see Example 7.5) describing the Jets heard first in the alto saxophone (0′17″) that includes blues thirds (C♯/C-natural) and sets the text ‘You’re never alone … ’ in the ‘Jet Song’; menacing sounds from pitched drums (e.g., 0′47″); a move to 2/4 (2′03″) with numerous ‘shofar calls’ as the gang battle starts; a jazz walking bass line (2′13″) and thickening texture as the violence increases; an exciting, descending motive that ends in a tritone in trumpets and woodwinds (2′36″); wild, imitative material in the brass (2′45″); re-introduction of the walking bass with a triadic motive in the mallet percussion (2′56″); and unpredictable rhythms and staccato notes (3′14″) with thickening texture leading to long, accented notes with flutter-tonguing as Bernardo pierces Arab’s ear (3′25″), preceding a frenzied recapitulation of earlier material as the police enter.

Example 7.5 ‘Prologue’, mm. 9–17, with a wide-ranging theme starting in anacrusis to m. 4 also heard in the B section of the ‘Jet Song’ and blues third C-natural in m. 17

‘Jet Song’

Music for this song existed in earlier versions of the first scene.⁴⁷ On OCR57, it is a continuation of the ‘Prologue’, with which it shares thematic material, but the song follows dialogue in the show. ‘Jet Song’ is an AA′BA tune, first sung by Riff; the A′ bears considerable variety. The vocal line in the A sections is in 3/4, but Bernstein’s bass line is in 6/8 and the remainder of the accompaniment is syncopated (see Example 7.6). The B melody is the alto saxophone line heard early in the ‘Prologue’ (tr. 1, 0′17″) and in this song’s introduction. Measures 100–116 in the piano/vocal score, where the Jets sing about the dance that night, is not on OCR57 but heard on the SR (1/tr. 2, 1′29″ff). (This section later sounds in the ‘Blues’ from the ‘Dance at the Gym’, as will be stated below.) After Riff leaves, the remainder of the gang sings the song and repeats the final BA, but with a different affect. Sondheim’s lyrics to this point mostly declare how great it is to be a Jet, but here they become more confrontational, and Bernstein’s music follows suit. The final B section (OCR57, tr. 1, 5′27″ff) is in 6/8 with the accompaniment mostly in two, featuring dissonant chords (major/minor triads with added minor and major sixths); the last A section (5′36″ff) changes to 2/4 with the walking bass from the ‘Prologue’ (see Example 7.7) and the vocal rhythms changed from quarter notes to a tresillo (3+3+2).

Example 7.6 ‘Jet Song’, mm. 28–35, with melody in triple meter against syncopations in the right hand and bass line in 6/8

Example 7.7 ‘Jet Song’, mm. 190–199, with tresillo rhythm in the vocal line and walking jazz bass like that heard in sections of ‘Prologue’

‘Dance at the Gym’

An early version of this scene took place in a nightclub called the Crystal Cave,⁵¹ but apparently the show’s creators then realized that these young people could not have entered such an establishment. Bernstein wrote dances for the nightclub that he abandoned: ‘First Mambo’, ‘Version B (mambo)’, and ‘Huapango’.⁵² Among sketches for the scene (Library of Congress, Bernstein Collection, Folder 1077/12), one finds most of the music for the ‘Dance at the Gym’, sometimes under other names. For example, the show’s ‘Mambo’ appears as ‘Fast Mambo (Merengue)’ and an ‘Atom Bomb Mambo’ became part of the dance (OCR09, tr. 4, 2′43″ff). The opening ‘Blues’ in ‘Dance at the Gym’ starts as the bridal shop scene concludes, when Maria starts to whirl to a musical hint from ‘Something’s Coming’, followed by undulating triplets in 12/8 based in chromatically adjacent triads (0′00″). The scene changes and a section marked ‘Rocky’ ensues (0′18″), the 12/8 mimicking a swinging 4/4. Bernstein retains the sliding between adjacent triads and places blues notes over a strong bass line, setting the abovenamed segment from ‘Jet Song’ as the Jets dance with their girlfriends. The Sharks enter and Glad Hand, the emcee, proposes a meeting dance for which Bernstein provided a ‘Promenade’ (SR, 1/5) marked ‘Tempo di Paso Doble’, a cheesy moment with four-square rhythms and tinny orchestration. Everyone quickly grabs their usual partners and launches into the ‘Mambo’ (OCR09, 1′36″), a competitive dance between the gangs based in the soundscape of the Sharks. It opens with an explosion of Latin percussion, followed by frenetic music block-scored for the sound of a Latin big band, but with strings (besides bass) functioning alongside the woodwinds. Bernstein introduces the omnipresent tritone in the brass, first in the trombones (2′06″), complemented by the surrounding chromaticism. There are exciting solos for trombone 1 (3′13″ff, joined by horns at 3′20″) and trumpet in D (3′27″). Block-scoring returns with earlier material and the ‘Mambo’ fades after Tony and Maria see each other (over tritones in the orchestra), introducing the ‘Cha-Cha’ (4′08″). Woodwinds, muted trumpets, and strings playing pizzicato and harmonics offer the melody to ‘Maria’, staccato over a Latin accompaniment; Bernstein layers in additional instruments for the repeat of A (4′34″). The B section is fuller with the violins now arco, leading directly into the ‘Meeting Scene’, where the ‘Maria’ motive dominates in strings, vibraphone, celesta, and high woodwinds in the underscoring (see Example 7.8). The scene ends with a return of the ‘Promenade’, now scored more fully, and a ‘Jump’ (SR, 1/9) scored for a small combo.

Example 7.8 ‘Meeting Scene’, mm. 1-8, with tritone and ‘Maria’ motive heard four times in ascending eighth notes of mm. 2–5

‘Maria’

Bernstein wrote a version of this song before Sondheim joined the project. Tony knows only Maria’s name and glories in its sound and his feelings. As Simeone notes, the song’s opening is one of the few recitatives in the score (OCR57, tr. 5, 0′00).⁵³ On OCR57, Larry Kert is joined by off-stage voices, not the case on OCR09, where the song is a solo throughout. Bernstein avoids the tritone in the recitative, so once the lyrical ‘Moderato con anima’ begins (0′34″), one cannot miss the striking interval that punctuates ‘Maria’. We have heard this motive many times in the ‘Dance at the Gym’, statements that help lead to this satisfying moment. Despite the song’s fame, its charm remains with its winning melody, convincing use of speech rhythms, and the tresillo rhythm from the rumba in the bass (see Example 7.9). As Tony keeps repeating her name (1′24″ff), Bernstein wrote a B-flat′ for two measures, with a simplified ossia part that most singers use. José Carreras realized the high note gloriously on the SR, but otherwise on the recording struggles too much with the English text.

Example 7.9 ‘Maria’, mm. 9-14, with tresillo in bass line and A′ as a tritone over E-flat in bass in mm. 9, 10, and 12

‘America’

Aaron Copland perhaps spurred Bernstein’s interest in Mexican music. The younger musician arranged Copland’s El Salón México in 1941, and the same year wrote his own movement, Conchtown, as a possible ballet; later that music became ‘America’. The opening section, a seis (OCR57, tr. 6, 0′00″), is the score’s only imitation of Puerto Rican music. A seis is an accompanied vocal work with lines of eight syllables (‘America’ here includes some nine-syllable lines),⁵⁶ but Bernstein omitted the genre’s usual instrumental interludes. The seis leads directly into the huapango (1′14″), a fast, Mexican dance that tends to mix 3/4, 6/8, and 2/4. Bernstein provides a similarly complicated mixture with some alla breve rhythms, quarter-note and half-note triplets, and a tresillo in the song’s opening section (see Example 7.10), as Wells notes, but that is in the seis.⁵⁷ Rosalia fondly remembers her home’s beauty, but Anita mocks her with images of the island’s sickness, storms, poverty, and violence, references that Puerto Ricans have often criticized. The orchestration cleverly supports points made by both women in the seis. In the huapango, instead of combining meters, Bernstein alternates continuously between 3/4 and 6/8. As Simeone has noted, ‘it is not one of the most musically demanding numbers in the show … ’,⁵⁸ but ‘America’ is mesmerizing and fluid, the key shifting effortlessly between C major and A-flat major as Anita and her friends mock Rosalia and praise life in the continental United States. Sondheim’s lyrics are witty and effective, if at times difficult to understand with the fast music. The orchestration in this number crackles with excitement with well-placed Latin percussion and other delightful moments.

Example 7.10 ‘America’, mm. 5–12, with combination of half-note and quarter-note triplets, tresillo in a clave rhythm (bass line), and alla breve (m. 7, voice)

‘One Hand, One Heart’

Bernstein originally wrote this melody for Candide. Its first placement in West Side Story, as noted above, was in the balcony scene, where Simeone believes it was to follow ‘Somewhere’.⁶⁰ During rehearsals, the creators moved the tune to the mock wedding in the bridal shop, prompting a new version dated 4 July 1957 (Folder 1078/9). The melody was in dotted half notes; Sondheim prevailed upon Bernstein to break those values into some shorter notes to accommodate additional words. The folder includes a lead sheet with the new lyrics. Here the ‘Cha-Cha’ underscores Tony and Maria imagining meeting each other’s parents, and music later heard with ‘Somewhere’ underscores their vows. ‘One Hand, One Heart’ is a slow waltz, with an elegant melody that revolves around the third degree of the scale. There are blues intervals of a lowered seventh (‘now we start’) just before the climax (OCR57, tr. 8, 1′01″ff) and a lowered third (‘Even death’, 1′13″) prior to the conclusion. The lovers repeat the song’s second half, singing more counterpoint. Not surprisingly, the ‘Maria’ tritone sounds in the accompaniment, such as at the song’s conclusion. (See Example 7.11 for an example.)

Example 7.11 ‘One Hand, One Heart’, mm. 112–116, with ‘Maria’ motive stated four times in eighth notes in the third stave

‘Tonight’ (Quintet)

Originally intended to be sung by Riff, Bernardo, Tony, Maria, and Anita, by the time the show premiered in New York the gangs sang with their leaders.⁶¹ Although it was no longer a true quintet, Bernstein’s operatic model remained clear with five vocal lines heard individually and combined towards the end. The ‘Tonight’ (Quintet) immediately follows ‘One Hand, One Heart’, perhaps the show’s most jarring musical juxtaposition. The number’s level of dissonance, metric complexity, and cross-accents foreshadow the violent music heard in ‘The Rumble’. As the number opens, Bernstein apposes C and E major and a bass ostinato in a clear triple meter against march rhythms in alternating 4/4 and 2/4 measures (see Example 7.12), later with occasional 3/8 bars. The gangs alternate, singing in a low range, their lines sounding in E minor with many lowered sevenths and frequently dissonant with the accompaniment. The vocal parts shift to a pitch center of A with more lowered sevenths and some C-naturals (OCR57, tr. 9, 0′42″), with the orchestra now projecting A and F major. When Anita makes her entrance (1′07″), Bernstein returns to C and E major and the opening accompaniment, but a sexy saxophone entrance greets her as she anticipates a passionate evening with Bernardo. When Tony enters with ‘Tonight’ as heard earlier (1′25″), the composer recalls the beguine rhythms and uses less dissonance. Tony sings the whole chorus followed by an orchestral statement of the opening march material in A and F major. Riff meets Tony (2′23″) singing the gang melody (now in E-flat and G major/minor), reminding Tony to attend the rumble. When Maria enters (2′40″), Bernstein has formed a trio; quickly all five parts come together, an extraordinary moment in the Broadway repertory. A few more modulations occur to accommodate the melody that Tony and Maria sing together (3′05″), with the other three active parts creating an exhilarating, dense texture. Dissonance continues as the accompaniment sounds both D and E-flat chords against the prevailing C major.

Example 7.12 ‘Tonight’ (Quintet), mm. 1–9, with changing meters, triple meter outlined by the ascending bass ostinato, and bitonal use of C and E major

‘Ballet Sequence’

Given the significance of dance in West Side Story, one almost expects a dream ballet. Manuscript evidence indicates that finding the scene’s form and content was a difficult task for both Bernstein and Robbins, as Simeone details.⁶⁵ The scene came together quite late, even after orchestrations were well in hand, because there is material in the orchestral manuscript ‘New Intro to Ballet Sequence’ that failed to remain in the scene.⁶⁶ The segment’s emotional range is notable, as is the number of other themes from the show that Bernstein works into it. The opening ‘Under Dialogue’ (some of it heard on SR) accompanies Tony’s anguished explanation of the rumble to Maria. Marked ‘Allegro agitato’, it is a development of the ‘Maria’ motive over insistent percussion. An ascending half-step dominates the accompaniment as Tony sings (OCR57, tr. 12, 0′00″) that they will flee, joined by Maria as they hope for a place that offers them freedom. As they run (0′20″ff), there is further development of the ‘Maria’ motive and material from the ‘Cha-Cha’. A strong statement of the ‘Somewhere’ motive (0′35″) opens the ‘Transition to Scherzo’ followed by a succession of short–long rhythms – related to both the ‘Maria’ and ‘Somewhere’ motives – leading into the playful ‘Scherzo’ (1′07″ff), where cast members from both sides dreamily dance together. The music is based on similar material. ‘Somewhere’ follows (2′36″), sung by a member of the ensemble. It is a simple, refined melody built from several ideas, proceeding with compelling inevitability because of its regular phrase structures and various sequences. The contrapuntal accompaniment includes satisfying, rising minor sevenths and imitation. The ‘Procession and Nightmare’ (4′47″ff) opens with the ‘Somewhere’ melody against ‘I Have a Love’, a combination that recurs in the ‘Finale’. This is the first time the audience hears any of Maria’s last song. Orchestral material from the ‘Scherzo’ follows (5′42″ff) but played more urgently. Bernstein further transforms it for the nightmare, briefly reprising music from ‘The Rumble’ (6′18″). Tony and Maria conclude the scene (6′42″) singing material from ‘Somewhere’. The three final measures in the orchestra (7′11″ff) are like those that close the show (see Example 7.13), but the two entrances in the bass on second beats of the first two 2/4 bars in the passage are the root of an F major chord rather than a tritone away, which is how the show ends. For a brief moment, the lovers are safe and fulfilled, ending a ballet, during which they are understood to have consummated their relationship.

Example 7.13 ‘Ballet Sequence’, mm. 84–88 of ‘Procession and Nightmare’, with ‘Somewhere’ motive stated three times in mm. 86–88 and F sounding in mm. 86–87 as root of the chord

‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’

The show’s two most operatic numbers are the ‘Tonight’ (Quintet) and this double song, which went through a long process of development, as Simeone describes.⁶⁹ Anita comes to Maria for comfort and discovers that she has been with Bernardo’s killer. She tears into Maria, singing low in her range for much of a violent song filled with dissonance. As noted above, the orchestral accompaniment is redolent of ‘The Rumble’. The first two measures in the orchestra function as a ritornello that sounds between each of Anita’s phrases in the AABA form, but the instrumental interjection is only one measure before the B section, as if Anita is so enraged that she cannot wait to sing (OCR57, tr. 14, 0′31″). Maria interrupts her (1′01″ff), quickly rising to an A-flat″, but then defending herself, singing Anita’s music in a lower range. As Anita starts to repeat her song in counterpoint (1′20″), Maria moves to the opening motive of ‘I Have a Love’, repeated numerous times as she parries Anita’s thrusts. Maria ends the duet soon after she reaches a B-flat″ (1′48″) and then tells her friend, ‘You should know better!’ ‘I Have a Love’ (OCR57, tr. 15) ensues, opening in an innocent G major and moving quickly from conjunct motion to cover a larger range with skips (see Example 7.14) and effective modulations like those heard in ‘Tonight’. Once Maria holds a G′ on ‘life’ (1′24″), now in E minor, Anita has been won over. Following an orchestral climax, they sing a contrapuntal duet (1′38″ff), signalling Anita’s willingness to try to help Tony and Maria.

Example 7.14 ‘I Have a Love’, mm. 1–9, with movement from conjunct to disjunct motion in the melodic line

‘Finale’

Bernstein wanted music in place of Maria’s final speech when she holds the gun. He stated: ‘I don’t know how many times I tried to musicalize that. It cries out for music.’⁷⁰ Despite his statement, however, no such sketches survive and the most dramatic moment in the show is spoken without underscoring. Earlier in the scene, Maria sings some of ‘Somewhere’, briefly joined by Tony before he dies. Material from ‘Somewhere’ accompanies Maria bidding farewell to him. She then excoriates the gangs as she threatens everyone with the gun, but finally she collapses. To conclude the scene during the procession as the gangs carry off Tony’s body, Bernstein used music from the end of the ‘Ballet Sequence’, a contrapuntal treatment of ‘I Have a Love’ and material from ‘Somewhere’. As noted above, the show’s last three measures are based on how the ‘Ballet Sequence’ ends, but Bernstein now combines C major (with the rising major second from ‘Somewhere’ resolving from D to E) joined by a jarring F♯ in the bass, stated only the first two times in the original show (see Example 7.15). The final measure includes just the C major triad with the rising major second ending on the third of the chord. Bernstein added the tritone to the chord root C′ with the F♯ in the bass to the last measure in the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, in his 1984 studio recording, and in the 1994 orchestral score. Most of the written finale appears on the OCR57 (tr. 16) and on the SR.

Example 7.15 ‘Finale’, mm. 24–28, with ‘Somewhere’ rhythmic motive stated three times in mm. 26–28, resolving to C major triad and tritone F♯ stated in bass in mm. 26–27

Conclusion

Created for a show that explored new ground on Broadway, the score for West Side Story was also unusual for its time with its very wide range of influences and the consistently high level of inspiration heard in the music. It includes unforgettable melodies and lyrics that strongly add to the definition of characters and dramatic situations. The dance music, written by Bernstein counter to the usual Broadway practice of hiring a dance arranger, is more original than the arrangements of songs heard in most contemporary shows. Numbers are unified by motives that often recur elsewhere in the score, making the music a major force in West Side Story’s sense of organic wholeness. The orchestrations translate the music into three dominant soundscapes that help tie together different scenes involving similar characters and situations. A fine monument to the music’s effectiveness is the orchestral work Symphonic Dances from West Side Story that Bernstein worked on with Ramin and Kostal in 1961. Numbers do not appear in the suite in show order, allowing one to hear the music without lyrics and out of dramatic context, where the score’s power remains undiminished, a tribute to the striking creativity that Bernstein brought to his most famous work.

In the 2019 revival of West Side Story in Manchester, directed by Sarah Frankcom, the character Anybodys steps forward and sings the iconic opening phrases of ‘Somewhere’:

Anybodys and the cast gather to sing of a peaceful place in the ‘open air,’ the antithesis of the cramped urban grid they occupy, and a time for learning and caring, the opposite of their experience so far. In addition to Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics and the song’s appearance in the middle of a ‘dream ballet,’ the music Leonard Bernstein crafted for this moment reminds the listener that this place is imagined. The melody begins with a leap up of a minor seventh, which provides neither a comfortable landing nor the impetus to continue up to the octave. The rest of the verse then flows from this gesture that reaches but ultimately falls short, only for the singer to try again and keep trying. In turn, the chorus provides no conclusion, ending with the incremental step up of a major second on each of the words ‘someday, somehow, somewhere.’ By the end of the act, this loose melodic thread is still hanging. With Bernardo, Riff, and Tony dead, we do not hear a final song from Maria or a closing chorus. Instead, we hear a reprise of ‘Somewhere’ from the orchestra, ending on the major second interval, repeated three times (‘someday, somehow, somewhere’) as the Jets and Sharks process offstage, together carrying Tony’s body. It seems that Bernstein was out of songs, done in by the challenge of scoring a musical that ends in a tragedy.¹ Or perhaps he recognized that he and his collaborators had already made their point.

Music critics and scholars seem to agree that ‘Somewhere’ is the heart of West Side Story, the carrier of its ‘message,’ but what that message might be is open to interpretation. Bernstein called his shot when he wrote ‘an out-and-out plea for racial tolerance’ across his copy of Romeo and Juliet.² The first drafts of the adaptation by Arthur Laurents took place on New York’s East Side and centered on a religious conflict between Catholic and Jewish gangs. Jerome Robbins, as director and choreographer, was concerned with the challenges faced by young people from immigrant families. The characters wound up united by class and generation but riven by race. The 1961 film version solidified the analogies to the Civil Rights movement and subsequent productions have introduced disability as an organizing theme, critiqued the original text’s stereotyping of Puerto Rican and Latinx communities, introduced a bilingual book and lyrics, and turned the mirror on violence, poverty, and xenophobia in America. What all these interpretations share is the recognition that the central dynamic of the musical is the push and pull between exclusion and inclusion. ‘Somewhere’ tells us is that this is a story about the importance of belonging. In response, Frankcom’s choice to have Anybodys sing ‘Somewhere’ – rather than the anonymous girl of the original, or the boy soprano of Arthur Laurents’s 2009 revival – asks us to consider what happens when we read that message through the lens of gender.

In order to read (that is, to interpret) West Side Story in a feminist way, we must recognize the unfinished nature of its project. The journey to, or creation of, a place to belong as described in ‘Somewhere’ is not yet accomplished by the musical’s end, but it is perhaps within reach: ‘Hold my hand and we’re halfway there.’ The narrative and characterizations – as expressed through songs, dances, and score – suggest a way forward and that redemptive path, I would argue, is gendered. Or, if we pay attention to Anybodys as a character, and consider also the roles of performer and spectator, the belonging we seek is un-gendered. To reach ‘Somewhere,’ we must step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity, each of which comes with its own reductive and destructive strictures.

Beginning with and returning to ‘Somewhere’ in this chapter also functions as a comment on methodology. When we listen to the score, read the book, attend a revival, or watch the film, we are only ‘halfway there.’ Although authorial intent is notoriously difficult to untangle in the collaborative medium of the musical, decoding the problems of masculinity and femininity embedded in the text of West Side Story is necessary to reading its message. How the middle-class, mainstream audiences of the original production understood gender roles in the socio-political landscape of the 1950s is crucial to this pursuit. Likewise, the performers of the work, and perceptions of those performers, multiply its potential meanings. And without giving in to a presentist critique, the responses of spectators from then to now also matters. As Stacy Wolf demonstrates with her project ‘to look and hear from a lesbian point of view,’ the meanings of a given work are always assembled from a combination of text, context, and spectator.³ While this chapter is not primarily concerned with the spectator’s uses of the musical, as Wolf is, a feminist reading needs all three facets of analysis, including the perspectives of what is often described as ‘fandom.’ This is particularly true in the case of Anybodys, a character whose embodiment and interpretation have evolved in the decades since the premiere in ways that are crucial to our understanding of West Side Story.

In addition, any feminist reading of West Side Story must be intersectional. Having migrated from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark work in legal studies to other fields, intersectionality is a broadly construed and continually evolving methodology in antiracist, feminist analyses.⁴ It is also a useful tool in complicating the history of this musical in particular. What attending to race-and-gender reveals is that, in their efforts to create a universalized message about ‘prejudice of different kinds,’ Bernstein, Laurents, Robbins, and Sondheim landed on a colourblind moral that was gendered as feminine, even as the narrative arc depends on the musical styles and performances of women of colour.⁵ The Sharks are nominally Puerto Rican, a category that includes Afro-Latinx people, but cultural specificity and diversity were not goals of the original production team. Still, Black and Latinx women have always been formidable, although limited, presences in the musical. Chita Rivera (whose father was Puerto Rican) originated the role of Anita and when Rita Moreno (born in Puerto Rico) took over in the role in the film adaptation, she became the first Latina to win an Oscar. African-American soprano Reri Grist played Consuelo in the original production and also performed ‘Somewhere’ from the pit during the live production and on the Broadway cast recording.

However, while reproducing stereotypes remains a hazard of every revival, reading West Side Story affords an opportunity to examine the ‘intercategorical complexity’ of the various identities at play. As Jennifer C. Nash explains, this strain of analysis uses categories of identity (e.g. race, ethnicity, class, gender) in a contingent fashion, in order to reveal the relationships between them and expose the inequalities such categories perpetuate.⁶ Crenshaw and others affirm that attending to identity can ‘reveal how power works in diffuse and differentiated ways through the creation and deployment of overlapping identity categories.’⁷ In this practical vein, casting has become an area where the critical analysis of the text connects to the work of social justice. The women carry the moral of the story, so it matters that we have seen Ariana DeBose (whose father is Afro-Puerto Rican) as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film adaptation. On a textual level, if the message of the musical is that intolerance kills, then looking at and listening to the intersection of race and gender tells us that racial violence is not just the doing of white supremacy, but is aided and abetted by what we now call ‘toxic masculinity’ and by restrictive gender roles that limit the agency of women of colour to the affective realm.

Much Ado about Masculinity

Within the frame of West Side Story, as in postwar American society, anxieties about race and gender are mutually reinforcing. Not only are the Sharks and Jets embroiled in a racialized conflict over territory, but as teenagers they also struggle to define and defend their ‘manhood.’ Together, the score, choreography, and the lyrics emphasize belonging as the crux of the matter. As Riff reminds the Jets, ‘when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day.’ They are each other’s chosen family, ‘never alone’ and ‘never disconnected.’ They are also brothers in arms, on the defense against the Sharks and often using militarized language. Robbins’s choreography embodies both the belonging and the aggressiveness in densely packed formations, lunges and prowling, and athletic leaps. Even the violence is choreographed, in cooperation with the music, which draws heavily on the then contemporary styles of bebop and cool. The words used to describe jazz where it appears in the outlines – brutal and violent – suggest the music as embodying, in and of itself, the characteristics of conflict.⁸ And that conflict is not only racially coded, via the association with jazz, but is also an explicitly male domain. As Wells notes, the ‘Prologue’ and later ‘The Rumble’ are ‘ritualistic tableaux in which male energy, male behaviors, and male street values are reified.’⁹ In a similar way, the music, lyrics, and choreography of ‘Cool’ demonstrate that for these boys on the cusp of adulthood, maintaining their masculinity is like walking a tightrope.

The Jets, ultimately, do not keep their cool and in the show’s deceptively boisterous 11 o’clock number, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke,’ they explain to themselves and to the audience that their hoodlum status is a failure of ‘domestic containment.’¹⁰ In ascribing their troubles, albeit jokingly, to a ‘social disease,’ the Jets turn our gaze to systemic issues. As the representative youth, Action is bounced from Krupke the police officer, to a judge, to a psychologist, and finally to a social worker who recommends ‘a year in the pen,’ presumably starting the cycle over again. Most of the song focuses on the deficits of the Jets’ home lives, and alcohol and drug abuse figure prominently in this disordered domestic scene (grandpa is ‘always plastered’ and grandma ‘pushes tea’). However, it is the inability to correctly perform gender roles that drives the verse home: ‘my sister wears a mustache, my brother wears a dress. Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess.’ The social contract of the 1950s placed the burden of forming a proper adult masculinity on the mother. As Elaine Tyler May explains, ‘mothers who neglected their children bred criminals; mothers who overindulged their sons turned them into passive, weak, and effeminate “perverts.”’¹¹ In the 2009 cast recording, Curtis Holbrook lisps the final words of the stanza, ‘that’s why I’m a mess,’ signifying what sort of ‘sickness’ we should presume Action has.

In order to belong, at least to one another, the Jets must both affirm their whiteness, counter to the Sharks, and prove their masculinity by rejecting the feminine. Little wonder, then, that they constantly dismiss their girlfriends, Graziella and Velma, and the gender non-conforming Anybodys. Moreover, when we realize that this virulent form of white masculinity is a driving force throughout the musical, it seems inevitable that the tragic ending is guaranteed by the rape of Anita, a woman of colour. It is also worth noting that the sexual violence was not demanded by the source material. Killing Bernardo as the Tybalt figure was dictated by Shakespeare’s text, but the ‘taunting’ of Anita is an invention for the musical. That said, the authors’ decisions should be considered in light of the fact that for them, the threat of being diagnosed as ‘sociologically sick’ was very real, given that all of them were gay and Jewish – two communities often under suspicion.

Miscegenation, Assimilation, and the Feminine Other

The Jet Girls and the Shark Girls are different sides of the same coin. They are young, but striving for an adult stylishness, and they challenge the authority of the boys they run with. Before the War Council at Doc’s store, Graziella sasses Riff and Diesel as they attempt to dismiss them: ‘I and Velma ain’t kid stuff, neither.’¹² Similarly, Anita warns Bernardo, ‘I am an American girl now. I don’t wait.’ When he responds with a nostalgic invocation of Puerto Rico, where women know their place, her retort undercuts his masculinity: ‘Back home, little boys don’t have war councils.’¹³ With their roles conditioned by gender and race, the girls represent two related concepts that complicate the theme of belonging: the desire to assimilate and the fear of miscegenation.

Although the parts for the Jet Girls are small, with no music of their own, they do have a symbolic impact. Romeo and Juliet is a story about intermarriage and adapting it to a 1950s context updated that tribalism to fit current racist and xenophobic taboos. The fear of miscegenation is clearest in the ‘get together dance’ as moderated by Glad Hand, which produces exactly that outcome – Shark Boys with Jet Girls and vice versa. As described in the stage directions: ‘There is a moment of tenseness, then Bernardo reaches across the Jet Girl opposite for Anita’s hand.’ The 1961 film adaptation, which addresses racism even more directly than the musical, heightens this moment. The statuesque blonde Carole D’Andrea as Velma stops opposite George Chakris’s Bernardo and it is she who recoils, offended. Throughout the swing era, desegregated dance floors, like the one at the Savoy in Harlem, had produced anxious commentary.¹⁴ On this 1950s dance floor, white girls are used to confirm that any interaction between Jets and Sharks other than fighting is unacceptable.

On the other side, there is Maria, more naïve than Graziella or Velma, but crucially a temptation to a white man. According to Wells, Maria is a figure familiar from the exotic operas and operettas of the nineteenth century as ‘an exotic, ethnically differentiated character who woos – or despite her chaste passivity, attracts – a white male tenor, often to his demise.’¹⁵ Indeed, Tony and Maria’s romance does get the white male tenor (or leading man) killed. Given that Bernstein’s stated goal was to make a point about racism, and the racial dynamics encoded in the music, dancing, and characterizations, it is plausible to read this inter-gang romance as an analogy to miscegenation. Notably, the serenade ‘Maria’ is composed out of the dissonant tritone interval that unifies the score as a whole and which is fundamentally unsettled, as an interval that splits the octave in equal halves. Although the interval resolves in this number, it emphasizes Tony’s yearning and foreshadows that in captivating him, Maria has become a destabilizing force within the score and the narrative. Though she is a milder personality than Anita, Maria is no less dangerous as a magnetic feminine Other.

We never see enough of Tony and Maria’s romance to know the basis of their attraction, but her appeal to the audience at least is made clear in ‘I Feel Pretty.’ At the same time, the song functions as a container for Maria, confining her to the realm of the affective. Where we might have expected an ‘I want’ song from her, we have instead a song that simply states how she feels: pretty, witty, gay, charming. The fast triple meter that indicates both waltz and an Aragonese jota (two charming dances), the flamenco-inspired flourishes and castanets all add to her exotic allure while the largely strophic form and the straightforward harmonies keep her expression simple. This is also one of the few songs where the tritone interval is not present, perhaps indicating that Bernstein wanted the song to be uncomplicated. Moreover, Sondheim’s later admission that the rhymes he gave Maria in the song were too sophisticated for her is revealing. Rather than clever, Maria is meant to be straightforward, as Laurents confirms in the dialogue. When they meet, Tony asks if she is joking, meaning deceiving him, and she responds: ‘I have not yet learned how to joke that way.’¹⁶ Although naïve, the power of her feelings and those she evokes in Tony lead the hero to his doom.

Anita, on the other hand, is a force in her own right and gives voice to the strategic move that also preoccupied the musical’s creators: assimilation. Andrea Most has provided an overview of the assimilation narrative and its prevalence among the music theatre works of Jewish-American creators. Those earlier narratives, like Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), were common enough for Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins to be worried about repeating a cliché. In response, they moved East Side Story to the Upper West Side and shuffled the ethnicities involved. As they take the place of the Jewish gang/Capulets, there is a marked tendency to acculturate among the Shark Girls. When we first see Anita, remaking Maria’s dress in the bridal shop, she is described as a Puerto Rican girl wearing a flashy dress that is an ‘unsuccessful attempt at movie-star-American.’¹⁷ In a similar vein, Consuelo is described as having ‘patently’ bleached blonde hair. These efforts to assimilate are characterized as deliberate and perhaps overdone – not just American, but ‘movie-star’ American.

The issue of assimilation comes to a head as Bernardo and the Sharks depart for the War Council. When Anita insists on her Americanness, Bernardo mocks her by addressing her in Spanish and with all of her saint and matrilineal names – ‘Anita Josefina Teresita … Beatriz del Carmen Marguerita, etcetera, etcetera’ – a naming practice one might downplay or curtail as part of acculturating.¹⁸ He is crudely illustrating that she is a first-generation immigrant, as opposed to the second- or third-generation Jets. Bernardo and Anita recognize the same problems, but their reactions to the Jets are conditioned by their gender roles: beating them versus joining them.¹⁹

Anita and the Shark girls are positioned as cultural mediators and ‘America’ is Anita’s argument for assimilation. Working on a lyrical and musical level, it creates a cosmopolitan, hybridized style that captures the mixing of communities. Rather than a faithful evocation of any particular Puerto Rican genre, it is a mashup of the Mexican huapango (from which the song takes its characteristic cross-rhythms), the Puerto Rican seis, and the seis de bomba (the origin of the verbal rejoinders from Anita and the other girls).²⁰ In addition, these folkloric traits are blended with the blues, a brassy orchestration more characteristic of Latin jazz, and the Broadway vernacular. The slow prelude captures the ‘spirit, if not the letter, of the seis,’ with its gentle syncopations and orchestration featuring Spanish guitar, guiro, and claves, as Rosalia sings about the beauty of Puerto Rico.²¹ But when Anita takes over the melody, she inserts a prominent blue note as she declares: ‘I like the island Manhattan. Smoke on your pipe and put that in!’ This slang expression and bluesy turn usher in the chorus which touts the benefits of living in the US. Doubling down on the role of women as cultural mediators, both film adaptations gender the disagreement, with Bernardo and the boys opposing Anita and the girls, emphasizing the resistance of race to assimilation. The future is only alright ‘if you’re all white’ in America. The women, their perspective, see more social freedoms and economic opportunities.

Even within the original text of the musical, the conflict is immutable, only yielding a little in the final, unspoken moments of the ‘Somewhere’ reprise. We could read Anita’s fate as determined by the tragic arc, but that would ignore the confluence of race and gender that we have already seen in the characterization of the Jets, the use of the Jet Girls as a device, and in Maria’s role. Anita is a type of exoticized female lead related to Maria, but still distinctive. In operatic terms, Anita is a Carmen-like figure whereas Maria is more like the demure Micaëla. According to Elizabeth Wood, characters and singers like Anita, Chita Rivera, and Rita Moreno are a threat to white patriarchy as ‘renegade figures of unbridled sexual passion: gypsy and Jew as the exotic, feminized, non-Western Other, the object of the male gaze whose return of the gaze with teasing defiance, scorn, or indifference enhances her allure for male desire.’²² ‘Teasing defiance’ captures Anita’s attitude toward Bernardo and the flashy choreography and costuming that attends almost every iteration of ‘America’ is certainly alluring. The parallels to Carmen would have been clear to the collaborators, all of whom were familiar with opera.

Although initially intended as a parallel to Juliet’s nurse in Shakespeare’s play, Anita’s role here is also embedded as part of a secondary romantic couple as dictated by the demands of opera, operetta, and musicals. As a result, there were some difficulties in defining her character, since she was neither significantly older like Juliet’s maid (or Aunt Eller in Oklahoma!) nor a peer like Rosaline (or Ado Annie). Given the struggles, when Robbins wrote to Bernstein and Laurents on 18 October 1955, he was afraid that Anita would fall into cliché as ‘the typical downbeat blues torch-bearing 2nd character,’ citing Julie in Show Boat (1927). As a result, Robbins predicted, ‘the audience will know that somewhere a “my man done left me” blues is coming up for her.’²³ In this comment, Robbins clearly reads Anita as a woman of colour. Julie is passing at the beginning of Show Boat but is later revealed to have ‘Negro blood’ and it is that miscegenation that puts her narrative on a tragic course. The torch song ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ provides the audience with their first hint that Julie is a ‘tragic mulatta’ figure when Queenie, the Mammy figure of the musical, recognizes it. The blues singers and characters Robbins was thinking of, as well as those whom Bernstein most admired, like Billie Holiday, were Black women.²⁴ In turn, Anita and her version of femininity draw expressive power from these voices.

Small changes to Anita’s character (lowering her age) and the avoidance of the blues (for the most part) in her musical characterization helped avoid the cliché Robbins feared. However, there was no easy solution to the threat Anita posed to the social order, whether the collaborators were conscious of it or not. Of course, Maria’s message to Tony has to go astray, as does the messenger Friar Lawrence sends in Romeo and Juliet, and the expediencies of musical theatre meant the messenger had to come from among the existing cast. Anita is close at hand and in terms of her own character development, perhaps recognizes that Maria’s goal and her own desire to belong in America are sufficiently aligned. The sexual violence she experiences, however, is not called for by the plot. It is a consequence of the demands of race and gender that intersect in her person and the legacy of the unruly women of colour who are her theatrical ancestors. Extending the work of Susan McClary and Nelly Furman on the figure of Carmen, Wood proposes that such voices can be heard ‘Sapphonically,’ as a ‘rupture and escape from patriarchal order,’ an order that insists that ‘runaway female desire, Carmen’s “rebel bird”, must be captured, caged, crushed.’²⁵ This is doubly true for Black women in America, like Julie, who dare to express their desires. Ironically, it is Anita, with her faith in the assimilation narrative of ‘America,’ who becomes the most forceful example of its failure. However, the invocation of the ‘Sapphonic’ points to the way out of the racial trap that West Side Story exposes and it does so through two women’s emotional relationship with each other.

The Redemptive (Colourblind) Feminine

The song complex of ‘A Boy Like That’ and ‘I Have a Love’ sits uneasily within West Side Story for many reasons. The discomfort makes sense narratively: Anita has just lost her love and Maria is striving to keep hers alive. Although appropriate to the situation, the wild contrasts in mood and style can be awkward to hear – particularly Maria’s operatic exclamation ‘Oh no, Anita, no!’ (Performances by Kiri Te Kanawa and Cecilia Bartoli have made clear the dramatic potential in this line specifically.) Indeed, that cry, the duet in counterpoint that follows, and later the parlando transition, seem to come from a different world than the songs on either side. The jagged rhythms and contours of ‘A Boy Like That’ are aggressive and Anita’s scansion is awkward. According to Wolf this disorder emphasizes both her fury and that English is her second language.²⁶ Relatedly, Wells hears Anita’s music as part and parcel of the Hispanicization of the Shark Girls.²⁷ These are both valid interpretations, but the passage would still be musically unsettling even if the language were more fluent. Moreover, this passage has none of the folkloric influences of ‘America,’ rather it embodies the jazz-based, modernist violence of the ‘Prologue’ or ‘The Rumble.’ Anita is adopting what has been, throughout this musical, a masculine style and that cooption is just one of the ways that this pair of songs destabilizes the patriarchal forces driving the narrative.

On the surface, Anita and Maria argue about Tony’s fate, but they also negotiate the relationship between the redemptive feminine and the assimilation narrative. In a striking reversal, driven by her recent experience, Anita rejects the notion of integrating into American culture, warning Maria: ‘stick to your own kind.’ The 2009 revival reinforced this sentiment by having Anita return to Spanish for ‘A Boy Like That.’ Maria initially argues back in Spanish, before switching to English to reprimand Anita: ‘You should know better. You were in love, or so you said.’ After struggling to be heard by Anita throughout ‘A Boy Like That,’ Maria now has her attention and can deepen what Wolf describes as her ‘pedagogy of emotion’ in the second song, ‘I Have a Love.’²⁸ This pair of songs ‘develops an emotional shift, a change brought about by one woman’s influence on another’ and is as ‘intensely homosocial’ as the rest of the musical has been.²⁹ In this moment, the balance tilts from the masculine kinship of the Jets toward these two women. In Wolf’s reading, Anita and Maria’s extended duet ‘upends the heterosexual romance entirely, altering and feminizing the affective organization of the musical by linking the two women in intensely grounded affiliation and mutual understanding.’³⁰ Wells also focuses on their shared place in a violent, masculine world in which this argument between two women represents ‘the only successful and rational mediation of conflict in the entire work.’³¹ Wolf hears this kind of female duet as disrupting the heterosexual drive of the musical whereas Wells hears it as offering up the traditional redemptive role for women, at least temporarily. The latter reading is much closer to the conscious decision-making of the authors, in which the survival of ‘Juliet’ was a key decision.³² The nature of Maria’s persuasion bears further investigation, then, as do the narrative results.

According to Wells’s reading, which she acknowledges is just one possibility, ‘I Have a Love’ grounds redeeming femininity in whiteness. When Maria shifts to the language of opera, she ushers in a slower, more moderate ballad, which Wells hears as closer to ‘classical’ style (notoriously the realm of dead, white men). The result is that ‘both women have shed their ethnic identity by the end of the number.’³³ Wells sees this as one of the tragedies of the show. The women’s wisdom becomes increasingly central to the narrative, but to ‘convey the horror of a men’s world … they also must abjure their ethnic allegiances, a primary source of their spirit and group identity.’³⁴ This scene hijacks Anita’s own self-professed drive toward Americanization, dictating conformity instead of the hybridity of ‘America’ as the terms of inclusion.

However, another interpretation is evident in the drafting process and ultimately in the score: ‘I Have a Love’ proposes colourblindness as the solution to the problem of belonging. In as much as Robbins was searching for contemporary touchstones, the collaborators were also seeking to present a universalized theme. The desire to address intolerance in America was always present, even as the cast of characters shifted from early outlines, through scene lists and drafts of the book. As he wrote in his copy of Romeo and Juliet, Bernstein had in mind ‘racial intolerance,’ but also a specific setting at Passover/Easter and a Catholic vs. Jewish conflict.³⁵ These first thoughts in response to Shakespeare’s text reveal the ways in which ethnicity, religion, and race were overlapping concepts for him and his contemporaries. One early outline also proposed a scene at a ‘festival, possibly Chinese,’ which together with Anita’s proposed last name (Ellis, as in the island) demonstrates how the collaborators were attempting to capture the diversity of New York’s immigrant community.³⁶ Another early outline, even closer to the Shakespeare and in which both principals still die, Juliet takes her poison and wanders the streets deliriously. The authors propose that ‘as she walks through the streets it’s as though – from what we see and hear – she is walking through alleys of prejudice of different kinds.’³⁷ These attempts to generalize about prejudice depend on what George Lipsitz calls the supposed ‘universal interchangeability’ of categories of identity.³⁸ Only this leveling of difference could allow for the solution offered in ‘Somewhere,’ a song in which prejudice disappears because people simply let go of such differences, including race.

In its formulation of utopia, ‘Somewhere’ imagines a colourblind America and ‘I Have a Love’ lays out the path to that vision. However, colourblind logic has often been used to shore up racist structures, perpetuating racial inequality, because its side-effect is to affirm whiteness as the un-marked ‘normal.’ According to Lipsitz, ‘the appeal to colorblindness is a claim with no content. It is a proclamation without a program, a pronouncement without a plan of action.’³⁹ Lipsitz’s definition of colourblindness certainly applies to the logic of ‘Somewhere’ and ‘I Have a Love.’ The lyrics, for instance – ‘peace and quiet and open air’ – indicate only that this idyllic place, free from discrimination, is not a city. The definition of ‘somewhere’ is so unmarked as to be practically anywhere suburban, ex-urban, or rural. However, whether one hears these songs as an evocation of classical music (pace Wells), as a ballad in the Broadway vernacular, or some of both, the unmarked norm at work is white. It is worth noting that the first performance of ‘Somewhere’ was literally colourblind as Reri Grist sang anonymously from the orchestra pit. Laurents perhaps also tipped his hand in 2009 by having Anita switch to English as well for the duet portion of ‘I Have a Love,’ which vocalizes the unstated assumption that ‘universal’ belonging is English speaking. However, departing from Lipsitz, I would argue that in the case of West Side Story, this colourblindness is not empty of content, rather it overflows with affective content.

If we return to Wolf’s idea of ‘emotional pedagogy’ and look carefully at the score, ‘I Have a Love’ takes up the themes of ‘Somewhere’ and completes its work. In terms of melodic content, both songs lack the unsettling tritone present in the rest of the musical. Both have simple melodies and lighter orchestrations featuring the warmth of the string section. The two songs also share organizing intervals and ‘I Have a Love’ manages to resolve the more open-ended structure of ‘Somewhere.’ The opening phrase, ‘I have a love and it’s all that I have,’ repeats a step up from F to G (with some embellishment), recalling the major second interval of ‘someday, somehow, somewhere.’ In addition, the minor seventh leap that opened ‘Somewhere’ reappears with the words ‘I love him.’ The difference is that after Anita is persuaded to join the melody, they finally land the octave leap that ‘Somewhere’ never accomplished. This gesture is a triumphant conclusion that accompanies the words: ‘Your love is your life.’ The way to a colourblind utopia is, quite literally, to love enough. For Maria to love Tony enough not to care about their differences. For Anita to love Maria enough to do as she asks. The redemptive feminine is the plan of action.

Of course, this plan of action is not enough. The resolve of these two women of colour is ultimately overpowered by violent masculinity. As Wells puts it, ‘their responses to these atrocities are the loss of faith, the loss of compassion, and the loss of the redemptive feminine.’⁴⁰ Because the women’s agency is limited to the affective realm – their persuasion is based in emotion and so is the solution they propose – their ability to bend the narrative arc is limited. Moreover, they are bound by gender and race. What Devon W. Carbado describes as ‘colorblind intersectionality’ does not work for women of colour; only white women can stand in for ‘all women.’⁴¹ Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the tragedy, then, is that only after colourblindness fails as an option and Maria has experienced sufficient pain and suffering is her challenge to the racist, patriarchal social order enough to move them. She forces everyone – both gangs, Doc, the police – to hear her by holding them all at gunpoint as she stands over Tony’s body. At this point, the authors of West Side Story deliberately chose to leave their Juliet alive and there is the smallest indication that Maria’s words may have landed, as both Sharks and Jets carry Tony’s body offstage behind her. But we still have a long way to go from this procession to ‘Somewhere.’

Conclusion: Un-Gendering West Side Story

What Anita’s and Maria’s fates demonstrate is that the problems of race, gender, and sexuality are inextricable. A colourblind solution fails in part because, in attempting to move past race as an issue, it does not attempt to dislodge the restrictive norms of gender roles and compulsive heterosexuality that also bind the characters. In analyses by Wolf and Wood, alternative readings of musicals and operas, as well as alternative ways of listening to performers, can give voice to otherwise unexpressed identities and even suggest alternate endings. In addition, the text of West Side Story itself may suggest such a queer reading in the person of Anybodys, the character who almost saves the day. It is Anybodys who warns the Jets that Chino is stalking Tony with a gun and it is Anybodys who succeeds in finding Tony just before the end. Not listening to Anybodys in that moment seals Tony’s fate – too far gone in grief to heed the warning, he instead yells for Chino to come shoot him. Continually rejected for refusing to abide by gender norms, it is Anybodys who proves herself the most resilient character. The name also suggests that a universal message might be embodied by the character, both within the text of the musical and in its afterlife.

In the case of the show’s leading women, their performances can be read as embodying a lesbian sensibility. According to Wolf, any woman who defies gender norms can appear lesbian because ‘culturally dominant, “commonsense” understandings of femininity weave heterosexuality into femininity’.⁴² Examples of this ‘commonsense understanding,’ like the expectation that women serve as mediators or the idea of the redemptive feminine, are key elements of West Side Story. A lesbian reading is particularly apt for Anita, whose likeness to Carmen, as discussed before, makes her not only a threat to the masculine of authority of the Sharks and the Jets alike, but also a danger to the heterosexual structure of the musical as a whole. The latter is a feat, fundamentally, of performance rather than authorial intent.

Wolf’s lesbian interpretation of ‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’ draws on Wood’s scholarship and her own analysis of two seminal performances. The different vocal qualities of Rivera and Carol Lawrence contribute to the effect of the shift in emotional timbre halfway through the number. As heard in the original Broadway recording: ‘The last section transforms a song of conflict and conversation into an expression of love as they join together musically – Rivera’s thick, rough-edged belt and Lawrence’s clear, plaintive soprano – and sing their agreement to each other with the same notes that the (heterosexual) lovers sang to each other earlier.’⁴³ In Wolf’s reading, the intimacy this scene produces alters the terms of the musical and audiences certainly feel more sympathy for both women in this moment than for anyone else, thanks in large part to Rivera’s and Lawrence’s complementary abilities and performance choices. And to the extent that this song pair lives on in performance, other singers have the opportunity to embody different emotional realities, gender expressions, and sexualities. Indeed, the afterlife of West Side Story began fairly quickly, not just with the film adaptation, but also with jazz recordings based on the score, the suite of dances Bernstein excerpted and arranged (Symphonic Dances from West Side Story), and concert and cabaret performances of the songs.

One performance that offers up something like an alternate ending for the characters can be heard in a concert given by Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews at Carnegie Hall in 1962. Throughout the evening, which was also broadcast on CBS, Carol’s and Julie’s performances ‘repetitively underline how they complement, harmonize, and complete one another,’ which taken together can position the two, implicitly, as a butch-femme couple. In Wolf’s reading, ‘Carol is Julie’s “other” much more so than any man with whom Julie performed.’⁴⁴ Their rendition of ‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’ comes at the end of a Broadway medley in which they cover a broad swath of repertoire, ‘singing songs representative of the various epochs or eras, if you will, as they were handed down through the ages and into history,’ as Julie archly suggests. (Carol’s response: ‘What?’) In their performance of ‘I Have a Love,’ the grainy timbre of Carol’s voice displaces the typical male role as counterbalance to Julie’s clear coloratura. As a result, we hear two women within the kind of romantic, symmetrical frame that had previously been the territory of (presumed) heterosexual romantic pairs.⁴⁵ Notably, the medley for Carol and Julie stops at this point, not because they are out of Broadway history but because their relationship has reached its emotional end-point. If the medley and the program as a whole are about demonstrating their affinity, the two could not be closer than at this moment.

In a similar vein to these lesbian readings of Anita and Maria, the character of Anybodys invites queer listening practices and identifications among fans of the musical. Described in the book as a tomboy, Anybodys can also be understood as a transgender boy or a non-binary person. As Wells points out, the yearning for belonging and normalcy expressed in ‘Somewhere’ is perhaps most perfectly embodied by Anybodys: ‘Although we can clearly see what is required for the other characters to escape – for Puerto Ricans and whites to stop fighting, for Tony and Maria to run away – the metaphor of an incomplete or possible escape suits Anybodys more closely. There is, in fact, no solution to her dilemma of not fitting in anywhere.’⁴⁶ One significant story beat, however, does allow Anybodys belonging as a Jet. Having delivered the crucial news that Chino is after Tony, Anybodys finally gets an assignment on behalf of the gang. Before they go their separate ways, Action says: ‘Ya done good, buddy boy.’ Anybodys responds: ‘Thanks, daddy-o.’⁴⁷ This moment of acceptance, affirming the role Anybodys has wanted throughout the show, stands in stark contrast to Tony’s dismissal later. As Anybodys attempts to get him to safety, he yells: ‘You’re a girl: be a girl! Beat it!’⁴⁸ His rejection attempts to put Anybodys back in place as a girl, but the writers of the musical recognized that their character was not ‘like any other girl on earth’ – as lyrics from a cut song ‘Like Everybody Else’ confirm. Whereas A-Rab and Baby John want to be taller or older, Anybodys’ predicament is profound: ‘Why can’t I be male?’ Removed almost as quickly as it was added in August of 1957, during the show’s out-of-town trial in Washington, DC, the song nonetheless opened a window to another reading of Anybodys, the traces of which still remain in the dialogue and action of the book.

The casting of iris menas, a transgender non-binary actor, in the role of Anybodys in the 2021 film adaptation of West Side Story highlights the importance of the character to transgender representation. Likewise, Tony Kushner’s small but significant adaptations in the script confront Anybodys’ problem more directly than other versions. Most striking is the clear trauma inflicted shortly before ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ in another violent confrontation with a fellow Jet. A-Rab says he can verify that Anybodys is a girl because he pantsed them. Anybodys’ response is defiant and comes with fists: ‘I ain’t no goddamn girl!’ (A similar fight in earlier versions stemmed from an insult to Anybodys’ sister instead.) It was never a stretch to read Anybodys as transgender, given that the book for the musical and the 1957 film script both eventually recognize the character’s gender identity and expression. The act of a fellow Jet affirming Anybodys’ true self – ‘buddy boy’ – resonates with other affirmations like correct pronoun usage. This reading has been widely adopted by fandom as ‘headcanon’ for Anybodys – what the text might not confirm, but what a fan assumes to be true. Even the 1950s descriptor ‘tomboy’ can be translated into contemporary notions about the possibilities of gender identity and expression beyond the binary. Kushner’s script shifts the audience toward the realization that Anybodys is trans before there was a word for it and menas’s performance hints that his acceptance may have come too late. Having only recently moved from outsider to insider, he is capable of understanding that others who are marginalized are also at risk. Indeed, immediately after the affirmation of ‘buddy boy,’ he runs into Anita on her way into the drugstore and warns her quietly but urgently: ‘leave.’

The queerness of Anybodys is part of what makes them perhaps the closest to a universal character in West Side Story. The name Anybodys rings true, as does Sarah Frankcom’s decision to have them sing ‘Somewhere’ and deliver the musical’s message. While Spielberg and Kushner did not recapitulate Frankcom’s choice, they also chose a different performer for ‘Somewhere’ in a move meant to universalize its message. They created a role for Rita Moreno as Valentina, the Puerto Rican widow of Doc who now runs the drugstore and shelters Tony. Like Anybodys she stands between categories. She at least somewhat rejects assimilation: ‘I married a gringo. He (Riff) thinks that makes me a gringa, which it don’t and I ain’t.’ But she is in turn rejected by Anita who, after the older woman interrupts the Jets’ assault, calls her a traitor and rejects her help: ‘yo no soy tu hija!’ Valentina’s version of ‘Somewhere’ reads like a prayer, one rooted in her own past and concerned for the future of the next generation, spanning the generational divide in the hope of breaking down others.

In writing a musical about immigrant youth in New York City, the authors of West Side Story confronted intertwined anxieties about sexuality, gender, and race. As a tragedy, it challenged the standards of American musical theatre and fundamentally changed the genre. However, the slim hope of belonging offered at the end of the musical effectively retreads a colourblind, assimilative (or integrationist) path taken by Civil Rights advocates and opponents of progress alike. This deferred redemption of the Sharks and the Jets is also gendered – it both depends on the imagination of women like Anita and Maria and produces their suffering. However, we can still imagine a path to ‘Somewhere’ out of the ending of West Side Story (an invitation Bernstein hands us in the score) if we look to the work of performers and spectators. If we recognize the interplay of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race we can consider solutions (read: performances and political actions) that undo multiple restrictions or offer multiple ways of belonging. We might also, as invited by the character of Anybodys, expand our ideas about gender beyond the binary and un-gender our vision of ‘Somewhere,’ making it a space that welcomes multiplicity and complexity. Belonging is not just a ‘boy thing’ or a ‘girl thing’ – it’s for anybody and everybody.

As a dramaturg who specialises in adaptations for the stage, when I consider West Side Story, I do so in light of its source, Romeo and Juliet. There are several different ways to focus dramaturgical work for theatrical adaptations, depending on the specific needs of the work in question.¹ 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, I nevertheless ground my initial research in questions central to adapturgy itself. Here, I examine the ‘spirit of the source’, as well as the pleasures available for spectators familiar with the source material. Finally, I question the geography of adaptation – how questions of time and space figure into comparisons between the texts as well as their production histories.

The Spirit of the Source

While the search for a singular original source is foolish, especially when considering adaptations of Shakespeare’s work, shifting the question from a desire to pinpoint an origin to the spirit of the source allows for a more nuanced understanding of the core story being adapted. We know that Romeo and Juliet, like every other play attributed to Shakespeare, was itself an adaptation, but we may also discern the core elements that audiences and readers associate with Romeo and Juliet in order to see how they are later adapted by others.² At the crux of William Shakespeare’s play is the concept of ‘star-crossed lovers’, a theatrical trope often associated with the improvisational sketches of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Whereas commedia sketches include young lovers, their love story is merely the fodder for the primary focus, which typically centres on the comic ways that their fathers’ servants attempt to disrupt or trick the lovers out of (or into) trouble. Not only does Shakespeare transform this story from comic to tragic, then, but he also shifts the focus from the parents and their servants to the young lovers themselves.

In so doing, the nature of how exactly the lovers are ‘star-crossed’ becomes that much more significant, for in order for a tragedy to work, audiences must understand the risks and stakes involved that inevitably lead to the tragic ending. What did it mean, then, for Romeo to be ‘star-crossed’ with Juliet? And how does that idea – the spirit of the source – translate into the lovers at the core of West Side Story? In order to explore this carefully, I want to consider both the ‘star’ and the ‘crossed’ part of the story’s essence separately, before analysing the notion of ‘star-crossed’ altogether.

As literary critic J. W. Draper acknowledged in the early twentieth century, ‘Romeo and Juliet is a tissue of improbable coincidence’ – nearly every event that leads to the tragic ending appears to occur by accident, if we do not fully consider the impact of the stars, or fate itself.³ We take the phrase ‘star-cross’d lovers’ from the Prologue itself and it is Romeo who muses that ‘Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, / Shall bitterly begin [its] fearful date / With this night’s revels’ just before he departs for the Capulet party where he will meet Juliet (I.iv.107–09). References to the stars, heavens, fortune, and fate abound throughout the play, which is not surprising when we recall that ‘the sixteenth century generally accepted astrology as a science’.⁴ Combined with the belief that the human body was ruled by ‘humours’ or bodily fluids that required balancing for optimal function, analysis of human behaviour in Shakespeare’s era involved the predictive practice of astrologists with that of proto-doctors who ‘read’ their patients’ humours as a means of categorising and predicting the opportunities and obstacles they would encounter. Thus, humans with an excess of bile (the choleric) were associated with the element of fire, and therefore influenced by the signs of Leo, Aries, and Sagittarius; those with an excess of blood (the sanguine) followed the signs of Aquarius, Gemini, and Libra, which are connected to the element of air. For those connected to the element of water, with an excess of phlegm, their ruling signs were Scorpio, Pisces, and Cancer, while the excess of black bile corresponded with humans ruled by Capricorn, Taurus, and Virgo.

Through the lens of this categorical system, an adaptation dramaturg might trace the connective threads between different humours and astrological signs with their corresponding characters in the source, while also noting how (and whether) these same designations hold true in the adaptation. The particular adapturgical interest here is whether (or how) this overall concept of Fortune drives the choices that characters make, given the tendencies predicted by the astrology and humours that influence them most. For example, Juliet’s cousin Tybalt ‘is clearly of the choleric or wrathful type’ – he admits as much himself when he refers to his ‘wilful choler’ (I.v.91), and after he is slain by Romeo, Benvolio notes Tybalt’s ‘unruly spleen’ which is ‘deaf to peace’ (III.i.162, 163).⁵ While his counterpart in the musical does not reference choleric metaphors directly, Maria’s brother Bernardo is introduced in the stage directions as being ‘handsome, proud, fluid’, with ‘a chip on his sardonic shoulder’.⁶ His protectiveness over his young sister sharpens when she shows interest in Tony, whom he calls a ‘Polack’ several times, including the moment that escalates the rumble at the end of Act 1, when Bernardo reaches for his knife, which eventually leads to him killing Riff.⁷ Thus, both the source and the adapted characters exhibit the hot tempers and rash actions of choleric types.

Equally important to the spirit of the source is the second part of this phrase, how they are ‘crossed.’ In Shakespeare’s play, the Prologue establishes that the Montagues and the Capulets have an ‘ancient grudge,’ but there is no further exposition to explain the feud, nor do theatre historians have reason to believe that it would have been a question raised by Shakespeare’s audiences. We simply accept that these two families and their employees do not associate with each other. For those who yearn for specificity of origin, it is possible that Shakespeare’s reference to these two families has historical (and poetic) precedents with Dante’s Divine Comedy, since in the Purgatorio he references a feud between the Montecchi and the Cappelletti, or Montagues and Capulets. While scholars have typically accepted the idea that Shakespeare did not read (or was not influenced directly by) Dante, this short reference is nevertheless intriguing, because it implies that the two families were ‘also caught up in the Ghibelline versus Guelph factionalism’.⁸ These factions represented a rivalry from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries between support for the Pope and support for the Emperor, resulting in civil war during much of the late Middle Ages throughout Italy.⁹

The question of how the lovers’ families are ‘cross’d’ gained complexity when the creative team of Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents began to tackle their adaptation in the mid twentieth century. Following the instinct of performance scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera to refer to West Side Story’s origin narrative as ‘legend,’ in recognition that ‘the veracity of any particular account is less important than the generally shared belief in the actual narrative,’ from most accounts it was Robbins who first landed on the idea of translating the crossing from warring families to religious cultures at odds when he conceived of East Side Story in 1949.¹⁰ In this case, the way the stars aligned in Robbins’s concept was through the timing of Easter and Passover, and the crossing was to be between Catholics and Jews who lived on the Lower East Side of New York City. However, once playwright Arthur Laurents was recruited to join the team, his recognition of the direct parallels between this adaptation and the 1920s smash-hit play Abie’s Irish Rose quickly ended the excitement, leading the team to look for other parallels that would communicate the spirit of the source in a way that translated for twentieth-century audiences. Six years later, when the stars aligned such that ‘Laurents and Bernstein bumped into each other by chance at the Beverly Hills Hotel’, they were compelled to discuss the project again, and could not ignore a newspaper headline about ‘Gang Riots on Olvera Street’, citing warfare between Mexican American and white gangs in Los Angeles.¹¹

Because these collaborators were committed (above all else) to creating a musical version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and because they recognized their Broadway audiences would be far less likely to embrace a story about California Mexicans than immigrants coming to New York, they translated the gang rivalry into a plausible scenario Laurents could better imagine: ‘I knew firsthand [about] Puerto Ricans and Negroes and immigrants who had become Americans.’¹² Thus, the crossing of the stars was adapted from Italian families with a centuries-old rivalry to two youth gangs competing for territory as well as the right to be seen as American. If we are to accept the theory that the feud between the Montagues and Capulets developed from factionalism related to the political and religious conflict between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, it seems that the musical team’s initial translation of ‘star-cross’d’ as Jews in conflict with Catholics would make a more direct match, insofar as it would retain the religious (and, related to some extent, political) factions vying for power. However, in shifting the emphasis away from religion, Laurents, Robbins, and Bernstein seized on a theme that was arguably more authentic for US audiences: the question of how we define American-ness, especially as it relates to immigration, race, and ethnicity.

Palimpsestuous Pleasures

One can hardly discern the nature of American-ness – that is, what it means to be an American – without employing the concept of a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a piece of artwork or writing that has several layers, and onlookers can discern parts of what was created or written before underneath the top layer. Most often used to refer to a manuscript or section of writing, a palimpsest both recycles previously written-upon material (papyrus or paper, usually) and does not entirely efface what existed before it. The trace or residue of history is crucial to the concept of palimpsests, and while in some ways the same could be said of any nationality, given the history of the USA (and especially that of New York City), palimpsestuousness has particular resonance for American identity. The ultimate goal of assimilation is to erase the trace of one’s previous identity, taking on the target culture such that no layers of difference might be seen – and yet, especially with regard to racial identity, we cannot define one without the other.¹³

This is especially true of Puerto Rican-ness, in part due to the multiplicity of race found there, combined with the easily overlooked fact that it too is part of the USA. ‘Since Puerto Ricans are a differently racialized people,’as cultural historian Frances Negrón-Muntaner explains, ‘and some are indistinguishable from whites or African Americans (as coded in Hollywood cinema), boricua ethnic specificity [has] to be easily seen and heard.’¹⁴ In other words, it must be performed, or layered on top of what is initially seen, as if adding a layer to a palimpsest. To be sure, this need to perform boricua (as Negrón-Muntaner argues) invites traumatic practices such as the use of brownface for Bernardo (played by George Chakiris on film – the same actor who had played the leader of the Jets onstage), but within the field of adaptation studies, it is the very ability to see beneath the top layer that provides pleasure for spectators.

To have a palimpsestuous pleasure, then, is to see at once the adapted choice and the residue of the source. It is this delight of recognition, of discerning the links between source and adaptation, that creates this response. For audiences of West Side Story, the palimpsests exist in several different ways of seeing the performance – for our purposes here, I will focus primarily on the ways that the characters of the musical are palimpsests that allow rewarding glimpses of Shakespeare’s play to peek through at strategic moments.

From the outset, it is clear that the adults are far more prevalent in Romeo and Juliet than they are in West Side Story – although the focus in both shows is on the lovers and their friends, all adolescents in the contexts of their times, the lovers’ parents remain unseen throughout the musical. Nor does Juliet’s counterpart have a Nurse as confidante – indeed, one of the most impactful changes made through adaptation was to transform the confidante role from elder to peer. While all adaptation processes hinge on practicality considerations – in this case, Robbins needed a female lead dancer – these decisions are never made based on expediency alone; thematic consequences are part of the creative process as well. By creating the character of Anita to replace the Nurse, and pairing her with Maria’s brother Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks (and therefore an adaptation of Tybalt), the writers make possible several significant changes that occur in the second act of West Side Story, as it deviates from Shakespeare’s play.

Rather than staging her own death in an ultimately unsuccessful plan to create the exit strategy for her to run away with Romeo, as Juliet does, Maria does not pretend to die. The extraordinary string of bad fortune that befalls Romeo (due, as we have discussed, not to chance alone but to fate written in the stars) culminates when Friar John fails to share Juliet’s secret with him, and instead Romeo believes his servant’s claim that his beloved has killed herself. In contrast, the Tybalt character that Romeo kills for revenge in the musical is not only the killer of his best friend (Riff), he is further entangled into the story by being Anita’s boyfriend and Maria’s brother. Bernardo’s death understandably enrages Anita, but when she tries to warn Maria that Tony is a murderer, she quickly learns that Maria has forgiven Tony. ‘A boy like that who’d kill your brother, / Forget that boy and find another!’ Anita sings, but Maria remains unconvinced.¹⁵ After Officer Schrank arrives to question Maria, she asks her best friend to deliver a message to Tony whom she is supposed to meet at the drugstore.

Reluctantly, Anita agrees and goes to the drugstore with the intention of updating Tony as Maria requested. However, her encounter with the Jets there changes her mind: Tony’s friends proceed to taunt her mercilessly, culminating in a ‘wild, savage dance, with epithets hurled at Anita, who is encircled and driven by the whole pack’.¹⁶ After she falls down in the corner, the Jets lift up Baby John and drop him on top of her, implying the spectre of sexual assault, which is interrupted only as Tony’s mentor and confidante Doc arrives and insists, ‘Stop it!’ Shaken and dishevelled, Anita purposefully lies to the gang, telling them that after learning about Bernardo’s murder, Chino has killed Maria. This is the final straw that leads to Tony running into the streets, inviting Chino to ‘COME ON: get me too!’¹⁷

Whereas I do not suggest that viewers of this scene glimpse the Nurse role peeking out from underneath Anita’s character, there is a palimpsest here that brings pleasure. The gamble that Anita takes in telling her lie recalls the gamble Juliet takes when she follows Friar Laurence’s advice, allowing her to feign her death with his sleeping potion. In both cases, the female characters defy the fate their community thrusts upon them: Anita refuses to allow the Jets’ disrespect for her (and murder of her boyfriend) stand without recourse; Juliet refuses to allow her parents to force her into a marriage with Paris. In effect, both women’s decisions confront and dismantle the very real consequences they would otherwise face of losing agency over their bodies and violating their morals, allowing them to assert a path forward that aligns ethically with what they believe is right. Thus, the palimpsestuous pleasure in this instance recalls the combination of dread that spectators feel when they see that Anita and Juliet are cornered, only to be replaced with a tragic sense of relief when they carve out another path, albeit one that audiences predict will not end happily.

Other opportunities for appreciating the palimpsestuous layers exist when we compare the supporting characters – the question of how Doc replaces Friar Laurence, for example, allows for a useful comparison between the roles of mentors who are secular versus those based in the Church – but I maintain that the most effective and crucial of these alterations to characters is that of Anita for the Nurse. It is up to characters, after all, to move the plot forward, based on the choices they make and the consequences and obstacles they face. However, any analysis of theatrical adaptation would be remiss to overlook the role of geography in the story.

Geographies of Adaptation

All stories – whether experienced as readers, listeners, or spectators – take up space. The space they occupy might be imaginary for the duration of our experience with a story, or we might first read (and imagine) the world of the story before seeing it on the screen or the stage. Because in live performance we have the option of creating a sense of space using both three-dimensionality and projected imagery or suggested depth with scrims and tricks of stage lighting, questions of geography as they apply to scenography are fundamental to theatrical adaptation dramaturgy. Especially when tasked with creating the fantastic or impossible onstage (through special effects, sleight of hand, symbolism, or puppetry, for example), the specific choices that are both indicated in the adapted script as well as those taken by designers for full productions of the adaptation are productive portals for dramaturgical analysis.

Of all the settings we might associate with Romeo and Juliet, the one expectation that audiences likely share is that of Juliet’s balcony. ‘The balcony scene’, as it is frequently called, occurs in the second act, although it is not the only time where the lovers’ speech indicates that they are either above or below each other. While the likelihood of a three-dimensional balcony appearing onstage during Shakespeare’s lifetime is virtually nonexistent, it is not a stretch to suggest the creative team for West Side Story would have imagined one as they considered the crucial elements of the source.¹⁸ Regardless of its actual presence onstage, the sense of a balcony – namely the verticality it provides, and the corresponding symbols it provokes for readers/spectators – must be considered central to the story and theme of Romeo and Juliet. Part of this is textual, not surprisingly for Shakespeare. Consider Juliet’s concern that Romeo has climbed up to see her: ‘The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, / And the place death, considering who thou art’ (II.ii.63–64). As literary scholar David Bevington suggests, ‘The vertical separation between Juliet’s window and the orchard or garden below lends itself to recurrent visual images of ascent and descent, aspiration and despondency.’¹⁹ Not only is Shakespeare foreshadowing the fall that inevitably awaits the young lovers, he is also calling upon the Biblical worldview that medieval stages made literal – early Renaissance stages retained the depictions of heaven and hell in their ceilings and trap doors or discovery spaces.

Rather than a general auguring of doom, Shakespeare offers specific signposts for what will befall them with Juliet’s words after Romeo has descended from her window: ‘O God I have an ill-divining soul, / Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb’ (III.v.54–56). The tomb is the other most significant space of action for Romeo and Juliet, as the location of both her feigned death and actual suicide. In a study of the Elizabethan staging of the tomb, theatre historian Leslie Thomson argues:

The verticality of movement – both the literal climbing up and down and the conceptual references to high and low – reinforces the spirit of the source, calling upon well-known medieval iconography of fortune as a wheel (‘stars’) as well as the oxymoronic references to love and happiness that occur alongside stage action of death (‘crossed’). Moreover, this ‘theatrical conflict – words contradicting actions’ emphasises the transcendent theme of this play, urging audiences to believe, as Romeo and Juliet do, that death has no power to end true love.²¹

In contrast, what is vertical in Shakespeare’s play becomes horizontal in West Side Story. While upon initial inspection observers might point to the parallels between the balcony scene and Tony’s use of the fire escape outside Maria’s bedroom (see Figure 9.1), when considering the musical as a whole, the importance of the streets quickly outweighs that of the fire escape. Unlike most mid century musicals, West Side Story does not begin with an overture but rather features a dance prologue that establishes the conflict between the two gangs. In part because it was so innovative, this opening scene remains one of the most iconic for spectators: beyond the movement-based exposition it provides, the prologue communicates the territorial protection of urban space that motivates gang warfare.²²

Figure 9.1 Tony and Maria on the fire escape in a West Side Story production at Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, MO.

(Photo credit: Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, MO)

In translating the spirit of the source from the transcendent power of fortune/fate to a sociological question about belonging and terrain, the musical collaborators move our focus from divine or sublime concerns about the nature of the universe to earthly notions grounded in conflict created from human prejudice. Thus, while the fire escape scene in Act 1 does have the effect of mirroring the balcony scene (allowing for palimpsestuous pleasure), we also cannot help but recognise the practicality and ubiquity of fire escapes – they provide a short-hand for urban spaces, especially in New York.²³ Our reception of those moments, then, is less about ascending the stairs than about escaping down them, and ultimately this scene reinforces the grounded, horizontal nature of geography throughout the musical.

To return to the scene where Anita goes to the drugstore to deliver Maria’s message (2.4), although there is a sense of verticality insofar as Tony and Doc are in the cellar, below ground level, the conflict remains horizontal and the dialogue reinforces the ground-level concerns around which the adapted story revolves. In a pointed moment of wordplay, Anita asks the Jets, ‘Will you let me pass?’ as she attempts to get by them so that she can descend into the cellar to find Tony. Snowboy, however, retorts ‘She’s too dark to pass.’²⁴ While clever, unlike Shakespeare’s wordplay of oxymorons and foreshadowing metaphors, Laurents speaks plainly to Americans, based in understanding colourism – for some, it may even call up a recognition of US racial history and the infamous ‘one-drop’ basis for segregation and slavery.²⁵ Moreover, her request – to pass – emphasises horizontal movement, both literally and metaphorically: the desire of immigrants to blend in, to walk among whiteness, as well as her practical desire to cross the stage.

The original scenic design of West Side Story reinforces this horizontal tendency – on several occasions, the ‘set flies away and the stage goes dark’, leaving actors alone onstage and bringing to mind the bleak bareness of deserted streets and alleys without surrounding foliage.²⁶ These moments are not meant to be literal as much as expressionistic representations of the primary characters’ psyches – for example, in 2.5 when this happens, it is just after Doc tells Tony Anita’s lie, that Chino has killed Maria. Tony runs out of the cellar, and as he does the surroundings disappear, leaving him to call for Chino in a blackout. When the next scene begins, ‘the lights come up to reveal the same set we saw at the beginning of Act One – but it is now jagged with shadows. Tony stands in the emptiness, calling, whirling around as a figure darts out of the shadows and then runs off again.’²⁷ The ‘emptiness’ here evokes what Tony feels, believing that his love has been murdered because of his own misdeeds, but it also reinforces the overall despondency of a world without upward mobility, where the options for success are not about climbing the social ladder, but about mere survival.

There are earlier instances when the set disappears in the musical to express happier emotions – the first time occurs in 1.5 just before the hopeful duet ‘Tonight’ – after Maria’s line, ‘All the world is only you and me!’ the ‘buildings, the world fade away, leaving them suspended in space.’²⁸ The promise of this song is reinforced by the stage directions, indicating their suspension, as if they are floating above the ground, unaffected by the rules of gravity (or fate). And yet, with the exception of Tony’s brief ascent of the fire escape for this encounter, for the majority of the show the movement and use of space remains on the street level. As the lovers sing, ‘Today the world was just an address, / A place for me to live in, / No better than all right, / But here you are / And what was just a world is a star / Tonight!’ In Sondheim’s lyrics we have one of the clearest adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, with a chorus that explicitly recalls the spirit of the source, repeating the phrase ‘And what was just a world is a star’ throughout the optimistic song.

The world they reference is the subject of the most iconic use of geography to communicate adapturgy in ‘Somewhere’ (2.1), the song that follows Maria’s discovery of Tony after the rumble, knowing that he has killed her brother and yet, miraculously, she insists that he stay with her and not turn himself in. ‘We’ll be all right. I know it’, Tony offers. ‘We’re really together now.’ Yet Maria corrects him: ‘But it’s not us! It’s everything around us!’ Tony’s suggestion, then, to ‘find some place where nothing can get to us’ erupts into him singing, ‘Somewhere there’s got to be some place for you and for me.’ This moment is reinforced by Oliver Smith’s scenic design when once again the ‘walls of the apartment begin to move off’ and ‘the two lovers begin to run, battering against the walls of the city’. Their escape works, ‘and suddenly – they are in a world of space and air and sun’. For this brief interlude – during Robbins’s dream ballet sequence – the horizontal nature of space is no longer that of the heaviness of gravity or the barren streets. It is the expanse of nature, of ‘joy and pleasure and warmth’, as the stage directions indicate, and the horizon begins to be one of possibility instead of limits.²⁹ In order for these crossed-lovers to exist happily, the adapters suggest, the world itself has to change. Indeed, as Shakespearean scholar Irene G. Dash claims, ‘this emphasis on place in West Side Story, specifically on America, reiterates the importance not only of America, but also of New York’.³⁰ This focus is further driven home by recognising that the Jets are introduced in the stage directions as ‘an anthology of what is called “American”’, as well as the unforgettable song, ‘America’, sung by Anita, Rosalia, and the Shark Girls.³¹ In this adaptation, then, the lovers are world-crossed instead of star-crossed.

Crossing Genres

The couple’s optimism is crucial for us to believe they are truly in love, and for spectators to have a sliver of hope that they might be able to succeed, against all odds. But those odds – whether grounded in sociology or foretold by the stars – must always be looming, in order for these stories to remain tragedies. In his recollection of creating West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein noted that the exact nature of the subject matter they would choose for their version of Romeo and Juliet was ‘all much less important than the bigger idea of making a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms’.³² The challenge of ‘using only musical-comedy techniques, never falling into the “operatic” trap’, as Bernstein put it, was considerable, because it had not been done before.³³

What are the essentials for tragedy? Definitions for this genre have shifted with contemporary playwriting, but as of the mid twentieth century when this musical premiered, Western theatre-makers would likely rely upon a combination of Aristotle’s Poetics with Arthur Miller’s ‘Tragedy of the Common Man’. Both theories of tragedy assert that audiences must identify with the tragic hero, but Miller maintains that the focus should be on the working- or middle-class person rather than (as previous centuries had insisted) one of noble rank.³⁴ Whereas it is clear that the collaborators achieved an adaptation that ‘spoke to bias in contemporary culture – ethnic bias, racial bias, and perhaps economic bias’,³⁵ what is less clear is whether the play upon which they based their experiment was itself a tragedy in the first place.

To suggest doubt about the genre of Romeo and Juliet is not meant to underplay the tragic nature of their love or ultimate demise. To the contrary, for most scholars, there is no doubt that this is one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, specifically a love tragedy that features two heroes instead of one.³⁶ Instead, I want to draw attention to the necessity of hamartia as well as anagnorisis in tragedies, following Aristotle. In order to create the possibility for catharsis, he suggests, the hero(es) must make a tragic error (hamartia) and have recognition of doing so (anagnorisis).³⁷ What fatal mistake do Romeo and Juliet make? To fall in love when their families are at odds? Is it Romeo’s revenge killing of Tybalt? Ultimately, they rely on others to communicate vital information and to offer their escape – this is where they falter, for Juliet’s death ruse does not work. However, these are not their decisions or actions; nor do (or should) they recognise them as such.

In both the source and the adaptation, it is society that fails the lovers rather than their own actions that directly trigger the tragic ending. Far beyond the reality of their ‘crossed’ natures, which are also outside of their direct influence, in both instances the young lovers are obstructed by forces beyond their control. As Friar Laurence tells Juliet, when she wakens from the sleeping potion, ‘A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents’ (V.iii. 153–54). Similarly, upon Tony’s death Maria exclaims, ‘WE ALL KILLED HIM.’³⁸ While the friar points to fate (or God’s will) as the reason the plans failed, and Maria’s accusation includes all of us and society more broadly, in both cases the stories also demonstrate the failure of adults to protect adolescents from these dangers. If Juliet were not forced into marriage by her parents, she never would have considered suicide. Had Tony’s so-called friends not harassed and attempted to assault Anita, she would not have spoken the fatal lie. Surprisingly, in both cases, a striking message against patriarchal control emerges: in the Renaissance play, it is more literal and can be traced to Capulet’s role as Juliet’s father; in the twentieth-century musical, it is more generally the atmosphere of ‘prejudice and hatred engendered around them’.³⁹ Further, although it is Juliet’s father’s rule that she upholds, with regard to a tragic error, both the Nurse and Anita ‘lose their moral compass as they attempt to save Juliet/Maria’.⁴⁰ However, neither character is given room onstage to acknowledge their error, and so arguably the tragedy is incomplete.

Through considering the process and product of adaptation here, what has been achieved is ultimately my goal with any subject of adapturgy: to refresh the spectators’ (and my own) vision of the source, so that they (and I) might see it anew. The comparative explicitness of Anita’s peril, as one example, helps contemporary audiences understand the stakes for Juliet as she considers her fate if she weds Paris. And the palimpsest works in both directions: through recognising what Juliet dreads and ultimately takes her own life to avoid, an audience’s appreciation for Maria’s refusal to abandon Tony even after he has killed her brother is also strengthened. For, while it is accurate to attest that this musical stands on its own and can be appreciated and enjoyed without exploring its source, by examining the spirit of the source, the palimpsestuous pleasures, and the geographies of adaptation, a new understanding of both the adaptation and the source emerges.

For millions of theatre, music, film, and television fans the words ‘West Side Story’ are forever entangled with perceptions and representations of US Latinx cultures like no other art product in the history of ‘American’ media.¹ Since Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim premiered West Side Story in 1957 it has become a filter, a set of eyeglasses through which US Latinxs and Puerto Ricans have been codified for mainstream audiences. Frances Negrón-Muntaner has referred to West Side Story as ‘the Puerto Rican Birth of a Nation: a blatant, seminal … valorized, aestheticized eruption into the (American) national “consciousness.”’ In other words, West Side Story has been seen by many social critics and academics as a sort of ‘trauma’ for the Puerto Rican diaspora.²

Paradoxically, it has also been identified by many Puerto Rican, Newyorican, and Latinx performers in all media as a motivation and a door into the arts. Performers from Rita Moreno to Jennifer López to Lin-Manuel Miranda have cited West Side Story as an instrumental and inspirational step in their paths to professional careers.³ I have argued elsewhere that the instinct to ‘burn’ West Side Story because of its perpetuation of stereotypes is shortsighted: it misses the historical and political context through which the Latinx experience of West Side Story can be seen as rebellious and subversive. From the revision of the ‘America’ lyrics to more accurately represent the disappointment of Bernardo and the Sharks vis-à-vis racism, discrimination, harassment, and lack of economic opportunity, to Maria’s usurpation of the ‘Miss America’ title, to the ironic rendition of the hymn ‘(America) My Country, ’Tis of Thee,’ and other references, West Side Story offers many conspicuous instances of criticism, resistance, and debunking of various ‘American’ myths.⁴ The fact that most of that criticism is channeled through the Puerto Rican Sharks, and well-grounded in the Puerto Rican mid century ‘immigrant’ experience, allows for a reading of West Side Story as somewhat subversive in the landscape of 1950s and 1960s US popular culture. The argument, typical in sociological debates, that West Side Story offers no alternative to the representation of Puerto Ricans/Latinx than that of finger-snapping, knife-wielding, juvenile delinquents is myopic and fails to account for the genuine, if limited social commentary that the text offers in context.⁵

But while the representation of immigrant, Latinx/Puerto Rican characters and attitudes can be debated as ranging from abject to progressive, it is the history of casting the Sharks in the most visible versions of West Side Story – Broadway 1957, the 1961 film, and prominent revivals – where more problematic issues arise. Historically, the casting of principal performers in West Side Story tends to favor a pattern that arguably privileges ethnically white – Anglo, Caucasian, and European types – for certain roles while reserving background and/or smaller parts for visibly more ‘ethnic’ actors. This pattern, which extends to the TV show Glee (2009–2015), was only visibly subverted in the 2020 Broadway revival. The controversial production though, directed by Ivo van Hove, went on hiatus on 15 March 2020 after only a few months due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The shift to a Puerto Rican focus, after the aborted ‘East Side Story’ idea, brings the Hispanic cultural debate into focus.⁶ This chapter considers primarily issues of Puerto Rican/Latinx representation and casting in the original 1957 Broadway show and the 1961 film directed by Robert Wise with Jerome Robbins, while briefly commenting on other productions, including the 2020 Broadway revival, directed by Ivo van Hove, and the 2021 film, directed by Steven Spielberg.

‘In America now … ’

Negrón-Muntaner addressed the issue that the original film was not ‘about’ Puerto Ricans, that it was never intended to be ‘real,’ and that it does not ‘seem real to Puerto Rican spectators.’⁷ She argues that West Side Story is ‘the most cohesive product of American culture to “hail” Puerto Ricans as Puerto Rican-Americans. Puerto Rican spectators have not been able to resist the command to turn around and respond to the film’s shameful hailing,’ she writes.⁸ In spite of the argument that the Sharks are depicted mainly as criminals, it is clearly the Jets who begin the cycle of violence that places the Sharks on their path to criminality. In the prologue that sets up the film’s first act, the spectator is introduced first to Riff, leader of the Jets, who refers to his gang as ‘juvenile delinquents,’ and later to Bernardo, leader of the Sharks. Bernardo is harassed without visible provocation apart from his ‘otherness.’ Later at the ‘war council’ it is confirmed that it was the Jets who ‘jumped’ Bernardo the first day he moved to the neighborhood. Criminality and lawlessness are not initially associated with the so-called ‘immigrants,’ but rather with the perceived ‘natives.’ Lieutenant Schrank and Officer Krupke are continuously represented as operating ‘outside’ the law in trying to make deals with the Jets. But police are also the common enemy, and the only truce between Sharks and Jets appears as a rebellious gesture against these corrupt authority figures.

In contrast to the lawlessness of the ‘natives’ and the impotence of ‘the Law,’ the Sharks (especially ‘their girls’) are productive, law abiding, and bound by ties that constitute them within some sense of community. Maria, Anita, Rosalia, and Consuelo all work in the bridal shop and appear to live in the same building. They speak Spanish to one another occasionally, trust each other, and visit one another. There is no real reference to ‘home’ or community around any one of the active Jets; they are amorphous as far as social or national identity is concerned, with the exception of the term ‘natives.’ Tony is also explicitly finished with his gang life; he works (which provokes the scorn of the gang) and tells Maria that he goes to church. In contrast, Riff lives with Tony’s family and he explains the Jets’ dire domestic situations in ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’: drugs, alcohol, abuse.⁹

As comical as the number is, it stands in great contrast to what we know about the Sharks and their community. In the film, Bernardo and Maria live with their parents and people know them and respect them in their building. We know that Maria has a caring, loving relationship with her parents, as evidenced in their exchange at the fire escape during the ‘Tonight’ duet. Although parents are absent from the immediate space of the narrative action, we know that Maria’s parents are just off-screen. It is also evident that Maria has been brought up properly, in an environment that encourages work and Catholicism, itself an important identity symbol for many Puerto Ricans. Besides the Shark women, we know that Chino also works, and the movie suggests that Maria’s parents own the neighborhood bodega. Moreover, the only ‘domestic’ space represented in the film is Maria’s family apartment in the ‘Puerto Rican’ neighborhood. There is a sense of community already built around the space shared by the characters and it is one of diversity and integration, however unwanted for the assorted ‘whites.’ In the prologue sequence we see two prophetic signs opposite each other, one stating ‘KEEP OFF’ and the other ‘SE HABLA ESPAÑOL.’ These suggest the inevitable integration of this neighborhood and the acknowledgment of the Puerto Rican/Latinx presence. The Jets are just an assortment of what Lt. Schrank calls ‘immigrant scum,’ with no distinct cultural backgrounds. (Tony is referred to as ‘a Polack.’) With no ‘home’ other than the streets, no ‘family’ other than the gang, no social ambitions other than reclaiming their indistinct ‘turf,’ the Jets are, by far, the group with no discernible cultural or social identity.

The block, the building, and the apartment where Maria and Bernardo live with their parents constitute the only ‘home’ seen in West Side Story. In the 1961 movie there are six important sequences that take place in the apartment and its immediate surroundings, more than any other space. These are: Bernardo, Anita, and Maria after the dance at the gym; Tony and Maria on the fire escape where she speaks to her father through the window; the ‘America’ number sung on the rooftop of the same building; Tony and Maria’s utopic ‘I want’ song, ‘Somewhere,’ and the lovemaking scene; Maria and Anita’s confrontation in the ‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’ duet; and Lt. Schrank’s interview with Maria after the fatal rumble. This unique domestic space is somewhat problematic in the absence of parental figures, its ‘colourful’ design and the featuring of a shrine to the Virgin Mary in Maria’s bedroom, expanding on certain stereotypes about Latinos. It is, however, the only domestic space seen in the film, but one where some signs of cultural identity can be glimpsed: a bowl of tropical fruit on the table, a guitar propped up against a corner, a combined dining/living room area. Besides the ‘colour,’ food, music, and references to family and Catholicism as cultural identity signs, there is a fleeting yet clear image of a small Puerto Rican flag along with the US flag visible on top of a television set. The two flags together call Schrank’s attention and he stops for a moment, to observe. The Puerto Rican flag shows up occasionally in films or television where a Puerto Rican presence is implied, especially in New York settings. What is far less common is to see the Puerto Rican flag together with the US flag, though that is the official Commonwealth of Puerto Rico constitutional practice. Media representations of Puerto Ricans rarely acknowledge Puerto Rico’s unusual political relationship with the USA. Extending Bernardo’s retort to Anita during the ‘America’ argument, ‘Puerto Rico is in America now’ – slightly revised from the show – and referring to the constitutional status of the territory in ‘Commonwealth’ with the USA, Maria’s family, in all evidence, is adjusted to this new status and welcoming of their ‘US–Puerto Rican’ political and social (if not ethnic/cultural) identity.

Puerto Ricans have been US citizens since 1917, and the ‘Commonwealth’ status was made constitutional by referendum and ratified by the US Congress in 1952. As US citizens, Puerto Rican ‘migration’ to the US mainland began in earnest in the 1920s and continued to grow over the next three decades. Between 1950 and 1960 some 470,000 Puerto Ricans (around 20 percent of the Island’s population) came to the USA, mostly to New York City, but also to places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston.¹⁰ This migratory wave peaked around 1953/54 coinciding with Maria’s arrival – and with Bernstein, Robbins, and Laurents seriously beginning to give shape to West Side Story. Nevertheless, it is the definition of Maria’s family as ‘US Puerto Ricans’ that is most significant, giving them, more than any other characters in the film, a sense of identity; a problematic hyphenated identity, but to a certain extent, ‘real.’ Maria’s family is one of ‘good’ immigrants and good Americans: hard-working, law-abiding, church-going, and respectful of Puerto Rico’s political and constitutional relationship to the United States, however awkward that status might be. The phrase ‘Puerto Rico is in America now’ that Bernardo recites to Anita with ironic gusto acquires a double significance. On one hand, it acknowledges Puerto Rico’s new political status that surrounds directly the temporal context; on the other, it emphasizes Bernardo’s slippery, sardonic definition of that status. As the ‘counterpoint’ of ‘America’ effectively foregrounds, ‘Puerto Rico is in America now,’ but Puerto Ricans remain trapped between unofficial second-class citizenship, and the need to assimilate culturally.

‘Will you let me pass?’

Within the improbable narrative world of West Side Story, the focus on Puerto Ricans has been well documented and criticized. Not only were all four creators of the show Jewish New Yorkers, but Sondheim himself acknowledged that he was not qualified to write for these characters: ‘I can’t do this show … ’ he is reported to have said. ‘I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even known a Puerto Rican.’¹¹ And yet in the process of the movie adaptation, Sondheim and screenwriter Ernest Lehman made a significant number of changes to the lyrics and format of the song ‘America,’ transforming it into an ‘argument’ oscillating between definitions and revisions of the immigrant experience and the fallacy of ‘the American dream.’

Besides the fact that nobody in Puerto Rico refers to the USA as ‘America’ (more likely Estados Unidos, or ‘New York,’ as synecdoche for the USA), the film version of the song significantly softens up the prejudiced content that led to such criticism during the initial stage run.¹² The biggest change is the reworking of the song structure from an argument between four of the girls (Rosalia, the one favorable to Puerto Rico, Anita and the others to ‘America’) into a gender-divided counterpoint where the boys, led by Bernardo, and the girls, led by Anita, discuss passionately the immigrant experience from two well-defined and completely opposite points of view. In the stage version the song ‘America’ is emphatic in its lampooning of Puerto Rico as an underdeveloped, poverty-stricken, over-populated, violence-infested, and disease-riddled country, in contrast to the material advantages of the ‘American’ experience.

The film version of ‘America’ sharply emphasizes the social disadvantages, the ethnic and racial prejudice, and even the violence to which the immigrant is exposed. The ‘Americanization of Anita’ is ridiculed by Bernardo and the Sharks as a sign of weakness as he quips, ‘Look, instead of a shampoo, she’s been brainwashed … and now she’s queer for Uncle Sam.’ The prologue to the musical number is faithful in the adaptation, affirming Bernardo’s disappointment at the contradictions between his naïve immigrant desires (‘We came eager, with our hearts open …’) and the cruel reality of prejudice (‘Lice! Cockroaches!’). But that is as far as the stage version goes, so it is meaningful that the film version goes to such efforts to dramatize Bernardo’s disillusionment, and then later to give him the final word; agreeing in no uncertain terms with Bernardo’s miserable prophesy of ‘America’ (‘Everywhere grime in America … Terrible time in America’). The movie’s gender counterpoint emphasizes the women’s shallow view of ‘assimilation’ as something strictly related to conspicuous consumption: it suggests that being American means to spend notably on consumer goods. The men, however, have a decidedly dystopian, more realistic view of a significant portion of the immigrant experience in the USA.

Surely the result is imperfect, yet nothing short of subversive, especially since Anita, the most vocal champion of the ‘America’ experience, later recants her previously cheery ‘Americanization.’ After the traumatic attempted rape perpetrated against her by the Jets, Anita’s near-final words serve as a real redemption for her character: ‘Bernardo was right … If one of you was bleeding in the street, I’d walk by and spit on you!’ She delivers the false news about Maria’s death saying ‘I have a message for your American buddy’ pronouncing the adjective ‘American’ as if it were an insult. Anita realizes that ‘Bernardo was right’ about the fallacy of the American dream, even if it takes the experience of sexual violence to come to this realization. While the Sharks are certainly portrayed as patriarchal and infected with stereotypically ‘Latin’ machismo, they are also evidently affectionate (especially Bernardo with Maria and Anita), while the Jets are consistently and plainly misogynistic (‘… Whadda we poopin’ around wit’ dumb broads?’). The Jets’ women, Anybodys, Graziella, and Velma, are treated in an openly hostile manner. This pattern reaches its most violent manifestation in the racially and sexually charged assault against Anita.

Anita’s attempt to make peace, prompted by Maria’s desire to escape with Tony ‘Somewhere’ (against Anita’s warning, ‘you’ll meet another boy tomorrow, one of your own kind, stick to your own kind’) leads to what is the most violent scene in both versions. By contrast most of the fight action between the gangs is ‘stylized’ dancing rather than stunt fighting. Even the killings of Riff and Bernardo, one arguably accidental, the other swiftly brief, are notorious for their lack of graphic violence. But Anita’s confrontation with the Jets at Doc’s candy store is verbally and dramatically aggressive. While trying to reach Doc and Tony, Anita is harassed by the Jets with racial epithets and cruel stereotypes (‘Spic! Lyin’ Spic!’).

The screenplay and libretto describe the rest of the scene graphically, referring to the Jets as animals, as if they were attacking wolves or dogs:

Ultimately, for Anita as much as Bernardo, the phrase ‘terrible time in America’ turns out to be a prophetic, emphatic truth. Subversive for its 1957/1961 contexts, the progressive discourse in West Side Story is subtle yet persistent, and never as violent as in the assault against Anita.

Moreover, Maria’s desire to usurp the ‘Miss America’ title is itself an act of resistance against the ultimate celebration of white female Americana. The idea of an ‘ethnic’ Miss America in the 1950s is nothing short of unthinkable. Criticism of ‘I Feel Pretty’ points to it as a sign of Maria’s submission to the gaze of a white man: she only becomes visible when desired by Tony. Yet arguably she is also showing an unusual sign of subjectivity. She rebels against patriarchal assumptions (‘Why did my brother bring me here? To Marry Chino. When I look at Chino nothing happens’) and expresses her desire to ‘touch excitement.’ Granted, she falls in love with the first man she sees outside of the immediate work and domestic spaces. Yet, the ‘choice’ of Tony is her only expression of sexual desire and agency. ‘I Feel Pretty’ and the Miss America claim extend the manifestation of Maria’s subjectivity and expand on the consistent questions about Puerto Rican ‘Americanness.’

Another important reference to the Puerto Rican ‘problem’ is the Sharks’ whistled rendition of Samuel Francis Smith’s 1831 ‘(America) My country ’tis of thee … .’ Upon being banned by Lt. Schrank from Doc’s candy store the Sharks’ farewell statement is the whistled phrase from the song invoking the lyrics ‘My country ’tis of thee/sweet land of liberty/of thee I sing … ’ The last note is rendered in a lowering turn, as if it was deflating, subverting the fallacious lyrics. Like Maria’s claim to the Miss America title, the Sharks’ appropriation of this other ‘America’ song comes across as an act of rebellion with its ironic use of a cultural symbol whose lyrics insist on the ‘native’ profile of the ‘real’ American: ‘ … Land where my fathers died […] My native country thee … ’ With these three visions and revisions of the word ‘America,’ Anita, Maria, Bernardo, and the Sharks are constantly calling our attention to the dystopia of this immigrant experience.

‘It was like putting mud … ’

The history of West Side Story and its relationship to Puerto Ricans and Latinxs in the USA continues to be controversial. Even if context allows for a reading against the grain that puts Puerto Rican characters in a progressive light, as I argue, more effort went into getting the music right than the casting. Some ‘Newyorican’ context was to be provided by Bernstein’s musical choices. As Elizabeth Wells has demonstrated, the many colours of Latin rhythms, Afro-Cuban jazz, the influence of Xavier Cugat, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and the ‘mambo craze’ of the 1950s all found their way into Bernstein’s score.¹⁴ The ease of travel between New York and San Juan allowed Bernstein to fly south to the Island and do some research there. The prominent Newyorican musician, composer, and band director Bobby Sanabria released the album West Side Story Reimagined in 2018. It unearthed inspiration from samba, mambo, Mexican, and even strong Afro-Caribbean intersections lying just under the surface of Bernstein’s score, though many of these had already been partially adopted into the city’s musical soundscape.¹⁵

The casting practices for the original 1957 Broadway production of West Side Story, however, set the pattern for the persistent racial and ethnic hierarchization of principal roles that has been associated with West Side Story since 1957. The original run featured two actors of Puerto Rican descent in prominent roles: Jaime Sánchez as Chino, and Chita Rivera as Anita. Sánchez would go on to a long career in theatre, films, and television. Rivera, a ‘Newyorican,’ was already a Broadway veteran who was married to ‘Jet’ Tony Mordente. That Anita, the show’s designated ‘Latin spitfire’ stereotype, should be played by a performer with real Puerto Rican ancestry became the norm, especially in contrast to the casting of Maria. Carol Lawrence, who played Maria in the first run and the 1960 revival, was Italian American. She showed up at her first audition ‘heavily made up and bejeweled in an attempt to look like a Puerto Rican Juliet.’ But Robbins would not have it and instructed her to clean up and then come back.¹⁶ She won the role after numerous auditions and callbacks, and aside from a heavily ‘accented’ speech and singing pattern, the Maria/Anita contrast in make-up, costume, and even movement – given that Maria’s is largely a non-dancing part – was clearly established. Since then, the female actors identified with Maria (especially Natalie Wood) would continue to fall into the ‘whiter’ category, associated with her modesty and lack of sexual experience, in contrast to Anita’s ‘spitfire’ persona. With Chita Rivera on Broadway and Rita Moreno in the 1961 movie the Maria/Anita dichotomy became most visible.

During its Broadway run, Hollywood producer Harold Mirisch saw the show, purchased the film rights, and began developing the project for United Artists.¹⁷ Natalie Wood was one of the last actors cast for the film in August 1960. Rita Moreno had tested for Anita as early as January. With more tests and screen credit negotiations extending for months, Moreno was signed up as Anita in late July 1960.¹⁸ Moreno was an established character actor in countless ‘barefoot princess’ parts going back to 1950. But she had played important featured roles in the movie version of The King and I (1956), for which Jerome Robbins had recreated his Broadway choreography, and especially Singin’ in the Rain (1952) where, as ‘Zelda Zanders,’ co-director Gene Kelly gave her the only non-ethnic part of her early career. Paradoxically, and in contrast to the ‘whitening’ of the role of Maria (on stage and film) Moreno, the ‘Spanish Elizabeth Taylor’ was not dark enough to play Anita.¹⁹

Besides having to fake a heavy accent, all the ‘Sharks’ in the cast – assorted white actors and a handful of Latinx dancers – were required to don ‘brownface’ makeup. In a 2017 interview with NPR, Moreno described the makeup as ‘extremely dark … It was like putting mud on my face.’ The story, which Moreno has told in numerous interviews and retold in her 2013 memoir, is further elaborated in the interview. Moreno says that she explained to the make-up man that Puerto Ricans came in a wide array of colours: fair, light brown, ‘Taíno’ bronze, black. ‘Why do we all have to be the same colour?’ The man replied, according to Moreno, ‘What are you, a racist?’²⁰ Precisely because Puerto Ricans are not easily identifiable due to our broad racial diversity, Negrón-Muntaner argues that Puerto Rican ‘ethnic specificity had to be easily seen and heard.’²¹ This need led to the imposition of ‘extremely dark’ make-up and the uniform thick accents on all actors. These practices were especially conspicuous in George Chakiris as ‘Bernardo,’ a Greek American who had played ‘Riff’ in the London production in 1959, and Joanne Miya, a Japanese American, as ‘Francisca,’ who recalls how she had to ‘pass’ for Puerto Rican in her audition.²² And while the ‘Sharks’ are presumably a mix of ‘Newyoricans’ born in New York, and recently arrived migrants (like Maria), the accent, along with the ‘brownface’ was adopted by the producers and imposed on the performers in a form of ‘drag’ or ‘masquerade’ designed to avoid any ‘ethnic misreading’ of their identity.²³

In spring 1960 the film producers were considering some actors for the part of Maria who had ‘ethnic’ acting experience, or even Latinx heritage. A standout on the list was Susan Kohner, daughter of Mexican actress Lupita Tovar, who had played the troubled ‘passing’ teen ‘Sarah Jane’ in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life.²⁴ But the producers, nervous about a largely unknown cast, hired Natalie Wood. Wood had a long career as a child actor from the 1940s, later specializing in ingénues at the brink of sexual awakening, and she had the right experience. Furthermore, she had name recognition and, like Carol Lawrence before her, she was of white European ancestry. In the context of 1950s and ’60s Hollywood, Maria and Tony’s romance could be interracial only in ‘drag’ but not in reality. While the other Sharks were required to apply ‘extremely dark’ makeup (even the fairly light-skinned Moreno), Wood was allowed to ‘pass’ for Puerto Rican without such impositions. As a typical Latin ‘spitfire,’ Anita’s persona also comes imbued with sexuality – a slightly different version of the ‘barefoot princess’ she had been playing since the early 1950s. That stereotype has been mapped out by many scholars, most recently Priscilla Peña Ovalle. ‘Hollywood’s depiction of racialized female sexuality,’ writes Peña Ovalle, was ‘a version of femininity that signified looseness or “excessive” female sexuality through hoop earrings, long and wild hair, an off-the shoulder blouse, and bad attitude.’²⁵ By contrast, the recently transplanted Maria, in her white dress and her ingénue manner, is unequivocally characterized as virginal, a disparity further emphasized by the casting of a white actor as Maria.

The 1980 Broadway revival, directed by Jerome Robbins himself, underscored this pattern in a rather paradoxical way. A contemporary article published in the New York Times described the two characters in typical terms. ‘The one is ethereal, fawnlike. The other is a little firecracker, sizzling and popping on stage and off.’²⁶ Needless to say, the article was referring respectively to the roles of Maria and Anita. Tellingly, the role of Maria went to the Puerto Rican actress Jossie de Guzmán, who was made to dye her hair several shades darker than her natural light brown and have ‘her pale skin’ darkened. But the compromise of a Puerto Rican actress playing the ‘ethereal, fawnlike’ Maria – even in ‘brownface’ – appeared to complicate the implied sexual contrast associated with the characters. Debbie Allen, an African American dancer and choreographer, was cast as Anita. In the black-and-white photograph accompanying the article the skin tone contrast is even more dramatic. But the author goes further in the ‘typecasting’ of Anita: he describes Allen’s outfit for the interview as ‘a fox jacket with free-swinging skins, a knit dress in fire-engine red and shiny cowboy boots to match.’ While that description could fit a 42nd Street sex worker circa 1980, no such description of de Guzmán followed. Instead, aligning again actress and character, the author wrote of de Guzmán ‘[s]he is deeply religious, like the girl whose role she plays.’²⁷

The next major revival on Broadway ran 748 performances from 2009 to 2011. Directed by then ninety-one-year-old Arthur Laurents, the production featured an attempt to further acknowledge and contextualize the Puerto Rican culture purportedly at the core of the show. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Newyorican known at the time as the Tony award-winning composer and lyricist of the hit show In the Heights (off-Broadway 2005), was engaged to translate and adapt certain lyrics and dialogue into Spanish, in a search for more authentic flavour. ‘A Boy Like That,’ one of the dramatic high points of the show, with the fatal lyrics ‘Stick to your own kind,’ was one of the translated songs. But audience response was lukewarm, and the lyrics went back to their original (accented) English after only a few months.²⁸ Casting was also revised to hire all Latinx actors for the Shark parts. Karen Olivo, a Broadway veteran whose credits included Rent (1996) and In the Heights, won a Tony Award for the role of Anita. Olivo is a Bronx native from a multi-ethnic Puerto Rican–Dominican family. The role of Maria went to Josefina Scaglione, an Argentinian musical theatre actress of Italian descent. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Laurents was unable to find a suitable Maria – among the thousands of Latinx performers auditioning for parts – leading to his casting of Scaglione.²⁹ She was a Broadway rookie who had appeared in Argentinian productions of Cinderella and Hairspray. It is telling that Laurents could not find the ‘right’ Maria and the final choice confirmed the historic trend: Scaglione’s fair skin, light straight hair, and green eyes were a visible contrast to Olivo’s brown skin, wavy dark hair, and dark brown eyes.

In its third season, the Fox television show Glee (2009–2015) featured a story line around a production of West Side Story. The casting of Maria itself became a dramatic hook; the white star of the ‘glee’ club, Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and the African American diva, Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) auditioned and competed for the role. After much embellished suspense and various ‘sing offs’ the role went to Rachel, by white default casting. The co-directors declared Mercedes a ‘risky’ choice, presumably because of the implications of miscegenation brought by her pairing with a white Tony. More importantly, the role of Anita went – by ‘brown’ default – to Santana López, the only openly Latina character in the main cast of Glee. Santana was played by Naya Rivera, born in Los Angeles to a multi-ethnic family with Puerto Rican and African American ancestry. As I have argued elsewhere, the most notable element in the Glee narrative arc is that Santana/Rivera is never seen auditioning for the part of Anita. While casting Maria became the narrative cliff-hanger of several episodes, it appeared that Santana López was the only choice for Anita.³⁰ In one scene, Santana and Rachel are rehearsing the duet ‘A Boy Like That/I Have a Love’ in a dark limbo set. That scene comes near the end of the show, with Anita in mourning and Maria in her nightgown after sexually consummating her relationship with Tony. But in the Glee intersection, Santana appears in a low cut, sleeveless, fire-engine red dress topped with a red rose in her hair, while Maria appears in the white dress (‘the only one there in white … ’) as seen, presumably, in the ‘Dance at the Gym’ scene. Once again, the contrast drawn between Anita’s type and Maria’s visibly whiter, more demure fashion, conforms to the historic pattern: ‘one sassy, sexy and brown,’ the other ‘virginal, modest, and white.’³¹ The alignment of whiteness with modesty (‘ethereal, fawnlike’) and brownness with the ‘spitfire’ stereotype (‘racialized sexuality’) is firmly upheld for Glee’s twenty-first-century teen/tween audiences.

‘Getting it right’

In the volatile cultural wars of the Trump years, it is hardly a coincidence that in the 2020s West Side Story saw a major Broadway revival and a Steven Spielberg remake of the film.³² The Broadway production, a ‘re-imagining’ by Belgian avant-garde director Ivo van Hove, featured a multi-ethnic cast that included Newyorican soprano Shereen Pimentel as Maria, and first-generation Colombian American Yesenia Ayala, as Anita. In an atypical role reversal, Pimentel’s Maria was the one with the slightly darker skin and wavy hair, while Ayala has lighter skin and straight hair. Moreover, van Hove’s version, set in contemporary times, made the ‘Jets’ a more racially diverse gang than the original assorted whites of every other historic production, in a nod to its twenty-first-century setting. The ‘Sharks,’ meanwhile, retained their predominantly Latinx – if not exclusively Puerto Rican – ethnic composition. Arguably, the diversification of the ‘Jets’ represented an acknowledgment of evolving US demographics. The incorporation of a multi-media design, including live video feed from backstage, and ‘Jumbotron’ style CCTV displays of main action on stage, attempted to create the urgency of a social media livestream. The production eliminated the song ‘I Feel Pretty’ and the ‘Somewhere’ ballet, allowing it to run in 100 minutes without an intermission. Van Hove replaced Robbins’s choreography – with its balletic motifs – and substituted it with a more defined ‘street dance’ style by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Not all the critics were impressed, but some emphasized the background of the Trump war on immigration and police violence as a fitting context for the revival, pointing to its formal sense of urgency as a political statement. In fact, van Hove’s production expressly underscored the ways in which the original social and political message of West Side Story, however naïve or muddled originally, could be brought to the contemporary surface with an innovative approach that otherwise left its core message intact.³³ In a cover story in the New York Times Magazine, Sasha Weiss wrote: ‘[s]o many of the contentious issues of contemporary life – poverty, immigration, gender discrimination and dysphoria, sexual violence, police brutality – are written into the play from the very first scene … “it’s all there.”’³⁴

While van Hove’s revival was still playing on Broadway, Steven Spielberg’s remake of the film was in post-production. Rumors about the ‘pet project’ by the distinguished director had circulated for years. The trade journals finally broke the news in early 2018, while ‘buzz’ features about casting calls and speculation about Spielberg’s approach began appearing in the media shortly thereafter.³⁵ Aware of the controversy about representation that has followed many productions, Spielberg pledged to engage Puerto Rican actors, singers, and advisors. Screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America, 1991) rewrote the character of ‘Doc’ as a woman named ‘Valentina’ and Spielberg cast Rita Moreno in the part, with executive producer credit. Spielberg’s pledge to ‘get it right’ came to the foreground in a townhall meeting with Kushner at the University of Puerto Rico on 14 December 2018. The room was filled to capacity with students and faculty from the Theatre Department. When asked by UPR Professor Isel Rodríguez to address how they would ‘represent Puerto Ricans,’ Kushner first flubbed his answer (miscrediting the offensive lyrics ‘… let it sink back in the ocean’ to the stage show) before passing the question on to Spielberg. In a video of the exchange posted on Facebook, Spielberg answered:

But some at the townhall remained skeptical. No production of West Side Story contextualizes the Puerto Rican migration vis-à-vis economic conditions in the US territory; people migrate out of necessity, not contempt for the Island, as the ‘America’ lyrics suggest. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Rodríguez: ‘No one leaves this Island without sobbing. Three hundred thousand people left after (hurricane) Maria and the scene at the airport was like a funeral.’³⁷

Another reason Spielberg and his team were in Puerto Rico was to conduct auditions with local talent. But none of the actors who auditioned through the local talent agent landed any major parts in the film, despite Spielberg’s pledge. Puerto Rican actress, singer, and dancer, Ana Isabelle, a veteran of youth shows on the Telemundo network, was cast as Rosalia – the vocal dissenter in the original ‘America’ version. Casting expanded to Latinx hubs in the USA including New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. The role of Maria went to Rachel Zegler, a Colombian American high school student from New Jersey. She answered the open casting calls that reportedly attracted 30,000 aspirants. The role of Anita went to Ariana DeBose, also a Latina with an Afro-Puerto Rican father, with Broadway experience (Bring It On, 2011; Pippin, 2014; Hamilton, 2015; Summer, 2017). Purposely or not, this casting repeats the pattern of a ‘darker’ Anita, curly hair included, in contrast to a Maria who is visibly lighter skinned and with straight hair.

Superficial as the casting distinctions may seem, the Spielberg pledge to ‘get it right’ did extend to important details of context, setting, atmosphere, and historical accuracy to the Puerto Rican experience. As early as 2018 the production engaged the services of Prospero Latino, a strategic consulting firm on US Latinx issues. The firm went on to establish a ‘Community Advisory Board’ to offer advice and strategies to ensure a more equitable and truthful representation of the Puerto Rican/Newyorican community in the 1950s. The Board included academics, cultural critics, historians, musicians, and members of various communities, in an effort to ‘integrate historically and culturally authentic elements in every aspect of the production’ and to ‘hear the voices’ of cultural stakeholders. Its purpose was to fairly represent ‘the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Latin music, Hispanics in the arts, and the LGBTQIA+ community … ’³⁸

Prominent members included Bobby Sanabria, the Newyorican jazz musician and band leader, known for his extensive work on the ‘Latin’ roots of the West Side Story score that resulted in the Grammy-nominated album West Side Story Reimagined. Sanabria was one of the people consulted extensively by screenwriter Tony Kushner to help him access a better understanding of the cultural context of West Side Story and the impact of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York in the 1950s. Also on the Board was Dr. Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. One of the founders of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and a distinguished historian of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Sánchez-Korrol was a main consultant on the project. She too advised the producers on set, looking at everything from diction to posture, to the look of the neighborhood. The filmmakers, she says, wanted to ‘get everything right.’³⁹ The Board met with members of the cast and crew and confirmed the efforts made at authenticity: costumes, setting, music, etc. Even details of art direction were revised to better reflect Puerto Rican sentiments in 1950s New York, including graffiti references to important political and historical figures like Pedro Albizu Campos and Eugenio María de Hostos.

Delayed for release during the Coronavirus pandemic, Spielberg’s version of West Side Story was finally released in theatres on 7 December 2021, to overwhelmingly positive reviews. While there were some naysayers in smaller publications, prominent critics from the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times, and many media organizations praised the new adaptation for its more rounded representation of the Puerto Rican characters, its fidelity to the look of ‘the Barrio’ in the 1950s, its emphasis on the conflicts brought up by gentrification, and its diverse casting. But the film was also a disappointment at the box office, failing to reach the audiences that its $100 million budget anticipated. Nevertheless, the Academy of Motion Pictures honored the film with seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Director. The standout (and stand-alone) winner at the Oscars on 27 March 2022 was, as expected, Ariana DeBose winning Best Supporting Actress as Anita, making her the second Latinx woman (after Rita Moreno in the same role sixty years earlier) and the first openly gay woman of colour to win the Oscar. In her emotional, gracious acceptance speech DeBose reworded lyrics from the libretto to reclaim West Side Story as an anthem of inclusion, concluding, ‘there is, indeed, a place for us.’

The effort to ‘get it right’ in these contemporary approaches to West Side Story is particularly conspicuous in the context of Trump’s ‘America,’ but also logical. As I have argued, the edgy, rebellious social critique that West Side Story offers is visible in any close reading of the text(s); its portrait of ‘America’ a lot less passive than critics have acknowledged. A political reading of West Side Story does not neutralize the stereotypes about Latinx and Puerto Ricans, the inequities in gender relations, and problems of race, class, homophobia, etc. Nonetheless, the political edge and social critique, as Ivo van Hove said, ‘is all there.’ The last word should go to Anita herself. On Bernardo’s condemnation of a ‘terrible time in America,’ it is Anita who concludes, ‘Bernardo was right.’

Leonard Bernstein always feared his legacy would be that of ‘the composer of West Side Story.’¹ Doubtless he had already enjoyed celebrity stature long before the show; Bernstein had been hurled into the upper echelons of society as a young man. After stepping down from the post of Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969, the Maestro continued to hobnob with the likes of the Kennedys, Andy Warhol, and the Jewish progressive music set in New York. Bernstein’s collaborators in the show that secured his place in music history, though perhaps not as famous as Bernstein himself, were all highly successful in their respective fields and thus could be found socializing in similar circles. In fact, at least three of the four would be in attendance at the infamous soirée that inspired Tom Wolfe’s controversial essay, ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970): a scathing indictment of classism and racism among elite liberals, as well as the decadence of white privilege.² In examining the essay alongside the ways in which class and race intersect in West Side Story, one sees reflected clearly both the progressive spirit of the collaborators and what could be called their colonialist and commercial sensibilities; indeed, just as today, we must remember that prejudices often hide behind education and self-professed leftism.

Broadway and the ‘Culture Industry’

One could assert that Bernstein bemoaned his predicted legacy because he long yearned for not just commercial but also critical success as a composer of concert music and opera. Long before Bernstein’s entrance on the scene, however, Broadway was dominated by late capitalist economic considerations not unlike those in other sectors of industry. Certainly, Bernstein and his collaborators pushed boundaries in innovative and unprecedented ways. Ultimately, however, they were still subject to the ambitions of their financial backers, and thus limited in the way all music is when the creators are paid commodities and music their product.³ As one of America’s most emblematic forms of musical entertainment, Broadway is thoroughly embedded in what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno dubbed the ‘Culture Industry.’ Briefly put, this refers to a society that is totally economically driven, where cultural ‘products’ undergo increasing levels of reification, boosted by the mass media.⁴ Adorno argued repeatedly throughout his career that in late capitalist society nothing is held sacrosanct and above fetishization; the approach to ‘manufacturing’ arts, theatre, film, literature, and other cultural idioms is no longer distinguishable from the means by which products are kept stocked on grocery shelves.⁵ Much like the multitude of brands that grow increasingly similar based on consumer taste, music and other arts are fetishized in the name of the free market. Tin Pan Alley, for example, churned out a constant barrage of songs not unlike goods traveling down a factory conveyor belt, often in the process exploiting musical styles developed by people of colour. Speedy proliferation and delivery of songs were often more important than artistic quality. Such an approach, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue convincingly, is also an exhibition of the thought values encouraged by the greater establishment and their emotional manipulation of society. By streamlining American culture, conformity, superficiality, and standardization in all other areas of society are bolstered; the mass media consequently reinforces the continued production of art by saturating our society with its product to increase the appeal further still.⁶ Those who extol the virtues of the free market argue that it creates more choices; in fact, the ‘Culture Industry’ can produce a self-reinforcing system of limited choices and standardization, traits that often define authoritarian societies.

Class and the Creators

To be sure, the collaborators who created West Side Story all enjoyed high social status and the trappings of wealth; they also, however, were genuinely committed to bringing about social change through their work. The political beliefs of the three older men – Robbins, Bernstein, and Laurents – were far enough left that the career of each was affected to some extent by McCarthyism. From the outset, however, West Side Story was perhaps limited by the ‘Culture Industry’ and the manner in which the latter shaped the men’s own values concerning class and race. Regardless of this potential influence and the musical’s commercial success, the collaborators were truly groundbreaking in confronting important social issues of the times: particularly in a realm of the arts often reserved for light-hearted entertainment and the many conformist tropes encouraged by the ‘Culture Industry.’ The notion of a Broadway musical that depicted youth gangs and the violence they caused along with the hatred and racism that brought about their formation was subversive in 1957. The show’s creators did wrestle with strictures posed by their financiers, determined to preserve the artistic integrity of the show. Its unusual and violent nature made it difficult for head producer Cheryl Crawford to raise money, and in April 1957 she pulled out of the project. (See Laura MacDonald’s chapter on the show’s producers for more on this [Chapter 6].) The social, musical, and dramatic significance of West Side Story make plain that its creators were intent on a new approach to the musical in which controversial social issues were not just clever gimmicks for shock value; indeed, they were being centered for one of the first times in Broadway history.⁷ No work, however, should be above scrutiny, nor should its creators.⁸ West Side Story has been performed all over the world for decades, and continues to be embraced globally as a masterpiece. As long as this work remains such an important part of the repertory – and given the show’s inherently serious nature – scholars must resist the temptation to ignore those elements that can be criticized.

In 1970, journalist Tom Wolfe was ready to take the creators of the show to task in a controversy that directly confronts the issues of class and white privilege. Three of the collaborators – Bernstein, with Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim guilty by association – received a thorough literary mauling that year in his ‘Radical Chic,’ a prescient essay that has remained relevant, all the more so in the era of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. Bernstein, with his A-list attendees as accessories, is lambasted for his classism, casual racism, and shocking tone deafness concerning the extent of his white privilege. Bernstein was hosting a benefit soirée for the legal aid of several prominent Black Panthers. Wolfe introduces the concept of ‘radical chic,’ a term coined by the author to describe the way in which rich socialites and celebrities collect social issues to champion not with sincere conviction, but because it adds to their socially progressive credentials and helps them climb the social ladder. While he does not use the term itself, the author refers implicitly to what writer Teju Cole dubbed the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ a systemic aspect of capitalist society in which Black people are reified for the emotional gratification of the white saviour. Not unlike the charges made by Wolfe against Bernstein, Cole argues: ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.’⁹ Perhaps with good reason, Wolfe indeed considered Bernstein to be part of that very problem, savagely lampooning the musician for suggesting that he had known discrimination similar to that experienced by Black Panther leader Don Cox. Bernstein asked Cox how he felt being in his luxurious penthouse: ‘When you walk into this house, into this building … you must feel infuriated!’ Cox felt ‘embarrassed’ but assured Bernstein, ‘I don’t get uptight about all that …, ’ then relating how recently he exited ‘ … the courthouse in Queens and there was this off-duty pig going by … see … and he gives me the finger. That’s the pig’s way of letting you know he’s got his eye on you.’ Cox admitted that made him angry, causing Bernstein to respond, ‘God, … most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted!’¹⁰ Wolfe’s portrait of Bernstein is devastating: A famous, rich white man who believed himself capable of understanding the feeling of rejection that Don Cox would have felt in that situation, probably because he was Jewish and gay and had known prejudice, but unable at that moment to accept how different his life experiences were to those of Cox.

We cannot separate such snapshots of Bernstein the man from Bernstein the composer, Jewish musical champion, and conductor who primarily led performances of works by his fellow white composers. In addressing these complex biographical constructions, we initially come across far more questions than answers. The significance, however, begins when we actively confront and decolonize history while remaining sensitive to the challenges Jewish American composers such as Bernstein faced. To be sure, he understood prejudice well as both a gay man and first-generation American Jew coming of age during the Holocaust – nonetheless, he enjoyed a degree of privilege his colleagues of colour did not.

In similarly poor taste to his conversation with Don Cox and decades prior, Bernstein had dedicated his Harvard undergraduate thesis to racial elements in American music, assigning these works in their unadulterated form to an inferior stage of development and lauding the multiculturalism and what he considered sophisticated use of jazz as realized by the likes of Copland and Gershwin. Given his undergraduate thesis at Harvard, Bernstein clearly considered himself an ‘expert’ on the ‘natural development’ of multiculturalism in music: regrettably, he persisted in confusing forced assimilation, assumed authorship, and uncredited cultural appropriation with promoting a diverse picture of the ‘American dream’ – allegedly accessible to all.¹¹ At best, Bernstein’s thesis, written at the age of 20, was haughty and dismissive of colleagues of colour who possessed similar merit and musical training, such as William Grant Still; at worst, the ideas assumed superiority and outright entitlement to assert ownership over elevating Black music to a perhaps ‘high art’ form as heard in music by Copland and others.

In examining Bernstein’s magnum opus, how do such issues of class, colourism, and racism intersect? In what ways did the collaborators’ subtle racism manifest in West Side Story? Did Bernstein engage in cultural appropriation of Latinx and African American musical materials? These are all questions that must be addressed in any critical analysis of the work.

Class, Colourism, and Racism in West Side Story

In many regards, West Side Story is centered on issues of class, and this was indeed always the intention, from the days in which Bernstein, Robbins, and Laurents entertained the idea of an ‘East Side Story,’ which was to be based on rival Irish Catholic and Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. In essence, this would represent the ethnic struggle between two white outgroups who both experienced discrimination, with the Catholic populace still enjoying more privilege than their Jewish counterparts. Eventually, the idea evolved into the Jets (Polish or Eastern European whites) and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans). From the outset, the Latinx gang is assigned the more menacing name, with ‘Sharks’ conjuring gruesome images of dangerous predators ready to attack at any moment. It is impossible to know whether the naming of the gangs itself was an unconscious expression of racism; however, it is among other aspects of the show that could have been more culturally sensitive.

In terms of casting, however, there were more insidious forces at work, particularly in the 1961 film version. There has been much discussion over the years about the decision to cast Carol Lawrence, a white woman, in the role of Maria for the original stage rendition. Did the creative team simply defer to their own racist colourblindness? Did they intend for Maria to represent a lighter-skinned Puerto Rican who would therefore appear more desirable and more chaste? When we compare Maria and the darker-skinned Anita, their characters are almost opposites. Where Maria is naïve and virginal, Anita is portrayed as sex-crazed and sassy. When the Jets meet Maria near the end of the show after Chino has killed Tony, they are deferential; when they encounter Anita at the drugstore where she has come to deliver a message to Tony from Maria, they sexually assault her, implying that she was ‘asking for it.’ While this was likely meant as a harsh criticism of sexual violence, when seen in the context of a greater narrative, one wonders if Anita’s darker skin tone was – consciously or unconsciously – correlated to her characterization.¹²

While Bernstein had little involvement in the film version of West Side Story, the set was rife with colourism. The filmmakers insisted that Rita Moreno, the Latinx performer who played Anita, wear brownface along with her castmates, Natalie Wood and George Chakiris. Moreno has shared the treatment to which she had been subjected:

It is important to note that the show’s original collaborators were not involved in the decision to use brownface, but this was indeed the culture that surrounded the show. Those who made the film recruited a very white cast, which can also be said about the original Broadway production.

What about the lyrical and literary content of the show? Is it inherently racist? In fact, just as in the case of radical chic, the collaborators almost certainly intended to express the injustice that the immigrant faced. Class is represented, not inaccurately, as being tied to colour. We see the honest working-class man in Doc; the menacing, racist police officer in Officer Krupke; and the leadership of the white supremacist system is represented by the white detective, Lt. Schrank. As the show progresses, Schrank makes clear that he holds in higher regard the white European immigrant children who make up the Jets. This too demonstrates an important social truth: there is a racial hierarchy in the country in which one’s relative proximity to whiteness determines social status and general worth as a human being. In West Side Story, even amongst gang members, white criminals are treated with more humanity. There is a sense in the detective’s conversations with the Jets that perhaps not all hope is lost for the white gang; the Latinx one, however, must be taken down immediately. The detective appeals to race and colour when he attempts to join forces with the white gang members. As Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz demonstrates in Chapter 10 in this volume, it is actually the Puerto Ricans for whom family life seems to be more important in the show, and the Jets seem to be more devoted to juvenile delinquency.

The creators of West Side Story also likely believed that utilizing jazz and Latinx musical materials gave the show a tolerant, internationalist flavor. Musical tropes from Spanish-speaking cultures also were significant in American popular culture of the 1950s and Bernstein had already shown a fondness for them in earlier compositions, although never to the same extent as in this score. Without consulting with any people of colour in this process – and especially knowing the attitude Bernstein expressed so provocatively in his thesis – using these materials is more akin to cultural appropriation than cultural appreciation, part of a long line of white composers using elements of jazz, blues, various types of Latinx music, and stylistic borrowings from elsewhere in the world. This mining of musical styles from cultural groups who often form a despised ‘Other’ in American society is assisted by copyright laws, which allow pieces of music to be protected but not musical styles. What attitude then do the West Side Story collaborators express in what is arguably the Puerto Ricans’ most celebrated moment in the show: ‘America’? It can be interpreted as an anthem of American exceptionalism, a moment in which some of the Puerto Ricans themselves castigate their own homeland while others remember it fondly. (The differences between the way that the song plays in the stage version and in both films is significant here, because on stage one woman defends Puerto Rico while the remainder celebrate their intended assimilation. In the films, ‘America’ is an argument between the women who praise New York and the men who criticize their treatment by whites and pine for their homeland.) Is it an opportunity for Sondheim to have a laugh at American ignorance about Puerto Rico and its people? It can be seen as that and as a paean to American exceptionalism, just as the benefit for the Black Panthers was driven by both genuine care and class-driven ignorance.

When Oppression Meets Oppression

While Bernstein was often well meaning and sincere in fighting overt racism and white nationalist violence, like the majority of comfortable white people of his time, he was perhaps unaware of the covert ways in which he enjoyed the benefits of white supremacy. He whitewashed his own closeted queerness, pitting that identity and his own Jewishness (which he celebrated) against the more powerful prejudices with which African Americans struggled. Even in his grand vision for the development of an Israeli national music amidst his early encounters with the Jewish state, he imagined that Israeli composers would be wise to appropriate vernacular music from the Palestinian population and that of other neighboring Arab countries; in doing so, they too could reach ‘high art’ in crafting an ‘authentic’ national music that ‘honored’ diversity.¹⁴ Bernstein was known to use his platform as a celebrity and respected intellectual to elevate his Jewish peers while sometimes showing less interest in the musical accomplishments of people of colour, certainly the case in his Harvard thesis. While Bernstein was genuinely interested in the Black Panthers receiving a fair trial, for example, his engaging of the Panthers in ‘Radical Chic’ perhaps reveals a rich white man’s delusional savior complex. Bernstein appears to have marveled at these African American men as cultural curiosities and controversial social commodities. In the safety of his bubble of enlightened privilege, he felt qualified to engage the Panthers in conversation about complex issues of race and Black culture, believing he was providing solidarity as a progressive authority, above reproach as a fellow victim of fanatical prejudice.

Looking back on the era of West Side Story, much has changed, but even more has stayed the same when it comes to the treatment of people of colour, often significantly impacted by classism. Where is the line between reification of people in the ‘Culture Industry’ and in that of society at large? Increased standardization of culture only serves to preserve class and racial divides and can be a step towards intolerance. Today, even US Presidents are celebrities, hiding behind an image both crafted and leveraged by the ‘Culture Industry’; they can be found hosting podcasts with rock stars, appearing on Saturday Night Live, and filling arenas for the purpose of political theatre. In the quest for social justice, we must be ready to confront our history, including some of its greatest cultural treasures. We can have empathy for the creators of West Side Story, who all experienced discrimination because they were Jewish and gay. Yet, like many white liberals then and now, at times they were blind to their own classism and racism, even as they genuinely believed they were allies to the poor and people of colour. As Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’: ‘Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’¹⁵ We can enjoy and celebrate works such as West Side Story while also publicly recognizing potentially insidious messaging and confronting it.

When West Side Story opened in 1957, it was received by audiences and critics alike as a thoroughly modern musical, a stylistic departure from even Bernstein’s own idiosyncratic works like On the Town and Wonderful Town. It was also seen as diametrically opposed to another of the year’s hit musicals, Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. Indeed, the race for the Tony Awards was largely between that show and West Side Story, each of which put forward a distinct vision of American culture. Whereas The Music Man celebrated the home-grown and small-town, West Side Story told the tale of warring hoodlum factions in Manhattan’s city streets.¹ As such, Bernstein’s work did not lull audiences into a sense of harmony and patriotism, but instead forced them to confront some of the biggest challenges in American culture during the 1950s.

Some of those challenges, like poverty and immigration, had been covered extensively in earlier musicals. Juvenile delinquency, however, was a new topic: although very well covered in other kinds of entertainment media,² it had so far gone unmentioned on Broadway. In West Side Story, audiences saw depicted on stage what was regularly reported in the New York Times, and although stylised and reified in high art, the content was still shocking for its original milieu. Contemporary audiences may find juvenile delinquents wearing jackets and ties and dancing in balletic moves almost quaint by comparison with modern gang culture, but at the time there was no other musical reference for these kinds of characters, making the depiction seem strikingly realistic. The creators of West Side Story set the bar for telling stories of juvenile delinquency on the Broadway stage – and, by including them, chose to depict a social issue of immediate relevance to their audiences. Our understanding of the musical, then, must include the context of the 1950s and its cultural debates. Not content with exploring just one pressing sociocultural issue, West Side Story also deals with the mid century scourges of communism and fascism. In this light, we can see that the musical’s creators were unafraid to tackle high-priority national and international sociocultural problems; this willingness may have contributed to West Side Story’s popularity.

In the late 1950s, Broadway audiences might have been accustomed to seeing lawlessness portrayed by tricksters like Ali Hakim and Judd in Oklahoma!, Joey in Pal Joey, or Sky Masterson and his compatriots in Guys and Dolls. Nothing about these characters, however, would have made audiences take them seriously as criminals. Then came West Side Story. The audience was confronted in the first moments of the show by particularly vicious episodes of gang warfare that included knives, fistfights, and the intervention of the police. There was no question that these were not the youth of musicals past, but a new breed of tough, unapologetic gangsters whom audiences would be afraid to pass on the street. The sheer aggression of the first scene was mirrored in its musical score: one critic went so far as to call it ‘a mugging set to music’.³ Violence is violence, even when danced and sung, and right from the start these youths were the most violent that Broadway audiences had ever seen.

Although depictions of youth culture and delinquency formed much of popular entertainment in the decades that followed, in 1957 the gangs of West Side Story were particularly topical. Stories of young people committing crimes were featured every day in the New York Times, on the cover of Time magazine, and in other major news outlets. Although many of the crimes were minor, much of American society felt that this was one of the most pressing social problems facing large cities, and – increasingly – suburbs and small towns. Popular books like Other People’s Children warned parents from all walks of life that their children were not immune to the dangers of youth criminality.⁴ However, cities were the centres of youth delinquency. Immigration, first by Italian and Irish newcomers, and later by Puerto Ricans, had changed the ethnic mix of Manhattan, and gangs were often formed around national identities rather than strictly by city territory. Particularly threatening were the children of immigrants, who after the war had more money, more leisure time, and less supervision from working parents. Although the media often blamed working mothers for the problems of ‘latch-key’ kids, it was in fact a number of complex causes that led to New York City’s largest challenge in decades. Nor was it an exclusively male issue: the rise of urban girl gangs and female offenders also frightened the American public. ‘Victory Girls’, who had sexual encounters blamelessly with ex-servicemen, were amongst the problem groups in a culture whose sexual morality was starting to loosen. Women taking back their sexual agency would eventually lead to the feminist movement and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. When West Side Story first premiered, however, ‘loose’ women who no longer cared to be reprimanded – and some who also turned to crime – were yet another source of national anxiety.

West Side Story is therefore completely in tune with what audiences would have been reading about, and perhaps seeing, on the city streets. Two gangs, one ethnically mixed and the other Puerto Rican, were in constant battle over territory, while their girlfriends played active or supporting roles. The musical’s opening ‘Jet Song’ highlights that belonging to a particular gang was critical to the juvenile delinquent identity. ‘From your first cigarette to your last dying day’, as Riff explains, gang membership was the most defining feature of these young people’s lives. When Riff tries to encourage Tony to leave his job at Doc’s candy store, making it impossible for Tony to achieve social mobility, he does so on the basis of gang loyalty. For the 1950s, this was largely how young people, and particularly those who were poor and delinquent, organised their lives. West Side Story’s depictions of gang politics could not have been more current, especially given the public outcry at the time against delinquent behaviour.

It is worth noting, however, that by 1957 juvenile delinquency had been a hot topic for at least a decade. In the 1940s, off-duty servicemen battled with so-called ‘Zoot Suit’-wearing young Mexican-American men as they argued over racial issues and wartime tensions. It was at this point that the American political and judicial systems first became heavily involved with juvenile delinquency treatment and prevention. The 1943 documentary Youth in Crisis features delinquents rioting in the streets, and the film’s producers (as well as those invested in quelling juvenile delinquency) predicted that by the mid 1950s (when West Side Story was being written) all youth would be delinquent.⁵

J. Edgar Hoover led the charge in the ’40s, with a special focus on female offenders. In his mind, the end of the war had brought about a decline in morality, and he was particularly concerned about Victory Girls and girl gangs. In West Side Story the character of Anybodys, the jeans-wearing tomboy who wants to join the Jets, could be a figure from Hoover’s nightmares. Although she is not sexually attractive to the Jets (they have Graziella and Velma for that), she is told to ‘go walk the streets’ like her sister; the fact Anybodys was added later in the writing period suggests a deliberate nod to the perceived threat of female delinquency. A cut number from the show places Anybodys in the limelight with two other Jet gang members. In it, she wants to be male, presumably because she can fight (something the Jets will not allow her to do) and become equal with the males in the gang. That it is she who precipitates the ending of the show, with her search for Chino and subsequent warning for the Jets, shows that the inclusion of this new female role was both deliberate and important.⁶

The end of the war meant teens had more time on their hands, and the resulting youth culture was blurred with delinquency in both the public mind and by government agencies. A series of Senate committees debated the issue. Many sociologists and criminology experts ran studies to determine how and why youth were turning to crime. By the 1950s, the problem had not been solved, but one of the major culprits had been identified: mass media, in particular the crime comic book. Psychologist Frederick Wertham published a widely read book in 1954 entitled Seduction of the Innocent.⁷ In it, he blamed crime comic books for the rise of youth delinquency. A long series of battles ensued within the publishing industry and juvenile delinquency experts regarding the banning of comic books. In one of the drug store scenes in West Side Story, Baby John is reading such a comic book. It would be surprising if this were not a direct nod to the well-documented war on comic books. The publication of The Seduction of the Innocent caused a public panic over juvenile delinquency, which peaked between 1954 and 1956, exactly the years when the authors were putting the finishing touches on the musical and after Wertham’s publication. Although the problem of gang warfare on city streets was by now at least a decade old, it remained both topical and urgent. The creators of West Side Story had hit on a minor miracle. Although youth crime did not increase during these years of panic, the nature of the crimes was escalating. In the 1940s and early ’50s, youth crime consisted primarily of minor sexual offences, stealing, and jacking cars. However, in 1954 four Brooklyn gang members murdered a vagrant, setting off newfound alarm bells amongst the middle class as to how dangerous these teenage gangs could be. West Side Story responded without pulling punches. Three murders are portrayed onstage, a record for a musical maintained for decades after its premiere.

Although musical theatre had never featured such depictions of young criminals, they were mainstays of other entertainment media. The cultural urgency of the juvenile delinquency movement had spawned a number of artistic renderings of youth culture, and audiences were eating them up. Films like Rebel without a Cause gave Americans a kind of prurient look at juveniles (although here Marlon Brando was less a teenager than a young adult) who wreaked havoc on otherwise law-abiding citizens, painting teenagers as misunderstood outsiders who only needed to fit in. This depiction was both romantic and frightening, a combination which seemed to appeal particularly to young audiences. Indeed, as the juvenile delinquency panic peaked in the mid 1950s, over sixty films with this theme were produced and distributed to a demographic that was increasingly young and who had the finances and time to consume this particular brand of culture.⁸ Although some films, like the Beach Party series, painted teenagers as insipid but fun-loving oafs, most of these movies lured audiences in with the dangers and intrigue of juvenile delinquency in America. Everyone from Time magazine to Hollywood saw a real advantage to telling these stories, and it is impossible to imagine that the original audiences for West Side Story remained oblivious.

Indeed, concern about juvenile delinquency extended far beyond the arts and entertainment industries. Every day in the New York Times during this mid 1950s period, story after story included the antics and problems of juvenile delinquents. They were the major cultural phenomenon of their time. When Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents met poolside in Los Angeles, they discussed a project which had started out life as ‘East Side Story’ – a tale of warring Catholics and Jews. Seeing a newspaper headline about Mexican gangs fighting in California redirected their failing project to the slums of Manhattan. For the first time, Bernstein reports, he could hear the rhythms and imagine the music of New York’s streets, and they reframed the conflict to include Puerto Ricans and ‘Whites’.⁹

Although depictions of juvenile delinquency were extensive, the most prominent artistic rendering was the 1954 novel Blackboard Jungle by fledgling author Evan Hunter.¹⁰ The story follows a young, naïve teacher, Richard Dadier, who after graduating with an English degree takes up a teaching position at an inner-city trade school in New York. Like West Side Story’s characters, his students come from different cultural backgrounds, but they all share an aggressively negative opinion of teachers and school. Puerto Ricans and African Americans are heavily featured in Blackboard Jungle (although the arch-villain turns out to be white) and to Laurents and Bernstein this racial mix must have seemed more up-to-the-minute than the tensions between religious factions on the East Side. One character in Blackboard Jungle, played by Sidney Poitier in the 1955 MGM film version, finds himself by the end of the story and stands up for the beleaguered teacher. However, apart from this minor epiphany, the novel and subsequent film version paint a picture of animalistic and barbaric teens with no redeeming qualities, who rape, vandalise, and steal in equal measure.

Although the novel was clearly an artistic representation of the new delinquency problem, the film version sought to inform as well as entertain. At the beginning of the movie, before the title sequence, came a stark message for viewers:

By presenting the film as a quasi-documentary, this warning label led audiences to expect a morality tale of the highest importance. The fact that the film was released less than a year after the novel was published also suggests that problem was timely and urgent.

At a time when the movie industry was losing viewers to television at a significant rate, audiences flocked to see Blackboard Jungle. The film was a massive hit, grossing $9 million worldwide. Educators debated its realism and the depiction of ill-prepared teachers and overcrowding in city schools. Polls suggested that audiences found the film realistic and felt that it drew attention to real problems. Schools fought back, issuing statements protesting that nothing like this was going on in their particular district. However, for the general public, Blackboard Jungle accurately represented their worst fears about teens, schools, and delinquency.

The creators of West Side Story saw the film, although they may or may not have read the novel. The movie’s influence is clear in their portrayal of teen characters, from the way they speak to their general attitude. The students in the Blackboard Jungle novel call their teacher Dadier ‘Daddy-O’, a moniker that comes up in the musical as well. The novel’s authors were very careful to portray the characters as realistically as possible, at least in comparison to other popular media. There is no love story in Blackboard Jungle, and neither the film nor the novel features warring factions, which are crucial to a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story. However, the up-to-the-minute urgency and realism of both versions of Blackboard Jungle were hugely important to West Side Story’s creators.

Apparently, the musical’s creative team took this all very seriously. Intent on bringing the tale to light in the most realistic – albeit artistic – way possible, Robbins visited real dances at gyms to see the way young people danced and acted.¹¹ One dash of realism that made it into rehearsals was the use of flowers worn in trouser cuffs. When tried in the dance studio, however, the flowers made for total chaos, and that idea was quickly jettisoned. It is likely that Robbins (and perhaps some of his collaborators) trolled the streets at night trying to get a better sense of youth culture. At one point, he even proposed auditioning talented street kids for the musical’s dance roles. The idea never got much traction, given that his demands challenged already seasoned professional dancers and actors. It is worth noting that, during this time period of massive closeted gay activity, gang members often posed as gay to attract men looking for sex. Once lured in, they would roll these men for money or beat them up. By observing gang members, the closeted Robbins put himself at some risk for the sake of authenticity.

Ironically, the producers and creators of West Side Story did not take the usual film studio approach of luring young people into seeing their musical. Based on the musical genres Bernstein chose to include, it is clear that target audiences were instead middle-class and middle-aged. Elvis Presley was one of the most important musical figures of the time, and the bane of parents and juvenile delinquency experts alike. With his gyrating hips, his slicked-back hair, and his links to African American music, Presley was the number-one icon for a generation of rebellious teenagers. If Bernstein was going to make a realistic musical about youth culture, he would have taken rock and roll as his model and Presley as his muse. Bernstein was well aware of rock music; it was everywhere. Even the film version of Blackboard Jungle presents its opening credits against a backdrop of ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets.

Although the Latin American music that pervades West Side Story could be a nod to the ethnic mix of Manhattan’s west side, Hollywood preferred to use more romantic and traditional music for stories of juvenile delinquency. In Blackboard Jungle, the opening credits are the only time we hear rock music. The rest of the score uses standard Hollywood markers of danger or excitement that would be just as appropriate in an action movie or romantic drama. The movie even occasionally dips into jazz – definitely not the music of the young – to reach out to its primarily middle-aged audience. The teachers, representing an older generation, listen to jazz; there is a tragic scene in both the film and novel featuring the destruction of a teacher’s beloved jazz vinyl collection by the recalcitrant teens.

There is no hint of the rock aesthetic in West Side Story. In retrospect, it is a surprising choice. Other musicals of the era, like Bye Bye Birdie (1960) or the British Expresso Bongo (1958), include scenes featuring young rockers. Instead, in West Side Story, the ‘Dance at the Gym’ is set, of all things, to a mambo, although the ‘Blues’ section may have been closer to what young people listened to.¹² This music did not belong to the young. It belonged to their parents. It was the music of the highbrow ‘long-haired’ listener attracted by Bernstein’s classical cachet. The musical’s operatic aspirations and dissonant score offered other attractions to that kind of listener. The Latin jazz sensation that had hit the American middle class was by now well established, so much so that it was featured in later films like Dirty Dancing where older adults learn Latin dances on summer vacations in the Catskills. Latin dance clubs already had a large, devoted audience, as did Latin jazz recordings, and Latin music was often explicitly connected to musical theatre.

The so-called ‘modernity’ of the West Side Story score, then, was not that it presented up-to-the-minute commentary on youth culture, but that it reified middle-aged culture in a way that made those audiences feel that they were really ‘with it’. Indeed, the depiction of juvenile delinquency in film and literature began to bleed into mainstream culture. The youth were not just disappointing adults, they were leading them. The focus changed: instead of asking teenagers to explain themselves, American society began looking to youth for cultural leadership. West Side Story could well have appealed to young people, given its subject matter and key themes. From a musical perspective, however, it was a story of youth culture aimed at an adult population.

Gang life, which inspired West Side Story, loomed large in the zeitgeist of mid 1950s America. Its effects on cultural trends influenced the white, middle-class audiences that made up West Side Story’s primary audience. That parallel makes the creative team’s choice of subject matter all the more fascinating. In his American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style, author Peter N. Stearns traces America’s relationship with emotion from the nineteenth into the mid twentieth century. As Americans moved from traditional ideas about emotional openness to a more consumerised, commodified culture, the idea of ‘cool’, as crystallised in the musical’s song by the same name, makes the work very much of its time. Stearns describes how the expression of emotions, especially anger, was becoming ungainly for the mid twentieth-century American. Heroes like Superman do not deal with emotions. Dr. Spock, the famed child-rearing expert, warned against allowing children to express anger, and anger in the workplace was particularly frowned upon. As Stearns writes, ‘New levels of concern about anger and aggression followed in part from perceptions of heightened crime, including juvenile delinquency, and the untrammeled aggression in Nazism and then renewed world war.’¹³ Seeing gangs as echoes of Storm Troopers was particularly frightening for Americans, especially the Jewish middle-class audiences flocking to see West Side Story.

If we look at the song ‘Cool’, we see an interesting combination of complexity and emotion. The lyrics read, ‘Boy, boy, crazy boy, keep cool, boy. Got a rocket in your pocket, keep cooly-cool boy. Don’t get hot, ’cause man you’ve got some high times ahead. Take it slow, and Daddy-O you can live it up and die in bed.’ Accompanying these words is the cool jazz style that we have come to associate with the Jets. By contrast, the dance scene features a fugue, the score’s densest and most complicated music. The scene is choreographically complex and ripe with repressed frustration and anxiety. The fugue’s convoluted musical texture warns that the worst thing these teenagers can do is give in to their natural tendency toward aggression. They must remain ‘cool’. The conflict between expression and repression was hugely topical, echoed in the business world of the 1950s and ’60s where sensitivity training was introduced to defuse angry clients.¹⁴ West Side Story’s characters are tragically flawed not just because they are delinquent or underprivileged, but because they cannot control their anger.

No character in West Side Story is innocent of anger. Bernardo’s tragic murder comes when Tony, who has come to the rumble to stop the violence, is overwhelmed with rage. His momentary fall from pacifist to killer is what drives the story, and Shakespeare’s conflict becomes Laurents’s momentum. Similarly, Tony believes Maria is dead because of Anita, who is furious after her attempted rape by the Jets in Doc’s candy store. She warns them that she would spit on them in the street if she saw them dying and tells them to let Tony know that Maria is dead. Laurents was particularly proud of this moment. In Shakespeare’s version, everything turned on a simple misunderstanding. In West Side Story, the fall was caused by racism and misogyny. If Anita had not been attacked and lashed out in self-defence, the story would have ended very differently. The relationship between the gangs and the police is also fuelled by uncontrolled anger on all sides. Policeman Schrank taunts gang members in the candy store, hoping that their rage will make them slip up and tell him where the rumble will be. His own anger over his inability to bring peace to the streets results in a diatribe about unruly Puerto Ricans. Anger is always boiling below the surface, with tragic consequences.

An interesting corollary to anger management and charges of fascism was the concern that juvenile delinquency was linked to left-wing ideology, particularly communism.¹⁵ During the era of House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) inquests and the blacklisting of artists in Hollywood and beyond, the threat of communism was extremely serious. Jerome Robbins informed on some of his colleagues during this period, mostly for fear that he would be outed as gay at a time when queerness was as reviled as communism – or more so. Bernstein had communist leanings, as did most of the creators of West Side Story, at least early in their careers. As Barry Seldes has revealed, Bernstein once had his passport renewal denied because his past ties to the communist party had put him on a government watch list.¹⁶ The popular fear that communism had infiltrated American values through delinquency gave the quest for their mutual eradication special urgency. As James Gilbert writes, ‘A poll taken by the Roper organization in 1959 suggested that delinquency was viewed more seriously than open-air testing of atomic weapons or school segregation or political corruption.’¹⁷ By 1960, the musical was in its first revival, and the film version would be released a year later, in 1961. Audiences and creative team alike would have known that juvenile delinquency was not just any topical subject: it was the topical subject of the late 1950s.

The musical draws an additional fine line between using juvenile delinquency as subject matter and analysing it as a social problem. Nowhere is this line drawn more clearly than in the show’s hit song, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’. For one thing, the song criticises the real-life strategy of giving police more authority to crack down on youth crime. For another, it directly addresses the problems faced by members of the establishment as they attempt to deal with delinquency. The song comes in the musical’s 11 O’Clock position: traditionally, songs in this slot are showstoppers featuring the principal cast members. It could be argued that the gangs themselves are the principals, not the stereotypical lovers Tony and Maria, making ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ an 11 O’Clock number in truth. Regardless, the song was a moment that savvy audiences would have anticipated all evening.

Less experienced audience members might have been surprised by a comic song in the midst of tragedy. However, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ did the work of an 11 O’Clock number by stopping the show every night without fail. It also became one of show’s hit songs, especially in Britain, where youth delinquency was on the rise. The song satirises different interventions meant to solve juvenile delinquency in a series of skits performed by the teenage gang members. This vaudevillian approach to a serious social problem may seem a little unorthodox, even disrespectful. However, audiences welcomed the funny moment as a break from the story’s tragic plot, just as a society saturated with the seriousness of juvenile delinquency would have welcomed its lighthearted send-up.

The song addressed recent work in predicting and treating juvenile delinquency, along with the social work and judicial systems. The gang members agree that none of these solutions is going to work. After acting out scenes in which the teens would normally find some kind of respite from their troubled lives, the Jets fire off a list of possible causes for their friend’s delinquency: the trouble is not in his genes, his head, or society, but that he has a ‘social disease’. In the 1950s, this meant a sexually transmitted infection. The play on words between ‘social disease’ and ‘social work’, the problem and its would-be solution, was a very funny but pointed slam by the creators against a system that had failed to curb youth delinquency.

At the end of the song, the teen gang members finally turn to the police officer and say, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you’. In Blackboard Jungle, the final show-down between teacher and students occurs because the most difficult of the students finally fires off a considered ending for ‘Krupke’ of ‘fuck you’ at teacher Richard Dadier. This precipitates a scuffle-turned-knife-fight in which Dadier is wounded and the young juvenile who has supported him comes to his defence. As could be expected in mid 1950s, this line in the film was changed to something less incendiary. However, a teenager saying ‘fuck you’ to an authority figure seems be a critical tipping point; both Blackboard Jungle’s author and West Side Story’s creators use such a moment to demonstrate the complete breakdown of moral and social order.

‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ presents the Jets with an opportunity to own their own delinquency. Their unwillingness to conform, to behave, gives them a sense of purpose – yet it robs them of any acceptance in society. The positioning of the teens in West Side Story as misunderstood outsiders would have appealed to audiences, since the Jets and Sharks need to emerge as sympathetic characters in order for us to care what happens to them. They cannot be two-dimensional villains: if they were written that way, the plot would not work and their attitude shift after Tony’s death would make no sense. Indeed, the portrayal of youth gangs in this musical is not just a reflection of what was in the papers, but a plea from the creators to understand and to accept these youths in a way that the rest of the social order did not. The fact that the teens express themselves through song and dance shows that they are special. The adults of West Side Story are confined to the real world. The teenagers alone can tap into the magic of musical theatre and share it with us. If we are to care about them enough to share these magical moments, they have to be portrayed as authentic. At the same time that this subtle shift towards sympathy was occurring in audience members, society at large began to lose some of its fear of youth culture. Although adults were initially worried that youth would take over popular culture entirely (and it could be argued that they did), in the early 1960s adults started turning to youth as beacons of change and ambassadors of a new way of life.

In the 1950s, however, youth culture was still a scourge on the nation’s good name. What seemed to bother adults most about their teens turning to crime, or at least a new youth culture, was not the delinquency. Of greater concern was that these young people were crossing class lines, turning to lower-class morals and styles. This applied to everything from sexual openness to wearing jeans. Even the language they adopted was seen as being ‘below’ middle-class standards. A little crime was one thing. Challenging the class system was quite another. Some of this awareness may have spilled over into the approach that the creators took to the work. Sondheim, who had grown up in privilege among Manhattan’s artsy set, claimed that he had never met a Puerto Rican. This was likely true for most of the creators, whose experience with other classes would have been limited to the hired help in their homes. Bernstein (like most of the team) had a staff of domestic help, mostly from Latin America. Robbins did the choreography for the Jets, but asked Peter Gennaro to do choreography for the Sharks. Ostensibly, this was because it was one of Gennaro’s areas of special expertise. One wonders, though, if it was also considered ‘below’ Robbins to learn about or engage with Puerto Rican culture and the popular Latin dances. After all, West Side Story was meant to be a work of high art, even if the subject matter was from the streets.

In the late 1950s, as a social programme, producer Harold Prince’s office offered free West Side Story matinee tickets to young people in New York under the supervision of social workers. Students interviewed after seeing the show commented on how much they liked the music and dancing (even though it would have seemed anachronistic), and they even mentioned Blackboard Jungle in their commentary on the musical’s themes. There was no sense that the creators had been off the mark in portraying these young people. Yet the teenagers had no idea why they were taken to see the show. They did not see themselves as delinquent; they saw themselves as normal.

This may be the most fascinating aspect of West Side Story’s gang members: that the youth in the musical are meant not to represent some strange and terrifying ‘other’. The delinquent youth of the 1950s may have been other people’s children, but they were still American children. They were the product of the very society that feared them. And, in time, their culture came to influence the mainstream – adults emulated delinquent youth. The divide became less of a wall and more of a mirror: even in 1957, West Side Story depicted gang members as teenagers whose rebellion made them outsiders, but who could be saved by renouncing that inner anger. Every character in the musical is flawed, and although the teenagers can sing and dance their frustration, it bubbles up just as often in the adults. The audience feels it in the pulse of Latin rhythms and the intensity of the score, in the approaching train wreck of the dénouement. When the story ends in a scene of tragic catharsis, every character, every audience member is changed, young and old alike. The boundary between delinquent youth and fearful society disappears.

The creators and producers, all Jewish, mostly closeted gays, artists made outsiders in a period of conformity, must have identified with their delinquent protagonists. Like the homosocial and tight relationships amongst real-life gang members, so these Broadway artists would have seemed like a subculture unto themselves. The fact that Robbins had to rehearse the dancers to create animosity between the Jet and Shark actors lends credence to the idea that we are all misunderstood, damaged individuals who are taught to hate. Surely audiences of the era, whose relationships to the musical styles made them feel young, were meant to feel sympathy for the teenaged characters. However, this sense of connection challenged the bitter divide of ‘us vs them’ that underscored the approach to juvenile delinquency in the 1950s.

The musical’s bittersweet ballad ‘Somewhere’ asks us all to imagine a world where people can be themselves, accepted and free. Perhaps this was what the creators were picturing when they put together a musical to represent their own complex identities, as both gay, Jewish, and ‘other’ as artists, and perhaps this is what audiences secretly desired when sat down to watch. Art has the capacity to challenge prejudice, and we all have the capacity to change our perception of others. In the end, the distinctions between gang members and adults seem trivial in the face of loss. Perhaps the tragedy was necessary to clarify what truly matters. Perhaps we are all outsiders in one way or another.

Perhaps we are the gangs of West Side Story.