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.