From East Side to West Side

When West Side Story debuted on Broadway in 1957, its frenetic dance choreography and exciting musical score were an instant hit. Its very form shattered existing norms in musical theater. Although its period-specific music and dance have aged well, it is the play's treatment of immigration and clashing cultures that have carved its niche in the pantheon of timeless classics.

West Side Story is writ large in the American cultural lexicon today, but it reached its final form as a result of much discussion and reimagination of the play by its principal architects – Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein. A modern version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet from the start, West Side Story was – in the very early stages of its creation – called East Side Story. Set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during Passover, it featured conflict between an Irish Catholic family and a Jewish one. The Jewish girl – who eventually became the Puerto Rican Maria in West Side Story – was a holocaust survivor who had immigrated from Israel. The character that eventually became Tony – the Polish-Irish Catholic boy in West Side Story – was an Irish Catholic.

Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert on location (West 56th street between 9th and 10th ave) for West Side Story publicity shoot, by Friedman-Abeles, 1957 (From the collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

But that was 1947, and Abie's Irish Rose, a popular film about a marriage between an Irish Catholic and a Jew with conflicting families, had come out a year earlier. The East Side Story project was shelved until the mid-'50s. By then, the rise of juvenile gangs – in particular violence among Chicano street gangs in Los Angeles – was making headlines. The phenomenon captured the attention of Laurents and Bernstein. In Original Story: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, Laurents – a New York City native – said the idea of setting the play in Los Angeles came up, but that since he was more familiar with the culture of the Puerto Rican immigrants in Manhattan than he was with Mexican culture in L.A., he decided to keep the action in New York. (His actual understanding of Puerto Rican culture is debatable, but more on that in a bit). The conflict focuses on rival street gangs: the American "Jets" and the Puerto Rican "Sharks."

Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Hal Prince, Robert E. Griffith, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Lawrence in rehearsal for the stage production West Side Story, by Friedman-Abeles, 1957 (From the collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

In its final form, West Side Story rode upon the human wave fleeing poverty in Puerto Rico after World War II. Between 1945 and 1955, New York City's Puerto Rican population swelled from about 13,000 people to almost 700,000. It wasn't the first time immigrants with language and customs different from the current inhabitants had arrived in the city en masse. Among other groups, impoverished Irish immigrants had arrived en masse during the early 19th century, and poor Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians took over the Lower East Side during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Newcomers had always been greeted by wary and often xenophobic natives, even if those so-called natives had only been in the U.S. for a generation or two themselves. Puerto Ricans were no different, and their role in reshaping New York City's demographics and culture during the post-war years served as a solid platform for West Side Story's narrative: newcomers arrive, second- and third-generation descendants of earlier immigrants (and, naturally, the longtime inhabitants, who are not seen in this story) don't like them, conflict ensues.

Madonna and Child, Ellis island, by Lewis W. Hine, negative about 1908; print 1938 (From the collection of The J. Paul Getty Museum)

As far as cultural accuracy goes, West Side Story leaves much to be desired. For starters, only one of the actors in the original Broadway productions – Rita Moreno – was actually Puerto Rican. The rest of the Puerto Rican characters were played by white actors. Secondly – and perhaps this was done to keep the narrative constrained to a simple, binary conflict – there are no black characters, or Asian ones, or anything other than white and hispanic, thereby completely erasing Afro-Latinos and Black Puerto Ricans It's also important to note that Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for Maria, Bernardo, Anita, and the other Hispanic characters stereotype and caricaturize their Puerto Ricanness. The same can be said of the white characters – Tony, Riff, Diesel/Ice, Action, etc. – who were an amalgamation of mid-century street punk stereotypes. Some of the things the characters do and say are cringeworthy; in the 1961 film version, the Puerto Rican accents tend to sound forced, just like when Al Pacino – an Italian-American – played a Cuban in Scarface in 1983 (George Chakiris, a Greek-American, played the role of Bernardo). The white characters were equally fed an unhealthy dose of then-modern slang, as when Action says to Doc, the owner of the drug store where the Jets hang out, "You was never my age, none a you! The sooner you creeps get a hip to that, the sooner you'll dig us."

Actress Rita Moreno standing on the defensive while Actor Ray Bolger is hiding behind her for protection, by George Silk, 1953 (From LIFE Photo Collection)

But to get bogged down in details is to miss the point (especially since some modern productions of the play have incorporated cultural updates, such as Spanish language renditions of some of the songs). West Side Story – although it used the ethnic divisions of its day to lend it current relevance and sizzling, brassy music to dazzle its contemporary audience – was never about the cultural nuances of being Puerto Rican, or Jewish, or Polish, or belonging to any other distinct cultural group. It’s message has always been, for better or worse, more universal than that. As in Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story shows that love can penetrate otherness, but that the conflicts brought about by otherness can still, ultimately, finish off love's protagonists.

Jerome Robbins, Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert during rehearsal for the stage production West Side Story, by Friedman-Abeles, 1957 (From the collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

Someday
Somewhere
We'll find a new way of living
We'll find a way of forgiving

These are the words sung by an off-stage soprano singer in the second act, and this message of hope against hate has resonated through the decades. Today the play seems to speak to current debates around immigration and contemporary ethnic and racial divisions. While the Puerto Rican diaspora may have become much more integrated in mainstream U.S. life, Spanish-speaking migrants from across Latin America are still the focus of xenophobia. . Those on the run from poverty and violence in Mexico and Central America have become the Other – the newcomers reviled by so-called ‘natives’. But when the descendant of an Italian or Irish immigrant calls for the stricter immigration, it is important for these people to consider that their ancestors once faced the same sort of hateful opposition years ago; that there was a time when the tale may have been an East Side Story. Perhaps a musical like West Side Story, which features ethnic groups that have since been absorbed into the greater population, can spur thoughtful discussion about America's most recent arrivals.

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