August 25, 1955—At a poolside meeting in Beverly Hills on his 37th birthday, Leonard Bernstein (in the image accompanying this post) and creative partners Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents shelved their previous idea for a modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet—a clash of Catholics and Jews—in favor of a different set of characters: Anglos and Mexicans in Los Angeles.
The switch was a pivotal transition point along the way to the violent “rumble” between native Anglo and immigrant Puerto Rican gangs that formed the crux of the landmark musical West Side Story.
Before the musical opened on Broadway in September 1957, it spent eight years being brought to life. In January 1949, director-choreographer Robbins proposed, as Bernstein noted in his diary, “a noble idea—a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the coincidence of Easter-Passover celebrations….It all fits…but can it succeed?”
Several years later, by their own admission, the answer was no. Librettist Laurents identified the problem eventually: the premise for what was then called East Side Story was simply a rehash of the 1920s comedy Abie’s Irish Rose, except without the laughs.
(Two decades later, TV was more shameless about reworking an old idea, bringing to life Bridget Loves Bernie, with eventual husband-and-wife Meredith Baxter and David Birney.)
So here Bernstein and Laurents were, soaking up the sun, when the composer suggested: “What about doing it about the Chicanos?” (That very day, in fact, the Los Angeles Times had a headline about gang warfare.) Excited, the two men called Robbins, who agreed.
Before long, the concept did a transcontinental flip, partly because Laurents felt more comfortable with New York-based Hispanics than those in California, so that now it was about Anglos and Puerto Ricans on the West Side of Manhattan.
Running like a thread through the whole thing, from start to finish, was the idea Bernstein had scrawled on the title page of his annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet in the early going: “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.”
Some years ago, I remember hearing longtime New York deejay Vin Scelsa call West Side Story the first rock ‘n’ roll musical—or rather, he quickly qualified it, not so much the first musical with rock ‘n’ roll music but the first musical born of the spirit of rebellion that animates rock ‘n’ roll.
He was onto something: rock ‘n’ rollers did see something of themselves in the great musical tragedy. Todd Rundgren, for instance, did a live version of “Something’s Coming,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” features a teenage clash with inevitable echoes of the musical.
But more basic to the musical than the idea of the rebel is that of the outsider. If they could move so easily from Jews to Mexicans to Puerto Ricans as the out-group, the quartet that created West Side Story—Bernstein, Laurents, Robbins, and, joining them that fall, the young lyricist Stephen Sondheim—were not just outsiders, but double outsiders.
All four were not just Jews—a group all too painfully aware, from the events of the previous decade, of their precarious nature in the world—but homosexuals. However well-known their sexual orientation might have been to entertainment professionals, it was a more closely guarded secret to the world at large.
(In fact, Bernstein had married a woman, at least partially in the unsuccessful hope that by doing so he would sublimate his attraction to men.)
In this context, the most heartfelt song for the quartet might have been “Somewhere.” Sondheim’s plaintive words and Bernstein’s soaring melody summon “a place for us,” where “We’ll find a new way of living/We’ll find there’s a way of forgiving”—a vision they must have felt still elusive in that age.
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