The Collaborative Genius of West Side Story

What’s this program about?

We think of West Side Story as Bernstein’s musical, but it needed director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, scriptwriter Arthur Laurents, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim to bring all of the elements together.West Side Story was a dividing line in each of the collaborators’ lives.It launched Sondheim’s career.Bernstein never again wrote anything like it.

“The chief problem,” Bernstein wrote, was “to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and ‘just dancing,’ abstract and representational.”Featuring jazz and Latin forms, and songs too operatic for actors without trained voices, the collaborators agreed to preserve the “kid” quality by casting teens rather than seasoned professionals.

Works discussed: Bernstein, West Side Story