THEATRE
Are you a Jet or a Shark? Get ready to choose as the award-winning adaptation of history’s most famous star-crossed lovers, West Side Story, comes to Dubai
See forbidden love, finger snapping and teen gangs in West Side Story
Once considered an impossible project that was declined by every producer in town, shelved multiple times, and taking a decade to complete, it’s fair to say that West Side Story well and truly defied the naysayers. The Broadway musical arrives in Dubai this month, bringing Maria, Tony, and the rest of the Jets and Sharks along for the ride.
As one of the best-known modern retellings of William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, West Side Story is set on New York’s Upper West Side amid a teenage gang war between Puerto Rican immigrants (Jets) and native New Yorkers (Sharks). As the gangs struggle for control of the neighbourhood, Tony (Romeo), a former member of the Jets and best friend of gang head honcho Riff, falls in love with Maria (Juliet), the sister of the leader of the Sharks.
Though it’s loved the world over now, the musical was plagued with issues from its inception in 1947, originally being named East Side Story and set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with a plot centred around two families warring over religion. When the creators abandoned that plotline, the story was shelved. Only
many years later did the original creators reconvene in New York, where conversation soon turned to the recent phenomenon of street gangs, and thus,
West Side Story was born. Eventually defying initial critics – the play had been deemed too dark and depressing and was declined by every producer in New York – the original Broadway production opened in 1957 and was a runaway success. It lives on through several Broadway and West End revivals, national tours and international productions, and now finally to the UAE.