East Side Story
The show’s beginnings Back in the late 1940s, Jerome Robbins envisioned a Romeo and Julietinspired story about clashes between Jewish and Catholic gangs on Manhattan’s Lower
East Side. Writer Arthur Laurents and composer Leonard Bernstein (below) were keen to pursue the idea, but other things got in the way. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that the project began to move.
The story shifted its focus across to the Upper West Side, where communities were being uprooted by gentrification and torn apart by social disquiet. A young lyricist called Stephen Sondheim was brought in to join Bernstein in writing the songs for what was now called West Side Story.
Bernstein was in the middle of writing Candide at the time and it’s said that the music for ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ and ‘One Hand, One Heart’ was originally destined for that. The original
Broadway production opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in September 1957, starring Larry Kert as Tony, Carol Lawrence as Maria and Chita Rivera
as Anita.