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5 results

The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story
  • Edited by Paul R. Laird, Elizabeth A. Wells
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, this Companion explores this explosive 1950s remake of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its portrayal of the raw passion, rivalries, jealousy and rage that doom the young lovers to their tragic fate. Organised thematically, chapters range from Broadway's history and precursors to West Side Story; the early careers of its creators; the show's score with emphasis on writing, production, and orchestrations; issues of class, colourism, and racism; New York's gang culture, and how the show's legacy can be found in popular culture throughout the world.

  • 9 - Shakespeare in the City

  • from Part II - The Work Itself and Its Context
  • Edited by Paul R. Laird, University of Kansas, Elizabeth A. Wells, Mount Allison University, Canada
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to <i>West Side Story</i>
    Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 154-169

  • Summary

    As a dramaturg who specialises in adaptations for the stage, Jane Barnette considers West Side Story in light of its source, Romeo and Juliet. There are many different ways to focus dramaturgical work for theatrical adaptations, depending on the specific needs of the work in question. Although the entirety of any dramaturgical approach for West Side Story ultimately depends on the approach taken by the director and creative team behind a particular production, in this essay, Barnette grounds her initial inquiry regarding the relationship of West Side Story to Romeo and Juliet in questions central to adapturgy itself. Specifically, she examines the ‘spirit of the source’, as well as the pleasures available for spectators familiar with the source material. Finally, she questions the geography of adaptation–how questions of time and space figure into comparisons between the texts–as well as their production histories.

  • 5 - Sondheim the Kid

  • from Part I - Before West Side Story
  • Edited by Paul R. Laird, University of Kansas, Elizabeth A. Wells, Mount Allison University, Canada
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to <i>West Side Story</i>
    Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 68-81

  • Summary

    Sondheim was an unknown and untested man of the professional theatre when Arthur Laurents suggested him as a possible collaborator on West Side Story. Sondheim had hoped to bring his music and lyrics to the Broadway stage, but Saturday Night (1955, with book by Julius and Philip Epstein) stalled after its main producer, Lemuel Ayers, died in August 1955. With this project stalled, Sondheim heeded the recommendation from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, to seize the opportunity to work with Laurents, Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins. This article attempts to explain the opinions of Laurents and others in the mid-1950s that Sondheim’s lyrics were brilliant but his music left them cold. Sampling his early lyrics and Sondheim’s recordings of himself singing his songs, I show how his music might be considered challenging but would nevertheless propel his words and musical theatre in general to a greater understanding of music’s dramatic possibilities.

  • 23 - TheCaravan Returns

  • from Part IV - Creating Fields
  • Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Tel-Aviv University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature
    Published online:
    05 December 2015
    Print publication:
    09 December 2015, pp 470-487

  • Summary

    One can hypothesize that the impressive volume of American Jewish plays created over the past half-century needs also to be seen as filling a vacuum created by the disappearance of the Yiddish theatrical scene. Israel Zangwill wrote two major Jewish plays, Children of the Ghetto and The Melting Pot, which were pioneering works in terms of Jewish drama. The theme of intermarriage introduced to the stage by Zangwill's The Melting Pot characterized numerous American plays. American anti-Semitism would emerge in the aftermath of World War II in Arthur Laurents's Home of the Brave, the first drama to explore the nexus of Jews, the military, and the psychologically debilitating effects of anti-Semitism. In the 1950s and the early 1960s the number of Jewish themed dramas declined. Some of the dramatists of the 1930s had migrated to Hollywood, while others were discouraged by the unwelcoming ambience of the Cold War and McCarthyism.