Four gifted New York artists collaborated to create the musical West Side Story. Conductor, pianist, and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was already a remarkable success when he agreed to write the music for the show. He delegated the writing of the lyrics to Stephen Sondheim (1930- ). The idea for the story line belonged to Jerome Robbins (1918- ), also the show's director and choreographer. Finally these three collaborators relied on screenwriter and playwright Arthur Laurents (1917- ) to supply the rest of the text and to model the work as a whole on Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.
The West Side. Roughly two hundred blocks make up Manhattan's West Side, which stretches from Central Park West to the Hudson River and from 59th Street north to 110th. Within these boundaries, a visitor to New York City in the mid-1950s would have encountered staggering contrasts in housing, wealth, and ethnicity. It is in an economically depressed neighborhood in this primarily residential area that West Side Story takes place.
On the streets West End Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Central Park West, wealthier New Yorkers inhabited spacious apartments and elegant private homes.
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