West Side Story West Side Story West Side Story is a musical with book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. It was inspired by William Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet". The story is set in the Upper West Side neighborhood in New York City in the mid 1950s, an ethnic, blue-collar neighborhood (in the early 1960s, much of the neighborhood was cleared in an urban renewal project for Lincoln Center, which changed the neighborhood's character). The musical explores the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. The members of
West Side Story Tribune" on September 27, 1957: The other reviews generally joined in speculation about how the new work would influence the course of musical theater. Typical was John Chapman's review in the "New York Daily News" on September 27, 1957, headed: "West Side Story a Splendid and Super-Modern Musical Drama". "Time" magazine found the dance and gang warfare more compelling than the love story and noted that the show's "putting choreography foremost, may prove a milestone in musical-drama history ..." The score for "West Side Story" was orchestrated by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal following detailed instructions from Bernstein, who then