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
The Shakespeare Project The Shakespeare Project In October 1983, the Riverside Shakespeare Company, then New York City's only year-round professional Shakespeare theatre company, inaugurated "The Shakespeare Project", based at the theatre company's home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, The Shakespeare Center. "The Shakespeare Project" was the first major New York residency of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company - with Edwin Richfield, Heather Canning, Christopher Ravenscroft, Jennie Stoller and John Kane (the later two from Peter Brook's "A Midsummer Night's Dream") - for a week of public workshops, panel discussions, seminars and performances at the company's Upper West Side theatre, The