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 the Sharks. They also perform a number similar to the "Jet Song". In film, Pixar animator Aaron Hartline used the first meeting between Tony and Maria as inspiration for the moment when Ken meets Barbie in "Toy Story 3". In the 2013 movie "Teen Beach Movie", two teens are trapped inside a movie called "Wet Side Story", in which a group of surfers and a group of bikers are competing in a turf war. "" has a plot that parallels "West Side Story", and makes the reference explicit to the point where the two rival cheerleading squads are named the