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 2009 Broadway revival began in October 2010 at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit, Michigan, and toured for two seasons. The cast featured Kyle Harris as Tony and Ali Ewoldt as Maria. The musical has also been adapted to be performed as "Deaf Side Story" using both English and American Sign Language, with deaf Sharks and hearing Jets. The original Australian production opened in October 1960 at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, before touring to the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney in February 1961. Subsequent Australian national tours have been staged in 1983, 1994 and 2010. In 1961, a tour of