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 Code "Sycorax" to Shakespeare, Shakespeare says that he will use the name (the joke is that the name in fact derives from Caliban's mother in Shakespeare's play "The Tempest".) Other sequences include subtle references to much earlier episodes. One of the putative lines of "Love's Labour's Won", "the eye should have contentment where it rests", is taken from episode three of the 1965 serial "The Crusade" — a story consciously written in Shakespearean style. The episode concerns the "lost" Shakespeare play "Love's Labour's Won", which is referred to in more than one historical document, but which may be just an alternative