West Side Story’s deeply Jewish roots

The classic musical - now reinvented by Steven Spielberg - started out as a story of warring Jews and Catholics

STEVEN SPIELBERG AND Tony Kushner’s new version of West Side Story brings the classic musical about star-crossed lovers in 1950s New York to vivid and visceral life for a new generation. That the director and writer are both Jewish feels appropriate, since despite what eventually appeared on stage and then on screen, in Robert Wise’s multi-Oscar winning 1961 film, West Side Story has deep Jewish roots.

Although the show would not open on Broadway until 1957, its origins go back to the late 40s, and a discussion Jerome Robbins (born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz), the esteemed Broadway director had with his lover, the actor Montgomery Clift, who was weighing up an offer to play the role of Romeo.

The Hollywood star said the character felt very passive and he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to bring it to life. Robbins advised him to think of Romeo as a modern man, and compared the rage and resentment fuelling the family feud in Romeo and Juliet to that driving hostilities between Jews and Catholics.

The idea lit a fire in Robbins’ imagination. In 1949 he contacted the writer Arthur Laurents (born Levine) and the composer Leonard Bernstein to talk about doing an updated take on the Bard’s tale, in which religion would replace blood ties, and the action would be moved from Renaissance Italy to the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, during Passover and Easter.

In Laurents’ script, tentatively titled East Side Story, Romeo was transformed into an Italian Catholic while Juliet became a recent Jewish immigrant and Holocaust survivor. Together, they reach across the religious divide and rise above the tensions that spark gang violence on the streets.

FULL STORY West Side Story's very Jewish roots (Jewish Chronicle)

Photo: Steven Spielberg's new version of West Side Story