1957 Original Broadway Production

1957 West Side Story Playbill Cover

Winter Garden Theatre

Opening Date: September 26, 1957

Closing Date: June 27, 2959

Performances: 732

It is widely known that West Side Story (WSS) is based directly on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (R&J). Jerome Robbins had at first envisioned Juliet as a Jewish girl and Romeo as an Italian Catholic. The action, set during the Easter-Passover season, was to have occurred on the Lower East Side of New York City. Hence the title might have been EAST Side Story. (Another working title was Gangway!) That was in 1949. Six years later, Laurents and Leonard Bernstein were working (independently) in Hollywood, where they conferred on the aborted project. The newspapers were filled with reports of street riots by Chicano Americans in Los Angeles.

Those headlines turned the trick, triggering the imaginations of the collaborators. The locale swiftly shifted to New York’s West Side, and in 1957 WSS exploded onto the American State. In the decades that have passed, WSS has become a contemporary classic.

-Jack Gottlieb

Cast & Production Staff

West Side Story is as big a step, Leonard, for you as it is for Jerry or Arthur or even me, and in an odd way, I feel proud of you...May [it] mean as much to the theater and to people who see it as it has to us.
— Stephen Sondheim in a letter to Leonard Bernstein
© New York Public Library, Friedman-Ables, photographer

© New York Public Library, Friedman-Ables, photographer

Carol Lawrence remembers West Side Story on Broadway, 1957

This show [West Side Story] is my baby... If it goes as well in New York as it has on the road we will have proved something very big indeed and maybe changed the face of American Musical Theater.
— Leonard Bernstein in a letter to David Diamond, 1957

Awards/Honors

1958 Tony AwardS®

Wins:
Best Choreography - Jerome Robbins
Best Scenic Design -
Oliver Smith

Nominations:
Best Musical
Best Featured Actress in a Musical -
Carol Lawrence
Best Costume Design -
Irene Sharaff
Best Conductor and Musical Director -
Max Goberman

1958 Theatre World

Wins:
Carol Lawrence