In 1949, Jerome Robbins was already Broadway royalty, having choreographed eight shows in just a few years. But he had a new idea that wouldn’t let him go—a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. The feuding Montagues and Capulets would be replaced by an Irish-Catholic family and a Jewish family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

He called two trusted friends: composer Leonard Bernstein and playwright Arthur Laurents. The three clicked instantly. Laurents was eager to write the book, Robbins would choreograph, and Bernstein—who initially dreamed of making it an opera—eventually agreed to a musical. They titled it East Side Story. 

It never made it past the first draft. Too much like other plays, too little spark. Disappointed, they abandoned it and moved on to other projects. 

Six years later, fate intervened. Laurents and Bernstein met for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel and started swapping news headlines. A recent story about a clash between rival gangs in San Bernadino caught Bernstein’s ear. He now imagined the show set in Olvera Street, Los Angeles. But Laurents was unfamiliar with LA, so he pushed for New York and drew from the Puerto Rican communities he was familiar with. The gangs became the Sharks and the Jets, and East Side Story was reborn as West Side Story. 

Laurents recruited a young Stephen Sondheim for the lyrics. Sondheim hesitated—he wanted to focus on writing both music and lyrics for his own shows—but his mentor, the legendary Oscar Hammerstein II, talked him into it, insisting this was the opportunity of a lifetime. 

From the start, the creative team clashed. Bernstein wanted operatic grandeur; Robbins wanted the precision of ballet. Laurents fought to rearrange songs, to keep comedy in balance with tragedy. The Cold War loomed over everything—Robbins was pressured to testify before Congress about Communist ties, while Bernstein and Laurents faced blacklisting. 

Then came a crisis: the producer backed out, convinced the show was too dark to sell. Broadway in the mid-1950s was awash with more cheerful musicals like Guys and Dolls—nobody thought audiences would pay to watch a turf war end that ended in death. 

Enter Hal Prince, a young producer with nothing to lose. After hearing Bernstein and Sondheim play through the score, he was nearly convinced but turned to his mentor George Abbott for advice. Abbott agreed with what most producers thought at the time, don’t touch West Side Story with a ten-foot pole. Had it been an earlier time, maybe Prince would have listened, but Abbott’s current musical was flopping at the box office, so Prince realized it was the time to take risks. Prince cut costs, raised funds, and convinced Robbins to stay by doubling dance rehearsals. 

Casting was equally fraught. The show demanded performers who could sing, dance, and act—and look like teenagers—so the company ended up a mix of kids barely out of school and actors in their thirties. To fully immerse the cast, Robbins kept the Jets and Sharks apart offstage and posted news clippings about real gang violence in the dressing rooms. He also broadened the scope of the production by giving each dancer a signature gesture while allowing them the freedom to fully explore their characters as if they were actors, something that wasn’t done for dancers at the time on Broadway. 

Even in the final days before opening, battles raged over the score. Columbia Records refused to record the cast album unless some orchestral passages were cut; Bernstein flatly refused. Eventually, Columbia caved. 

On August 19, 1957, the show had its first out-of-town tryout in Washington, D.C., earning the hearts of critics and selling out shows. Nearly everyone was thrilled about the outcome, but Robbins wasn’t completely satisfied. He demanded and received a “conceived by” credit, allowing him to make changes without consulting anyone. This led to a fracture in his friendships with the creative team. By the time the show opened on Broadway a month later, no one was on speaking terms with Robbins.   

But the personal rifts didn’t matter to the box office and West Side Story   immediately became a hit. The audience was spellbound. Robbins won the Tony for best choreography, Oliver Smith for best scenic design, and the 1961 film adaptation, co-directed by Robbins, went on to win ten Oscars. In fact, Robbins is the only person in Academy history to win a best director Oscar for his one and only movie.  

The personal rifts would eventually be mended, with Robbins and Sondheim working together two years later on Gypsy   and Bernstein reviving his collaboration with the choreographer again for Dybbuk  in 1974. 

The journey had been brutal—years of false starts, creative fights, and personal strain—but the result was a musical that rewrote the rules of Broadway and saw five of Broadway’s giants unite to tell a story that still feels relevant today. Nearly 70 years later, you can still fill the backstage bulletin board with stories of racial injustice or fights amongst communities like Robbins did. And West Side Story remains as fresh and hard-hitting as ever, still singing with the same heartbeat that first inspired Robbins in 1949: two lovers holding onto each other in a divided world. 

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