The essay focuses on the career of playwright Arthur Laurents from his graduation from college to the opening of West Side Story, including discussions of his early plays and screenplays as well as his involvement in the development of the classic musical.

Bernstein’s extrovert personality, ambitions and eclectic talent were perhaps best demonstrated in the theatrical medium, and this chapter explores the origins of Bernstein’s relationship with this medium, looking at the collaborations, contexts, and influences surrounding his first works for the New York stage: the ballet Fancy Free (1944) and the musicals On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956). There is a particular focus on Bernstein’s employment of symphonic dance music, the rhythmic vitality contained within many numbers, and his inclusion of both ‘highbrow’ compositional techniques and ‘lowbrow’ sounds of jazz and popular culture within his scores. The author also considers how Bernstein’s music helped to vividly portray the locations and characters within the shows, and discusses the musical elements found in these early works that would later resurface in his contribution to West Side Story.

For Jerome Robbins, musical theatre dance provided spectacle, but its primary function was to communicate story, acting as a cohesive thread between visual, aural, and textual elements. Robbins turned dance into a common language in the world of the play, an extension of a character’s vocabulary. For West Side Story, Jerome Robbins envisioned a prominent ensemble comprised of singing–acting dancers responsible for conveying essential narrative elements. By centering the action of the ensemble, movement and music lead lyrics, book, and design in translating given circumstances and character action. He enhanced aesthetic unity, thematic synthesis, and flow by developing a choreo-direction process which integrated American Stanislavski-based method acting principles with staging and dance composition. This ultimately contributed to the legacy left by West Side Story on film, Broadway, and concert dance.

This chapter traces Robbins’s formative training years, early career, and then focuses on several foundational shows that set-in motion his choreographic career along with lesser-known creations that helped shaped his mode of expression building up to West Side Story. I consider the tensions that continued to mount for Robbins between his personal life and his professional career and how they colour his way of working. This chapter draws out a collection of primary threads that weave together to create the dance-driven storytelling that comes to full fruition in West Side Story. Enroute, the chapter explores Robbins’s choreographic strategies, and ingenuities that began in his early career, helped along by key mentorships and collaborations with fellow artists both in ballet and musical theatre.

West Side Story has long been important in the international market. This chapter provides four vignettes of its presence outside of the United States. Attempts to make the show one of the pieces of American culture that the US State Department allowed to tour in the USSR in the 1950s were unsuccessful, but the 1961 film helped make West Side Story known there and its sense of integration between various elements aligned closely with Soviet artistic conceptions. The film became very popular in Spain, where staged versions did not appear until tours in the 1980s. The first two professional Spanish productions premiered in Barcelona in 1996 and Madrid in 2018. Jerome Robbins took an American cast to England in 1958, creating a sensation first in Manchester and then in London. A Finnish production in Tampere Theater in 1963 proved popular and played briefly in Vienna in 1965.

Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins shared mutual desires to innovate and create in their individual fields and to create truly ‘American’ art of the twentieth century. Their collaborations for ballet (Fancy Free, On the Town, Facsimile, Age of Anxiety, Dybbuk) and musical theatre and film (West Side Story) propelled each into defining their specific style and artistic voices. Their aim to synthesize classical, symphonic aesthetics with rhythms and movements of Black and Latinx vernacular dance and music; their mutual interest in translating character, intention, emotion, mood, and narrative circumstances through non-textual mediums; and their active integration of music and movement in the creative process cinched their artistic connection. Even after the two went their separate ways, their legacies are forever entwined.

Although the concert hall was perhaps Bernstein’s first love, musical theatre was always very close to his heart, and this chapter explores his first three works written for the Broadway stage: On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956). There is an exploration of the origin and context of each show, and of the collaborative processes behind their development, from the tight team-work of On the Town and Wonderful Town to the personnel problems of Candide. The author considers the wide variety of musical styles utilized by Bernstein, particularly his blending of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ techniques and sounds. There is a discussion of how the stories and libretti of the three shows reflect aspects of the social, historical and political atmosphere of the time, and of the importance and influence of these early works.