They met poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. 22, 1955, Bernstein and Laurents were both in Los Angeles, working on other jobs. (Lyricist Stephen Sondheim would join them later.) But a mix of conflicting work schedules, disagreements over the tone of the story and the style of the music and a lack of consensus among the artistic temperaments caused the project to grind to a halt.Īccording to their separate biographies, on Aug. Robbins and Bernstein brought in writer Arthur Laurents to work up a story. The project was called “East Side Story” and set on Manhattan’s lower east side amidst strife between rival groups with differing religious backgrounds - Jews and Catholics, according to published accounts. But the project had actually begun eight years earlier.ĭirector/choreographer Jerome Robbins first came up with the idea of doing Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as a musical set in modern times. “West Side Story” debuted on Broadway in the fall of 1957. “To hear that this might have sparked this play and movie to come out is unbelievable,” he said. That light-bulb moment gave the project new life and inspired the romantic tragedy’s Latin accent.ĭelgado, 71, a former Raider living in Las Vegas chronicled the fight as well as growing up on San Bernardino’s west side in his 2009 memoir “The Last Chicano: A Mexican American Experience.” Two Hispanic gangs, the Raiders and the Bullies, fought over some long-forgotten dispute. 20, 1955, brawl outside Johnson Community Hall in San Bernardino. Then by chance, they read a newspaper’s three-paragraph account of an Aug. Nigel Simeone’s book “Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story,” which examines the musical’s development, describes how in the mid-1950s the creative team was stumped for a focus and had stalled in their work. The modern-day retelling of “Romeo and Juliet” that debuted as a Broadway musical five years earlier is based in part on a fictional turf war between Puerto Rican and white street gangs on the upper west side of Manhattan.īut few know that the beloved musical that is a staple of famous theaters and high school stages likely never would have existed but for a real-life gang fight on the west side of … San Bernardino. Fifty years ago, “West Side Story” won 10 Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture.
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