'West Side Story ' Shocked Audiences When It First Came too Broadway

The Broadway show ran for 732 performances. The first film adaptation won 10 Academy Awards. And the fictional love story between a former gang member and the sister of a rival gang’s leader spawned more than a dozen revivals and tours.

Now Jerome Robbins’s beloved musical, “West Side Story,” is on theater screens once again. The new film, directed by Steven Spielberg, premiered Friday.

Often ranked among the best musicals of all time, “West Side Story” was much less vaunted when it debuted on Broadway in 1957. Audiences and critics were discomfited by the violence and juvenile delinquency portrayed in the show, an adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” that trades rival families for warring street gangs — one Puerto Rican and the other White.

“The radioactive fallout from ‘West Side Story’ must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” critic Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. Theatergoers were flummoxed that the show not only lacked the frothiness of other musicals, but featured so much bloodshed. Three characters are killed off during the performance.

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