With a revival on Broadway that launched earlier this year and a new movie adaptation by director Steven Spielberg due out this December, West Side Story remains one of musical theater’s most beloved productions. Yet many fans don’t know the show’s fascinating roots: West Side Story was actually going to be East Side Story, a musical about Jews and Catholics fighting it out in the streets of the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20^th century during the holidays of Easter and Passover. Why didn’t East Side Story ever happen and what does that say about the religious, racial, and cultural identities of Jews and Catholics in mid-20^th century America? In the newly released second edition of The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical, I shed some light into this forgotten history.

This excerpt comes from the book’s third chapter.

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West Side Story might be one of America’s most famous musicals, but its almost-ten-year genesis is not well known by even the show’s most ardent aficionados. The musical is a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, now set in the streets of late-1950s New York. The Montagues and the Capulets have been replaced by the Jets, a gang of native-born Americans and the scions of immigrant parents, and the Sharks, a gang of Puerto Rican immigrants. Romeo has become Tony (of the Jets), and Juliet is Maria, recently arrived from Puerto Rico. The action proceeds quite quickly: Tony and Maria fall in love almost immediately at a neighborhood dance, and their ominous fate is sealed by the next day.

But what is perhaps most interesting is that this was not the show that was initially imagined by the creators at all. West Side Story is a musical with a fascinating history, a genesis that speaks to the work’s racial underpinnings as well as to the lives of the show’s Jewish creators themselves.

West Side Story had its genesis when choreographer/director Jerome Robbins’s actor friend and lover, Montgomery Clift, who was performing the role of Romeo, asked Robbins for advice on how he should approach his character. A lightbulb went on, dim at first: make Romeo and Juliet contemporary. The idea sat in Robbins’s head until 1949, according to composer Leonard Bernstein, when “Jerry called up and gave us [Bernstein and book writer Arthur Laurents] this idea. . . . It was an East Side version of Romeo and Juliet, involving as the feuding parties Catholics and Jews at the Passover-Easter season with feelings in the streets running very high, with a certain amount of slugging and bloodletting. It seemed to match the Romeo story very well, except that this was not a family feud, but religion-oriented.” Arthur Laurents picks up on Bernstein’s narrative: “My reaction was, it was Abie’s Irish Rose, and that’s why we didn’t go ahead with it.”[1] Laurents writes in West Side Story’s 1957 Playbill, “East Side Story was the original title of West Side Story. . . . The locale was to be literally the lower East Side of New York: specifically, Allen Street for Juliet and the Capulets, Mulberry Street for Romeo and the Montagues.”[2]

Early on, the idea of doing a show that would focus on the issue of religious and ethnic tolerance inspired Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins (lyricist Stephen Sondheim would enter the project after the transition to West Side Story had already occurred), but something still wasn’t working. Following World War II, Jewish identity was in flux. Jews were no longer entirely marginalized, and yet anti-Semitism lingered. At midcentury, according to the scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson, “ethnic revision of race stopped at the color line, universalizing whiteness by lessening the presumed difference separating ‘Hebrews,’ ‘Celts,’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ but deepening the separation between any of these former white races and people of color, especially blacks.”[3] Yet even at this early moment, a conflation of racial issues and religious ones seemed to be occurring. What exactly were Jews? A race? A religion? A people? A culture? All of the above? It was hard to say.

One possible answer to this ambiguity of categories can be found in the Library of Congress, which has Bernstein’s own annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet, presumably marked up after Robbins pitched Bernstein his idea. The Library of Congress’s senior music specialist Mark Horowitz explains that “in the inside cover of the book, Lenny has penciled a scene breakdown. Act one begins with scene ‘I. Street Scene—pushcarts—enter R—or Mulberry St. Festival—or Easter=Passover.’ Scene three is ‘Balcony Scene’; Scene five is ‘Bridal Scene’ and the act ends with scene six ‘Street Fight.’ Act two includes this cryptic description of scene two: ‘Sex—Plan to escape to Mexico’; and the act ends with scene four’s ‘Romeo’s death with Tante’ and scene five ‘Juliet’s death.’” From the allusion to Passover as well as what we know about earlier instantiations of the musical, it’s clear that Shakespeare would be given a Jewish makeover. Yet perhaps the most interesting annotation is the one that appears on the top of the first page of dialogue, where Bernstein has written, “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.” Assuming that this annotation was made early on in the process, what does this mean for how we understand Jews and race? Does this apparently simple notation not offer, at least in theory, the possibility for us to read Jews, at this moment, as a distinct and even visible group of people? Bernstein’s call is not for religious but racial tolerance.

What, though, did East Side Story look like? Several drafts were penned, and traces of the early incarnation live on in theatrical archives. In one manuscript, simply titled “Rough Outline: ‘Romeo,’” Romeo is Italian and the Capulets are Jewish. Laurents’s script takes its cue rather directly from the Bard. The play opens with a fight involving Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo. Romeo has been following Rosalind, much as in Shakespeare’s original, and the script informs us that “Mercutio and the others kid him [Romeo]. He ought to know better than to ‘chase a Jew babe.’ ‘They don’t put out.’ But ‘Rosalind ain’t orthodox’ etc.”[4]

Not much changes in Laurents’s script from Shakespeare, except for the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the characters. In act 1, scene 4, of the draft, Shakespeare’s balcony scene is reset on a fire escape, and Laurents writes that “the difference in religion should not matter to either of them and Juliet here explains she is a cousin come to visit the Capulets for the Passover holidays with her Tante.” Act 2, meanwhile, opens with a seder at the Capulets’:

Scene One: A tenement is revealed and we are looking into one of the upper apartments: the Capulets’. To music, a seder is in progress. The Cpaulet [sic] family, Julet [sic], Tante, other cousins (how many?) are all there. They have come to the Four Questions. Tybalt, the only child, should ask these but he is not home. Loafing with that gang, his mother says irritably, and a cousin asks the questions. The seder (sung in English) continues and the background slowly is lighted.

Outside, a cop chases Romeo. The seder continues, and “they have reached the last of the ten plagues: the death of the first born (Tybalt),” who was killed by Romeo. The scene even involves the search for the “hidden Matzoth.”[5]

Can we even imagine a show in which Jews would be looking for the afikomen (“hidden Matzoth”)? Broadway’s most Jewish musical, Fiddler on the Roof (1964), was still a few years away. While this East Side Story had the potential to be game changing by putting Jewishness onstage so nakedly, the show’s racial politics were fiercely dated. Jews and Catholics might have had some latent animosity, but they were hardly murdering each other on the streets of New York in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

What, though, was the turning point that took the show away from its Jewish-Catholic roots? Arthur Laurents was at least partially correct; there was something very Abie’s Irish Rose about the whole initial project, but is there more to the story than that? Bernstein and Laurents “recognized that the East Side wasn’t what it used to be: there had been an influx of Latin Americans, and the Jewish-Catholic ghettoes were not now the exclusive zones of gang rivalry.”[6] The idea of an East Side story was dated not simply because the project bore resemblances to Abie’s Irish Rose but because the racial and ethnic landscape of the United States, particularly the country’s white landscape, was quickly changing as the team was writing.[7]

Laurents recounts the moment in 1955 when the key to West Side Story’s puzzle appeared. While lounging at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel and talking about all things theatrical, he and Bernstein began to discuss that morning’s headline in the Los Angeles papers: “More Mayhem from Chicano Gangs.” Conversation soon turned to the possibility of using Latin music in the show, and the pieces began to come together in their heads. Laurents, though, had no knowledge of Chicanos in Los Angeles: “New York and Harlem I knew firsthand, and Puerto Ricans and Negroes and immigrants who had become Americans. And however it turned out, the show wouldn’t be Abie’s Irish Rose. It would have Latin passion, immigrant anger, shared resentment. The potential was there, this could well be a ‘Romeo’ to excite all of us. ”[8]

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[1] Dramatists Guild, “Landmark Symposium: West Side Story,” Dramatists Guild Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1985): 13 (emphasis added). Abie’s Irish Rose was a long-running 1922 Broadway play about a Jewish man and Irish woman who strike up an interfaith relationship.

[2] Arthur Laurents, “Musical Origins,” Playbill, West Side Story, September 30, 1957, 17.

[3] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 35.

[4] “Rough Outline: Romeo,” Box 81, Folder 1, Jerome Robbins Papers, (S) *MGZMD 130, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, NY.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Keith Garebian, The Making of “West Side Story” (Toronto: ECW, 1995), 31.

[7] Laurents had explored this racial shift himself in his play Home of the Brave (1945), about the anti-Semitism a soldier faces in the military. The plot was changed for the 1949 movie version, in which the solider is no longer Jewish but black, reflecting a shift from religion and white ethnicity to race as defined by skin color.

[8] Laurents, Original Story By, 337–338.

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Warren Hoffman is the Executive Director of the Association for Jewish Studies. He received his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of California-Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture and The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (now in its second edition). Learn more about him at warrenhoffman.com.