On April 30, the musical West Side Story premiered at my school. The production ended up being a major success, selling 1,660 tickets in total. Although the audience enjoyed the students’ performances, it was a different story for the cast and crew. Two weeks earlier, the actors and musicians met for their first of many rehearsals together. By the end of practice, everyone was exhausted and a bit nervous for the final production. Since I was one of the musicians who played in the 2 plus hours long show, I can say that this musical was one of the most tedious and difficult processes in my life because of the challenging music and choreography involved.

In 1947, theater director Jerome Robbins came up with an idea for a new musical; a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For this project, Robbins recruited playwright Arthur Laurents to write the script and composer Leonard Bernstein to create the musical score. Ten years later, the completed musical, known as West Side Story, opened for the first time. The show received many positive reviews and went on to become one of the most popular musicals ever written.

Since West Side Story was originally based off of Romeo and Juliet, its plot does not stray too far from Shakespeare’s popular work. Instead of a love story between members of rivaling families, Robbins changed the characters to fit with the time period. Now, the “forbidden love” story was between two rival gangs, the Jets (Caucasians), and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans). In addition to altering the characters, Robbins also moved the setting to New York City to fit with the new characters, thus giving the borrowed plot a new look and feel.

While still being very popular today, West Side Story has also proven itself to be very challenging to perform. The first reason for the high difficulty is because of the music involved. From the first few notes of the Prologue to the end of the Finale, the 31-piece orchestra is pushed to its limit to provide music for the actors to sing and dance to. For example, the song Cool features complex rhythms for the woodwinds and strings, as well as extremely high notes for the brass instruments. Throughout the two weeks leading up to the premiere, I was consistently nervous about this song in particular and wondered if the orchestra and actors could pull it together in time for the show (we did). Another song that proved to be a bit too much at times was the Rumble. Since this song is played during the violent confrontation between the Jets and the Sharks, there were many parts of the song that had to line up with the actors’ movements. Due to this, many hours were spent working on this entire scene to get it ready for the final performance.

Since the music in West Side Story is so challenging to play, it makes sense that the choreography is equally difficult. Throughout the show, the actors are put to the test by having to dance in almost every scene. One part in particular that pushed the cast to their limits was the Dance at the Gym sequence. For about 10 minutes, the actors had to constantly switch their styles of dance to match the music playing. In total, they had to dance in three different styles, which included jazz, Latin, and the Cha-Cha. Another portion of the show that was hard for the cast was the song Tonight. Due to the song requiring five different parts to be covered by the actors, this scene was perhaps the most difficult to stage and execute. In the end, the rival gangs were placed in the audience and the rest were separated on the stage. Even though the staging problem was solved, the number still proved to be a challenge because of its overlapping vocal parts. By showtime though, the cast and orchestra had finally gotten it together.

Overall, the student production of West Side Story was well received by the audience and broke the record for the most tickets sold for a musical. With all of this success however, the production still had some mistakes in it due to its difficult music and choreography. Thankfully, these errors were not very noticeable and they did not detract anything from the overall plot. If West Side Story happens to be playing nearby, I highly recommend that you should go watch it because seeing it live is an experience that will never be forgotten.