West Side Story is one of Broadway\'s greatest musicals and one of the most riveting Hollywood ever put on screen. The ambitious production restaged Romeo and Juliet as an operatic ballet on the meaner streets of Manhattan, where the abiding American problems with race and immigration played out in a tragic love story. The shock of reality jolted many viewers upon release in 1961, and the 50th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray-DVD set displays how a gritty story of racially-charged gang violence can be set in a hyper-reality of lavishly suffused color and choreographed to Leonard Bernstein\'s gorgeous fusion of symphonic, jazz and Latin American music. West Side Story remains thrillingly dynamic cinema, a pinnacle among Hollywood musicals.
West Side Story\'s forbidden love across the boundaries of conflict has proven popular across the world and as the commentary on the documentary disc shows, the film has influenced many several generations of dancers, including Michael Jackson, and may have even shaped the colorful spectacle of India\'s Bollywood musicals. Jerome Robins\' choreography and Bernstein\'s propulsive rhythms deserve much of the credit for the production\'s success, but here\'s a surprise: playwright Arthur Laurents originally conceived West Side Story as a clash between Roman Catholics and Jews as Easter and Passover converged. It may have been Bernstein, with his love for the torrid rhythms of the Caribbean, who steered the plot toward the Jets, the younger brothers of the Dead End Kids, defending their tiny turf against the new outsiders from Puerto Rico.
