By Fiona Capp
A Place For Us: West Side Story and New York
Julia L. Foulkes
A Place for Us, by Julia Foulkes.
University of Chicago Press, $61
While West Side Story is still emblematic of New York as is Romeo and Juliet (on which the musical was based) of Verona, it is now recognised as "a universal tale of longing and conflict". Since its Broadway debut in 1957, there have been about 40,000 productions worldwide, with the first international performance outside London staged in Melbourne in 1960. This engaging history of the musical and the film not only explores the collaboration between choreographer and director Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein and librettist Arthur Laurents, but also the social issues in New York that gave rise to the story and the Cold War politics that shadowed the creators and fuelled the show's creation. Times might have changed but the fundamentals remain, says Julia Foulkes: "Dividing the world into opposing camps. Yearning to belong."