A cultural touchstone means more than just a movie, play, symphony or ballet. West Side Story is all of that, but its status as a cultural touchstone is unparalleled. Since the musical play’s 1957 debut and screen transfer in the early 1960s—guaranteeing it worldwide prominence—no other single work in the performing arts canon has proved as effective or more popular.
This doesn’t mean that the 1961 film—currently being celebrated with 50th anniversary theatrical screenings across the country and a deluxe DVD release—is a great work of art. Fact is, West Side Story’s phenomenon is defined by how it transcends mere notions of quality. It may be the ultimate ecstatic proof of art culture’s unending high/low tension.
What else in recent modern culture has brought the popular audience into the experience of high art? West Side Story’s pedigree proves its cultural triumph: Starting as a update of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, it became a Broadway show expressing the vaunting ambitions of Jewish American theatrical artists composer Leonard Bernstein, playwright Arthur Laurents, choreographer Jerome Robbins and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Then Hollywood increased the show’s impact exponentially; the modernized tale of social change—racial and ethnic rivalries and adolescent unrest—dramatized the still-perplexing circumstances of urban tumult.
Based on legend, West Side Story itself became legendary as successive generations were attracted by and felt attached to its characters and its vision of American perplexities. What began in a bourgeois-established institution became a lively myth for the restless but unempowered. It went from being a middle-class alternative to rock ‘n’ roll to—somehow—an inarguably authentic expression of the rock ‘n’ roll ethos.
Not effete or middle-aged (“Catch the moon/ One-handed catch” from “Tonight” separates virtuoso songwriting from sissies), West Side Story is the genuine American article. Generations respond to it across ethnic lines because its class yearnings as much as its star-crossed love story are common and irresistible.
Until someone makes a singing, dancing version of The Godfather or a successful musical adaptation of Gone With the Wind, nothing else in our culture can match West Side Story. Whether it is a good movie is irrelevant. The fact that it works splendidly (due to the felicities and power of that great, great score) is incontestable.
For all West Side Story articles, please go to:
To the Curb
Dance as Narrative (and More)
Street Signs
Utopian Variations
A Landmark Soundtrack
Robbins’ Road to Hollywood
