West Side Story [Remaster] - Original Cast (CD 1998)

In 1957 Jerome Robbins brought what many consider to be the finest musical ever made to the Broadway spotlight. An updating of Romeo and Juliet set amid the gangs of modern New York, West Side Story replaces the Capulets and Montagues with the Jets and the Sharks, highlighting the ever-present battle between the whites and the Puerto Ricans in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Perhaps even more impressive than the story, the music is at once sweeping and sweet, funny and deadly serious. Filled with love songs and rants against the system, exhuberant outpourings of joy and harsh grating songs...

I was born six years after West Side Story premiered on Broadway, and I have only seen the movie version, so for me this CD is the next best thing to building a time machine to see the original stage production of the Jerome Robbins/Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim modern take on Romeo and Juliet. Set in mid-20th Century New York City's West Side, Arthur Laurents' book tells the story of two "starcross'd lovers" -- the "American" Tony, a former member of a street gang called the Jets, and Maria, a Puerto Rican immigrant and younger sister of Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks, who are the...

Bernstein was a walking, talking paradox. He craved to be famous, but despised being popular. When he conducted, he wished he was composing. When he was composing, he wished he was conducting. He bathed in the popularity of his masterpiece West Side Story whilst wishing that his horridly dated Mass could have the same success. This CD is an remastering of the Original Broadway Cast recording of West Side Story with music by, obviously, Bernstein and lyrics by a very young Stephen Sondheim. Remarkably this was his first major project (Sondheim that is), and it's true the lyrics aren't his best.