West Side Story is a Broadway musical with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents, and choreography/concept by Jerome Robbins. The musical is based off of Shakespeare’s play called Romeo and Juliet, with the idea of modernizing the plot to relate to New York in the 20th century (Hoffman 84). The musical was originally set to be called East Side Story; a “religion-oriented” (Hoffman 85) feud between two parties, however, a transformation occurred “between Jerry Robbins’s original idea in 1949 and the Broadway premier in 1957 [sic]” (Hoffmann 85). The initial theme of East Side Story was of a conflict between the Jewish Capulets and and the Italian Catholic Romeo. Since the original draft, the “ethnic
