Another thing I’ve inherited from my parents. My Mom was a big Johnny Mathis fan and had an album she’d play all the time that had a version of “Maria” from this show on it. Mom and Dad were also fans of the great Broadway musicals and Broadway musicals don’t get much greater than Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “West Side Story”. 

It’s loosely based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet”. The setting now is the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City where Tony, of the local American gang the Jets, and Maria, from the recently arrived Puerto Rican community and allied to their gang the Sharks, fall in love, and “never was a story of more woe than this of Maria and her Tony” to paraphrase the bard.

The Broadway show was made into a movie in 1961 starring Natalie Wood as Maria, Richard Beymer as Tony, leader of the Jets, Russ Tamblyn as Riff, George Chakiris as Bernardo, Maria’s brother and leader of the Sharks and Rita Moreno as Anita, Bernardo’s girlfriend. It’s a fantastic looking film, bright and colourful. The songs are superb “Something’s Coming”, the incredible set piece “America” (Bernardo “Everywhere grime in America, Organized crime in America, Terrible time in America”, Anita “You forget I'm in America”), “Maria”, “Gee Officer Krupke” is hilarious, the slinky, jazzy “Cool”, I have no idea why fans of the New York Jets haven’t adopted “Jet Song” in some way as their own (“When you’re a Jet, You’re a Jet all the way, From your first cigarette to your last dying day”) maybe because they just don’t sing at their football games like we do ? It all ends on the stunning “Somewhere” with a dying Tony and Maria professing their endless love for each other.

As a loosely connected aside, some of you may know I’ve been a big fan of American Footbal for over 40 years. My NFL team is the New York Jets and the college team I follow are the Long Island Sharks…one has to wonder how much influence this movie had on those decisions…

Somewhere - https://youtu.be/PtwIFrtZ7ww?si=hM-PiuoJNeoNhzRj