A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York by Julia Foulkes (review)

The iconic street scenes in the film West Side Story where dancers leap before rubble-strewn, abandoned lots were shot on the empty streets of the upper west side neighborhood of San Juan Hill, just before they were demolished to make way for the new Lincoln Center arts complex. It is rich irony: the popularity of West Side Story on stage and screen allowed classically trained dancers depicting 1950s street gangs to stand in as popular images of juvenile delinquency in the postwar city; while the abandoned streets on which they danced, and which had once been home to the kinds of immigrant teenagers they were modeled upon, were soon replaced by palaces of high culture that heralded a new vision of the city. These tensions between the images and realities of the city and their depiction through popular culture are at the center of Julia Foulkes' A Place for Us.

Foulkes examines West Side Story from the perspective of the shifting landscape of postwar New York by investigating biographies of its creators and the inspiration they found both on the streets of New York and through the larger cultural politics of the postwar era. West Side Story, Foulkes suggests, is in many ways the story of the men who created it. Choreographer Jerome Robins, composer Leonard Bernstein, screenwriter Arthur Laurents, lyricist Steven Sondheim, and set designer Oliver Smith were all gay first-generation Jewish immigrants born during the interwar era. The musical's central themes of love, hope, prejudice, belonging and American identity, the author argues, mirrored their own struggles against homophobia and anti-Semitism. Robbins, one legend purports, first came up with the idea of reimagining Romeo and Juliet as a modern tale of urban youth when an actor friend with Method training was struggling as a gay man in the 1940s to find personal connections to young heterosexual lovers in Verona. Transferring the story of forbidden love to transitioning immigrant neighborhoods, and placing the drama and tragedy of ethnic and racial intolerance onto New York's streets gave Shakespeare's tragedy modern relevance in the era of the Red Scare and civil rights conflict. Foulkes uses a rich collection of records from the production files of the men who created West Side Story to reconstruct their intellectual and creative processes, providing a fascinating window onto the New York theater world of the 50s, as well as the city they sought to capture through music and dance.

The New York of West Side Story is acityofmovement andenergythat reflected its postwar cultural and economic ascendance, all snapping fingers and jazz kicks, but it is also a city wrought by ethnic divisions and the dashed hopes of urban youth without access to the era's abundance. Though the drama over turf plays out in the streets and alleys of tenement neighborhoods, Foulkes contends that they take place in the shadow of urban renewal and the dramatic transformation of postwar New York. In preparation for both stage and screen, the musical's creators toured the city with cameras and collected sociological and journalistic studies of the changing metropolis to capture that dynamic moment of transformation in American cities – and New York in particular. They also joked that buildings they had started working in had already fallen to the wrecking ball. It is perhaps the impact of the car, however, that most determines the landscape of the city relegated to the Jets and Sharks. Foulkes calls the streets, alleys and highway under-passes where they dance and fight the "detritus of the automobile era," and she convincingly argues that West Side Story ultimately provided a visual representation of contemporary debates about urban renewal and the value of sidewalks and streets.

West Side Story changed the genre of American musicals by offering social commentary and tragedy as narrative alternatives to the light comedies that preceded it; it helped to reorient mid-century American aesthetics from the west to the...