adway on September 16, 1957. At first, the critics were not able to fully appreciate the magnitude of the achievement, but one critic, Brooks Atkinson wrote that the ballets “convey the things that Laurents is inhibited from saying because the characters are so inarticulate.” This was done intentionally as a part of the realistic approach to the musical. By making the teenagers inarticulate, they were forced to communicate at an emotional level that almost lended itself to an impressionistic approach. One innovation of West Side Story was that there really wasn’t a dance chorus. Each dancer was assigned a specific character to play, and all of them sang, danced, and spoke. Robbins knew that by assigning his dancers actual characters he would strengthen the importance of the dancing in the story. This made it so that future shows had to try to achieve an equal level of integration, or the dance numbers would seem to slow the show down dramatically. Another important aspect of the show is that the adults and the teenagers were not able to communicate across the generation gap. None of the adults in the musical sing or dance, which leaves them alienated form the group. This again strengthens the importance of dancing as a means to communicate the story of the musical to the audience. Robbins, Bernstein, Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, who made his legitimate theatre debut here as lyricist, made what is called by some the perfect musical in West Side Story. The advent of the choreographer-as-director enabled musical theatre to take this last, significant step in the integration of dance in musicals. This production ran for 732 performances. It then went on a successful nation wide tour, after which it returned to Broadway for another 249 performances. The film based on the musical, which came out in 1961, won ten oscars that year. It was largely successful and made the muscial even more well known as an impo...
