Shakespeare in Manhattan

Situation and idea are again made present: The greatest conductor of his time teaming up with the top writers and choreographers of the era, to interpret a classic fabric according to the current problems in a world metropolis new and make a wide audience. This is what happened, as in the fifties of the last century, Leonard Bernstein took along with Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a template to address the Rassenkonfikte in New York and to address their destructive effect. After various changes in concepts, the work under the final title West Side Story premiered on September 26 in the Winter Garden Theatre on New York City. Its action went far beyond the city. It has been celebrated around the world not only because of its subject, but it is also regarded as the birth of modern musicals.

The theme is well known: two youth gangs, the Jets, the representative of the metropolitan New York grown underdogs and the Sharks, a group of immigrants coming from Puerto Rico, meet each other and compete with each other. A girl from the immigrant group and a member of the Jets fall in love. After confusion and failings her love ends tragically amidst the violence entanglements. Romeo and Juliet in Manhattan.

Bernstein performed the musical realization by embedded the dialogic and choreographic expressions of the Jets in jazz and the Sharks in Latin rhythms. Elements of classical opera, the musical, the Hot Jazz and Latin American dance rhythms meshed. Thus did the two worlds collide as apparent opposites, which already formed the musical reality and the estimated diversity of New York, however, and were appreciated as such. The brilliant diversity ended in the streets of the metropolis as a contrast, which found its dissolution in death. Conceptually, this design was brilliant and it had its effect. Hardly anyone who still listen to the famous songs from West Side Story, this embassy is aware.

The now released double CD West Side Story. Jazz Impressions. Turn Unique Perspectives published the greatest interpretations of the oeuvre. With artists such as André Previn and his Pals, Shelly Manne, Red Mitchell, Cal Tjader, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Stan Kenton, Annie Ross, Gerry Mulligan, Marian McPartland, the Oscar Peterson Trio and Manny Albam grandiose recordings were chosen to the entire to call artistic spectrum of this work again in memory. They all contribute to revive both conceptual diversity as situationally staged uniqueness of the players described. While listening to the message is clearly once again pushing the ethnic characters with no moment of reconciliation to each other, they have a destructive effect, considering them as different expressions of a whole, they are unique in their entirety. It is a world at stake.

West Side Story. Jazz Impressions. Unique Perspectives sends the message again in a larger audience. So, as if caught it in the eye the producers to appeal to all those who have great artistic means to address the burning issues of our time and not, as unfortunately so often to pursue, the hackneyed clichés of mainstream or withdraw to the historical heritage of their own genre. Seen, West Side Story is still a blueprint for the intervention of art in the confusions of the profane.