West Side Story and Romeo & Juliet

West Side Story is supposed to be a modern day Romeo and Juliet. The plots mirror each other largely but the key differences between the two are that West Side Story is simpler than Romeo and Juliet, is a musical while Romeo and Juliet is not, and adds an additional twist to the plot in that there is racial tension between the Puerto Rican and the New York gangs.

The characters of West Side Story are meant to imitate those of Romeo and Juliet. The Jets are an allegory to the Montagues while the Sharks symbolize the Capulets. Furthermore Tony represents Romeo and Maria represents Juliet. The list of character match ups goes on and on: Anita represents Juliet's Nurse, Riff represents Mercutio, Bernardo represents Tybalt. Chino represents Juliet's suitor Paris, Doc represents the kindly Friar Lawrence, and Officer Krupky and the detective represent Prince Escalus.

As the characters have their correspondents so do the plots. Both performances start with a petty display of tension between the respective clans; Jets and Sharks, Montagues and Capulets that is broken up by Officer Krupky/Prince Escalus. Soon after the opening quarrel the rivals meet at a party/dance where the Jets/Montagues scuffle briefly with the Sharks/Capulets. Also in the dancing scene Tony/Romeo and Maria/Juliet meet and fall in love. They both follow shortly with a "balcony scene" where Maria/Juliet is up in her balcony and Tony/Romeo professes his love from ground level. Later there is a fight in which Bernardo/Tybalt slays Riff/Mercutio and Tony/Romeo takes revenge and kills Bernardo/Tybalt. Then Maria/Juliet argues with Anita/Nurse about why she is in love with Tony/Romeo even though he killed her relative Bernardo/Tybalt (Maria's brother and Juliet's cousin on her mother's side). Meanwhile Tony/Romeo lays low under Doc's/Friar Lawrence's care. Through middle men Tony/Romeo and Maria/Juliet make plans to run away together but by slightly different reasons Tony/Romeo thinks that Maria/Juliet is dead and manages to commit suicide (Tony does it by finding Juliet's suitor Chino who is out to kill him while Romeo does it by ingesting poison). Thus Maria/Juliet is left without the love of her life (Maria lives while Juliet stabs herself with Romeo's dagger and dies).

West Side Story adds another element to the complex Shakespearean plot: racism. The play focuses on two gangs a New York gang (the Jets) and a Puerto Rico gang (the Sharks). There are two types of racism against the Puerto Ricans in the movie: Racism from the Jets and Racism from the police.

The Jets are incredibly cruel to every Puerto Rican that they encounter. When the Sharks' leader, Bernardo, asks the Jets leader, Riff, "Who jumped us on the first day we came here?" Riff responds with the racist rhetorical question, "Who asked you to come here?" This statement by Riff is symbolic of the many instances of racial degradation throughout the movie.

The Jets call a Shark a racially derogatory term that will not be displayed in this text as they chase him through the playground. This term is repeated in the fight scene under the freeway. Later on when Anita comes into Doc's bar she is subject to derogatory terms, whistled at, and pushed around by the Jets. This scene is indeed the climax of the racial tension of the movie. It is unknown how far the Jets would have gone in their harassment if Doc didn't stop them.

The other discrimination against the Sharks is from the detective. While the Jets' harassment seems initially petty because in reality the Jets are in no better a place in life than the Sharks, the harassment from the detective is especially poignant in that is abuse from an authority figure to his underlings. The detective initially is sympathetic to the Jets after the first scuffle and asks one particular Jet to tell him which one of the Puerto Ricans gave him a black eye. Later, after the war council, the detective is verbally abusive to the Sharks and again sides with the Jets, pleading with Riff to tell him where the rumble would be so that he could help the Jets expel the Sharks from town. Overall, the movie's use of racism shows a disconcerting truth about the era in which the movie takes place.