Below is a long article about 'West Side Story' from The Mail on Sunday.
Victor Grigolo? Now that's a new one
Stephany
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A flavour of the controversy over inter-racial romance at this time can be provided by the surprised disapproval which greeted the marriage of pop singer Buddy Holly - a Baptist from Lubbock, Texas - to Maria Elena Santiago, a Catholic girl from Puerto Rico.
Fifty years on, however, West Side Story still packs a few surprises.
It continues to remain controversial. Puerto Rican activists frequently protest at performances, arguing that West Side Story stereotypes and demeans Puerto Ricans.
Once a popular show for high-school performances, it is now largely avoided by the educational establishment.
People are fearful of accusations of political incorrectness - even though it is regularly restated that the point of West Side Story is that love between a white man and a Puerto Rican woman can break down racial hatred.
Certainly times have changed since such love was considered a thing of scandal. For a tourist to New York, however, what surprises most is the way that the West Side of New York has been transformed since the Fifties. For the wealthy who lived in grand apartments on the East Side of Central Park, the West Side was traditionally something of a no-go area.
West of mid-town, for example, was Hell's Kitchen, a festering slum of poverty and vice, at which wealthy Manhattanites would have shuddered on their way to board opulent transatlantic liners.
HESE days, as you might expect, the area is now undergoing rapid gentrification. The lower West Side was always dirty and dangerous but the upper West Side was originally, from its development at the end of the 19th Century, a place of bohemian chic.
The streets which, by the Fifties, were being roamed by gangs of hoodlums, had only years before been the haunt of showbiz legends such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin (who wrote Rhapsody In Blue on a battered upright piano in his Riverside apartment overlooking the Hudson). Ingrid Bergman and Igor Stravinsky were among the regular guests who stayed at the wonderful Art Deco hotel Essex House, now the Jumeirah Essex House and, more recently, a favourite of rock band Oasis.
The Dakota building on Central Park West was once visited by Tchaikovsky and was where Lennon lived and where he was shot dead in 1980.
There really was more than just a touch of the Wild West about the West Side. John Martin, for example, the original ticket-taker in the subway station at Broadway and West 103rd, had a unique claim to fame: he was the only survivor of the Custer massacre at Little Big Horn.
By the beginning of the Sixties, when Hollywood arrived to shoot the first scenes of its version of West Side Story, the area was changing fast.
The chosen area was West 61st Street near the junction with Amsterdam as several apartment blocks had been earmarked for demolition (the site was quickly redeveloped as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts).
As you look up West 61st to Amsterdam, you have to use your imagination a little to recreate the opening scenes where the Jets confront the Sharks (the basketball court was actually located a couple of miles away on East 110th Street).
In truth, the Puerto Rican community was located much further north than 61st Street: east of 86th Street and beyond to the north.
Yet even around West 66th Street, now loomed over by the glass twin towers of the Mandarin Oriental, very strange things have happened.
It was here that film star Rudolph Valentino was laid out in the Frank Campbell Funeral Church after his untimely death from perotinitis in August 1926 - 80,000 adoring women fans arrived to pay their respects turning the event into a celebrity circus of a sort that became more familiar as the century grew older.
New York's West Side, it seems, has a million stories: the tale of the Sharks and the Jets is just one of them. [/size][/quote]
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