West Side Story: A Musical.

by Laurents, Arthur; Music by Leonard Bernstein; Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Choreographed by Jerome Robbins

$20,000 · Offered by Biblio

First edition · Signed

New York: Random House, 1958. First edition of this classic musical. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein on the half-title page and inscribed by Stephen Sondheim on the front free endpaper. Review copy, with the slip laid in, fine in a very good dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable signed by these three contributors. In 1947, Jerome Robbins approached Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents about collaborating on a contemporary musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. He proposed that the plot focus on the conflict between an Irish Catholic family and a Jewish family living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, during the Easter–Passover season. The girl has survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Israel; the conflict was to be centered around anti-Semitism of the Catholic Jets towards the Jewish Emeralds (a name that made its way into the script as a reference). Eager to write his first musical, Laurents immediately agreed. Bernstein wanted to present the material in operatic form, but Robbins and Laurents resisted the suggestion. They described the project as lyric theater , and Laurents wrote a first draft he called East Side Story. Only after he completed it did the group realize it was little more than a musicalization of themes that had already been covered in plays like Abie s Irish Rose. When he opted to drop out, the three men went their separate ways, and the

• Publisher: Random House
• Year: 1958
• Edition: First Edition
• Binding: hardcover

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