LAURENTS, Arthur.

£17,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

West Side Story. A Musical. First edition, inscribed by the lyricist Stephen Sondheim, composer Leonard Bernstein, playwright Arthur Laurents, and producer Hal Prince on the front free endpaper. Copies of this landmark of the Broadway stage inscribed by more than one of the collaborators are scarce. Choreographer Jerome Robbins first proposed a collaboration on a contemporary musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with Bernstein and Laurents in 1949. The project was slow to progress; Sondheim joined the creative team only when Bernstein's first choices of lyricists were unavailable.The Broadway premiere took place at the Winter Garden Theatre on 26 September 1957. It ran for 732 performances and won Jerome Robbins the Tony Award for Best Choreographer (West Side Story included more dancing than any previous Broadway show). Random House published the book in their series of "Recent Broadway Hits" six months after the premiere.The first West End production opened on 12 December 1958 and ran for 1,039 performances. There have been numerous Broadway and West End revivals, together with two film adaptations. The first was released in 1961, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, and the second in 2021 directed by Steven Spielberg who revealed "West Side Story was actually the first piece of popular music our family ever allowed into the home. I... fell completely in love with it as a kid".The inscriptions read "For Paul - from Steve (Sondheim), 5/6/86", "Best wishes, Paul! Hal

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