Using the skeleton of Shakespeare's plot, the creative team of choreographer and director Jerome Robbins, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim turned Romeo and Juliet first into an immensely successful Broadway musical and then into an Academy Award winning motion picture. Shakespeare's feuding Montagues and Capulets became rival ethnic street gangs defending their Hell's Kitchen neighborhood turf. The anger of macho teenagers boils over and explodes in the pressure-cooker of city streets and callous adults' authority. Lyrical romantic love between a Puerto Rican girl and a Polish boy can't survive in such a violent world.

The film's grim vision of the urban ghetto was part of America's fantasy of a suburban paradise. Central cities were bulldozed for "urban renewal," and the middle class fled to the new but sterile suburbs. The opening sections of West Side Story were filmed in the vibrant neighborhood that was being cleared out to make way for the monolithic marble structures of Lincoln Center.

Shakespeare depended on the energy of his language to build the exuberant and deadly beauty of his story. His acting company also used short interludes of vigorous dance, song, and choreographed sword-fighting as parts of the overall effect of Romeo and Juliet on stage. Sondheim's lyrics, Bernstein's music, and Robbins' choreography imitate the Dionysian energy that Shakespeare drew on as well.