Release Year: 1961

Genre: Drama, Musical

Director: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise

Writer: Ernest Lehman (stage script by Arthur Laurents)

Stars: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn

Bust out the Kleenex, Shmoopers.

You know that play by William Shakespeare about two crazy kids on opposite sides of a blood feud, who fall in love and end up dying tragically because their respective families couldn't stop their feuding?

The creators of West Side Story sure did.

Luckily for us, they found an entirely new way to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. Instead of fair Verona, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean, it's the mean streets of 1950s New York City, where young gangs rumble over the right to walk down the street.

Into this hotbed of juvenile delinquency (that's what they used to call youthful offenders) come Tony (Richard Beymer), former gangbanger turned starry-eyed good guy, and the beautiful and innocent Maria (Natalie Wood), sister of the leader of a rival gang. They meet and fall in love just as their respective sides are gearing up for total war. Before these kids have even got their bearings, Tony's killed, and their budding romance becomes a doomed victim of the very hatred they both were desperately trying to escape.

West Side Story started out as a long-running, Tony-winning stage musical, and while there were plenty of previous efforts to update Shakespeare for more modern times (ever hear of Orson Welles' voodoo version of Macbeth?), none of them had the kind of talent that this one did.

From rock-star composer Leonard Bernstein came the music: a combination of classic orchestra and hip jazz that found the beating heart of those New York streets. From boy wonder (just 25 when he started work on the film) Stephen Sondheim came the lyrics: the kind of stunning, amazing works of poetry that made him a living legend. (You may have heard them in movies like Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Dick Tracy.)

From choreography legend Jerome Robbins came the idea for the play, and the dance moves that left the performers with permanent knee damage but blew the world away with their sheer unadulterated snazz. And from director Robert Wise, you had the setting moved convincingly away from the stage and into the actual streets of the city.

Put all those geniuses together and how could you not have one of the greatest movie musicals of all time?

West Side Story was a massive commercial hit. Adjust the figures for inflation, and it beats a number of movies with words like "Star Wars," "Harry Potter," "The Hunger Games" and "The Avengers" in the title. It also cleaned up at the Oscars, winning ten, including Best Picture, Best Director and a passel of acting awards (source). They should have just handed over all of them and the Oscar television audience could have been in bed by 10:30.

Just sayin'.

The Oscar rumble wasn't a totally fair fight, though. After all, the film already had Bernstein's music, Sondheim's lyrics, and Robbins' dance sequences from the wildly successful Broadway musical. Still, the adaptation wowed the Academy, edging out worthy competitors like Judgment at Nuremberg and The Hustler for Best Picture.

The picture was an international smash as well. It ran at one theater in Paris for four years. That made history in a country with plenty of cinematic history (source). The soundtrack was the hottest selling album of the 1960s; it sat at the top of the Billboard charts for more than a year.

Legions of baby-boomer teen girls sobbed by the Hi-Fi listening to that soundtrack for the hundredth time as Tony lay dying in Maria's arms. We couldn't bring him back; we couldn't even binge-watch the movie because VCRs hadn't been invented yet. All we could do was thank Bill Shakespeare and Jerome Robbins for the greatest love story of the millennium, and grab another box of Kleenex. You should, too.

Uh, yeah…you're gonna need a bigger box.

Shakespeare can be tough to get into sometimes.

We'll tell you the same thing your English teacher does: once you've figured out the rhythm and meter of his language, his plays are going to open up like a rose. But until that happens… yeah, it can be a slog.

One of the great things about Shakespeare, though, is that his stories can fit any time, any place, and any characters. How about turning Macbeth into a Japanese samurai story? Been there. The Taming of the Shrew set in a modern American high school? Done that. There's The Tempest moved to an alien planet in the far future, and King Lear planted firmly in cowboy country. These stories are so universal you can make them work anywhere, and some of the best adaptations of the Bard capture his mojo without using a single word of his dialogue.

Enter West Side Story, a jumped-up version of Romeo and Juliet taking place between rival gangs on the streets of New York. It follows the same basic path of the Shakespeare plot: two lovers on opposite sides of a bloody divide who try to make it work but are undone by their respective teams who just can't seem to put down their grudges.

The story's pretty much the same, but the setting is modern, the characters come from a world closer to our own (remember, it was considered 100% in the here-and-now when it came out), and the songs are full of 20th century energy: jazz, Latin rhythm, and the kind of funky beats that could only come from the good old U.S. of A.

These changes remind people of how generally awesome Shakespeare is, and hopefully encourages them to check the man out in the original. Plus, it demonstrates that Shakespeare was talking about things that didn't only matter in the days of hose and couplets. Heartbreaking romances, people who can't get past their hate—we've got more than our share of that in today's world, too.

That's why we still read Shakespeare (well, that and OMG it's poetry), but it's also why we reinterpret his work and find new ways to explore it. It will always have something to tell us, whether we're Montagues, Capulets, Sharks, or Jets.