West Side Story Cultural Artifact

Exploration Document

Leimaris Cruz Rosa

HUM200

Cultural Artifacts

For my artifact project, I have chosen to analyze the 1961 film West Side Story and compare it to William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. The reason behind this is the cultural connection I have with the film and its obvious ties and draws to the former. West Side Story is a film adaptation of a 1957 Broadway musical with the same name. It was directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. This musical was inspired, as I said before, by William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” using the familial differences in Shakespeare’s Verona and adapting it to a New York City of the 1950s and exploring race relations and stereotypes of the time.

Common Theme

One very clear very common

There is usually nothing positive from feuds or trying to keep two people apart. Thus, I like to advocate unity as much as I can and as often as I can. From west side story, I learned about the Puerto Rican experience during the early part of our “mass migration” to the continental US. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet being that they both died and no one was happy as a result is important because this was a catalyst to uniting the families, at least in grief over their loved ones. It also made them understand how strong their love was that they would take it to that extreme because the kids did not believe their respective families would support them. The same can be said for West Side Story. María and Tony loved each other enough to want to elope together, however Tony’s untimely death prevented that. And his death can be directly attributed to animosity between Maria’s family and her people and Tony’s. I repeat, divisions are never a positive

Given the two artifacts I chose I looked at 6 sources: three for each artifact. For Romeo and Juliet, the first one being an article written by Chris Jeffery called “What Kinds of Play Is Romeo and Juliet?” for the source “Shakespeare in Southern Africa”. The second of my sources is a literary criticism by Peter C. Herman called “Tragedy and the Crisis of Authority in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.” Written for Intertexts for San Diego State University and the third source for Romeo and Juliet is “Tragic Form in Romeo and Juliet” by Ruth Nevo written for “Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900” for Rice University in 1969. For West Side Story I’m using “Star Cross’d Lovers in Song and Verse: An Interdisciplinary Engagement with Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story” by Ryan J. Merrill of San Francisco State University, “Shakespearean Matters Reread in the Dramatic Musical Adaptations of Romeo and Juliet” by Alina Bottez an article written for East-West Cultural Passage in 2016. Finally, I will also use “"Romeo and Juliet" and "West Side Story": An Experimental Unit” by Gary J.