West Side Story: The Hollywood Musical as Social Critique

West Side Story is often regarded as the first Hollywood musical with a social conscience, appropriating the plot of Shakespeare's most uninspired tragedy to tell a story about ethnic divides in inner city New York. Hollywood musicals before West Side Story were concerned with sexual politics, although a few exceptions did exist before the Sharks and Jets went leaping through the mean streets. Most notably-and the reason why it stands as one of the most meaningful Hollywood musicals of all time-was Judy Garland's Meet Me in St. Louis. Ostensibly an old-fashioned boy-meets-girl romance, the underlying thematic drive of that musical is the ultimate proof that conservative propaganda need not result in stilted entertainment. Meet Me in St. Louis is structured in such a way that the typical sexual politics of Hollywood musicals fade away almost immediately as it sets about creating an archetypal mythology of how Midwestern American values triumph over sinister Eastern elitism. Meet Me in St. Louis is as much a political film as anything Hollywood has ever produced.

West Side Story uses the traditional conventions of the musical genre to set the stage for what appears to be an examination of sexual politics as well. The movie updates Romeo & Juliet to a then-contemporary milieu and, for the most part, has characters bursting into song despite the lack of a nearby orchestra or dance lessons having been undertaken by the characters. In other words, everything is set up to make the viewer think the movie he is about to watch will be like any number of other musicals he's seen. Of course, most viewers know it will deal with subjects not normally seen in musicals such as race relations and gang violence, but ultimately it will treat those ideas no differently than it treated the idea of the opening of the west in Oklahoma!. But before it is over, something amazing will happen. West Side Story will successful engage in absolute subversion of the musical genre by using its musical numbers not to symbolize the sexual act but to examine the sociopolitical inequities inherent in the American ideology.