West Side Story is a legendary musical. When it opened on Broadway in September 1957, it galvanized critics and audiences alike with its gritty realism, its brash music, its evocative dancing, and its modernizing of the classic Romeo and Juliet story. Critics hailed it as something entirely new and different from what Broadway had seen before: a true tragedy told in musical theater terms. The press coverage, however, was not unanimously positive; some reviewers thought the music too difficult for an average audience member to understand, some thought the work too dark and too different from what audiences were accustomed to. Indeed, the lyricist Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing a tired businessman leave the theater halfway through the show, obviously having anticipated an evening of blissful entertainment.

“That's when I knew my career was in trouble,” he recalls.2 By the time the work was revived just over a year later, with largely the same cast, it had garnered more positive reviews than the first time around. This was due in part to the fact that audiences had become more accustomed to its new sounds and look. Another reason was that it had become wildly successful at its West End premiere in London, and news of this triumph had come back to Americans through Variety magazine, among other media. Suddenly the imprimatur of Europe had left the musical more important, and seemingly more groundbreaking, than its original New York audiences and critics had found it. At this point, with a movie deal in the works, the legacy of the show seemed assured. It remains to this day one of the most performed musicals in history, taken on not just by professionals but also by high school and community companies alike. However, one part of the show's history has rarely been recounted, and that is the occasion of the musical's first appearance in out-of-town tryouts in Washington, DC. A rare moment in which cultural forces met with a new, modern musical that addressed some of those same forces, West Side Story's Washington premiere tells a fascinating story about this work and its original audiences.