Conclusion

Abstract

The chapter will discuss a film that, at first glance, has very little in common with the Shakespeare original. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is rendered by Leonard Bernstein, Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins into a musical and retitled as West Side Story and so it appears that there are only superficial links with the original story which concerns itself with the illicit love of two members of warring factions. The reader will be shown how this film resembles the original by considering the question raised in the introduction — that of Shakespeare’s perceived universality which suggests that the author and his plays dealt with issues that were of universal concern and dealt with matters such as love that crossed cultural and historical boundaries. In choosing to tell the story through the medium of music and dance, Bernstein, Wise and Robbins will be shown to have retold the story through visual and aural means that render it on a par with the original play in its use of nonnaturalistic devices.