MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Elizabeth Blair has this appreciation.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: Unidentified Group (Actors): (as characters) (Singing) The Jets are gonna have their day tonight. The Sharks are gonna have their way tonight.
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BLAIR: Audiences flocked to "West Side Story." One critic called it revolutionary for the way it addressed racial tensions. In an interview with NPR, Arthur Laurents said because you couldn't say four-letter words on stage back in 1950s, he invented tough-sounding slang for his teenagers.
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ARTHUR LAURENTS: So I have them say things like cut the frabba-jabba. Well, it sounds like, you know, real talk. Things like daddio, which I threw in, they picked up on.
BLAIR: "West Side Story" is considered one of the greatest musicals of all time, as is another Broadway musical for which Arthur Laurents wrote the book, based on the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. In "Gypsy," Laurents created the character Momma Rose, a stage mother from hell.
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BLOCK: (as Momma Rose) Well, she's nothing without me. I'm her mother and I made her. And I can make you now.
BLAIR: Complex and grand is how New York Times critic Ben Brantley described Momma Rose. Arthur Laurents was known for writing stories that examined the extremes of human nature. In the 1940s, he started writing for Hollywood, but his movie career was suspended when he was blacklisted. Several years later, the experience inspired his screenplay for "The Way We Were," starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.
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ROBERT REDFORD: (as Hubbell Gardiner) ... rights. We don't have free speech in this country. We never will have.
BARBRA STREISAND: (as Katie Morosky) We never will if people aren't willing to take a stand for what's right.
REDFORD: (as Hubbell Gardiner) We never will have it because people are scared.
BLAIR: Unidentified Man (Actor): (as Tony) (Singing) Make of our vows, one last vow.
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BLAIR: Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Steven Sondheim and Arthur Laurents created "West Side Story" together in the late 1950s. Arthur Laurents told NPR they shared something unique.
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LAURENTS: Unidentified Man and Woman #2: (as Tony and Maria) (Singing) ...one heart. Even death won't part us now.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "WEST SIDE STORY")
BLAIR: Elizabeth Blair, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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