West Side Story Play Analysis

I will be writing a play review of West Side Story. The lyricist Stephen Sondheim born in New York on 22nd March 1930, was inspired to write West side story based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The play is targeted to an audience of aged 15 and above as it has mature and complicated themes to understand, however if you do understand it then it is a good play to watch. 25-35 year olds will enjoy it the most as it is based on relationships and it is perhaps more appealing to the feminine side of an audience with it being a love story. Before seeing this play, I expected it to be quite laborious, nonetheless, it surprised me as the play kept you on the edge of the seat making you guess what is going to happen next. Before seeing …show more content…
The characters were very realistic and you could tell that they were really getting into character and the accents were excellent and very real. The Puerto Ricans had a good Spanish accent, which made it very realistic, they showed good technique to keep the accent going throughout the play. I didn’t know much about the play before we watched it but it became a lot clearer when we saw the two gangs started fighting you could tell that it was based on Romeo and Juliet so they did well portraying this at the start of the play. The themes of the play were Love and hate, love being the main one was as Maria and Tony fell in love however, they were from two different gangs who hated each other, a sharp contrast. Relationships were a very important theme that ran through the play as there were many. That’s all we saw from many different characters but it came back to haunt them as it was relationships that ended because of the rivalry. Another major theme was death as members of the group died due to the rivalry going on. The characters acting were believable as they really got into their roles as you could see the passion in their facial expression and they got the audience going which gave a positive vibe. Some of the characters were realistic such as the main characters but the background actors were not as strong and their acting was a bit flat and had no energy. The relationship on stage between Maria and Anita seemed to be most realistic, they had connection on the stage they would help each other out, and that looks respectable on stage the best scenes was the scene between each other. The characters did stay in character throughout and you could tell that they have practiced a lot over the last couple of months. They made it as realistic. The had a lot if lines to learn throughout and I don’t think they messed up once which was really