Jim Wolf, Special to the Appalachian 

It’s the summer of 1948...the New York City streets are hot and the air is thick with the heat of Hispanic rhythms. 
 
Brownstone steps are crowded with families breathing in the heat of the night. There is great tension in the air—the tension of fear, hatred and distrust. 

In contrast to and in opposition of these Hispanic harmonies and rhythms are other rhythms; other musical beats, like foot tapping and singing and easy listening...on brownstone steps crowded with families...Irish, German and Italian.  Musical and ethnic contrasts are played out against strong pulsating Puerto Rican rhythms. 

New neighborhoods, new language, new culture and new music has been entering the New York scene. 
 
Renewed fears carried over from earlier cultural immigrations are rampant as New Yorkers and Americans feel threatened by the alarming new immigration of these foreigners, these “new” Americans who aren’t yet American. 

I was 17 years old, born and raised on the West Side—Columbus, Amsterdam Avenues, 97th, 103rd, 105th streets, a “toughie” from the wrong side of the tracks. 

I was a tough kid, dealing with my own transition from a tough Irish “street kid” to a Jewish middle class. 
 
A Stuyvesant High School graduate, now caught in the middle, was witnessing and experiencing this scary cultural conflict...”West Side Story.” 
While I lived out the story, Leonard Berstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim played it out. They turned the experience, the street fights, the gangs, the fears and tensions into a great aesthetic and breathtaking Broadway musical. 

This is a musical that is possibly as new to the Broadway theater scene as was the real-life drama to the quiet west side neighborhoods. 

I was not only blessed with being part of the real story, but lived my life as a toughie in the Irish neighborhood, stealing candy and fruit, taking money from kids on the way to the grocery store with their milk bottles (for nickel refunds), playing hooky from grade school and hitching on the back of every moving vehicle. 

Ten years later, I was blessed with being in an orchestra seat at the original “West Side Story” production at 52nd Street and Broadway. 

I recall walking out of the theater and crossing Broadway, sitting at the Nedicks Orange Juice counter.  I was in awe, in amazement, stage-struck and confused. 

This was my story...not only for the “street experience,” but because I had wanted to be a dancer.  This kind of dancer was strong, virile and tough. 
 
In fact, ten years earlier, I had been told I should be one, because I was a natural at it. 

I said, “I ain’t no queer,” and continued to live with fear and anxiety for years, inhibiting the dancer and artist within. 

There I was, slowly sipping orange juice in awe of this great “new” dance, this powerful music, these stirring words, all put together as a musical Broadway production. 

A real-life drama that I had been living out now played out in powerful movements, rhythms and words in front of me. 

And so last week, at Farthing Auditorium, 40 years later, I once again witnessed and experienced this great production.  Again I was stirred and moved by its strength, by the exciting tension and powerful emotions seen, felt and expressed throughout the evening. 

The streets of New York were alive again with brutal force and passion. 

The energy, the force and the excitement of the Broadway production and the fearful antagonisms of the New York streets were all present in this production. 

Powerful movements, strong, virile and gentle, the new dance movements choreographed originally by Jerome Robbins were performed with great versatility and impact. It was directed and reproduced with obvious loyalty by Kevin Backstrom. 

The “real-life” engaged couple of Jeremy Koch and Denine Mulay were the beautiful couple living out the passions of young love, with hope, with dreams and with despair. 
 
Enrique Acevedo has a good reason to be proud of his Puerto Rican culture and good reason to be proud of his strong, powerful portrayal of Bernardo. 

Meghan Murphy deserves special recognition for her touching performance of that “toughie,” would-be girl jet.  I wonder if she knows that there were girl-gangs in those 1940s street rumbles! 

I wonder also, in a final note, how many know how real those rumbles were—how much the “gangs” roamed the neighborhoods of gentrification, of expensive sidewalk cafes and restaurants. 
 
These were also the neighborhoods of crowded tenements and brownstones with families sitting on steps, playing out exciting Hispanic, Latino rhythms. 

Hot summer nights, tension, but less fear it would seem, is in the city where now, Puerto Rico is celebrated and honored for its music and culture. 

It’s people, in parades that outdo the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that I watched begin up there at 11th Street as part of my “West Side Story.”