Blood on the stage, racial tensions turned violent, dissonant music, and dancing hoodlums—West Side Story was anything but the treacly Broadway musical typical of the late 1950s. It was a high-stakes, radical innovation that fundamentally changed the face of American popular drama. The movie version earned ten Oscars. Not a bad achievement for the team of virtuosos—choreographer Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents, composer Leonard Bernstein, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim—who created it.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.