"West Side Story" still thrills us 40 years later both a musical and a commentary of the human spirit. Director Robert Wise has adapted the Shakespeare play "Romeo and Juliet" and place it in early 1960's New York city, where gang fights were a norm.

The Jets and the Sharks are battling each other for turf control for quite some time and if you read the play, you know what's going on. Forbidden love will bloom between two different people that will be the difference in the movie.

"West Side Story" won ten academy awards and the film has still carrys a powerful message of love and death today.

One of the best movies ever made! The music is wonderful and the dancing is fantastic. A true classic love story.

West Side Story is a beautiful film that still tugs at my heartstrings, even though it's 55 years old. I was first introduced to West Side Story through the soundtrack of the original Broadway stage production of this musical while attending day camp out west, in the summer of 1962, prior to my entering the sixth grade. A girl in the group I was in, who'd just received a copy of the LP soundtrack to the original Broadway stage production of WSS for her birthday, brought it to camp one morning and played it for the rest of our group. My love for WSS and the music took off instantly.

West Side Story-mania was in the air that summer, as kids roamed the halls, often in packs, snapping their fingers, and singing the songs, which also rang through the bus to and from camp 5 days a week. It was cool.

Since my parents didn't consider West Side Story a kids' movie, I didn't get to see the film version until around Christmastime of 1968, as a high school Senior, in a now-defunct cinema north of where I grew up, during a national re-release of the film version of West Side Story. I fell in love with this great classic instantly, and, much to my family's and friends' amusement and resignation, I've been in love with the film West Side Story ever since.

West Side Story is a film that I never get tired of seeing again and again. The MGM quote "Unlike other Classics, "West Side Story" grows younger." is so true!

How I wish it would come to movie theatres more often than it does. There's something super-special about seeing a classic film like West Side Story on a great big, wide movie screen, in a real movie theatre, with the lights down low, and sharing the experience with a bunch of other people, whether one knows them or not.

Yesterday afternoon, I drove up to a city roughly 40 minutes north of Boston to see it, and had a wonderful time, as usual.