Romeo and Juliet Compared to West Side Story

Romeo and Juliet Compared to West Side Story

We have recently been studying two different stories in our class. We read the first act of Romeo and Juliet and watched the movie West Side Story. I was surprised that I actually enjoyed both. Our assignment is to write a compare/contrast paper on what we have read so far in Romeo and Juliet and what we saw in the move West Side Story. I found that there are many things alike and many things different between the two.

There were two very noticeable similarities that I saw in the stories. In Romeo and Juliet, there was the famous balcony scene, and West Side Story also has a balcony scene. Both stories also have a common setting of a ball or dance. These are two of the many things the stories have that are alike.

There were also a lot of differences. One major difference was the time period each story was set in. In the movie West Side Story, the setting was more modern. Romeo and Juliet had a setting in the older days, as you can tell by the scenery and the language they spoke. The movie dealt with racism more than Romeo and Juliet did. In West Side Story, it was different races causing the problem for the two lovers. In Romeo and Juliet, the two lovers were the same race, but they had a feud between the families. This difference becomes a similarity though because in both stories, there was split between the lovers caused by hatred between the two families/groups.

In the stories, there was a balcony scene where the two young lovers had there first real talk and fell even more in love. In the story of Romeo and Juliet, the scene took place in an older setting on her house outside her window. In the movie West Side Story, the scene was outside her room in an ally way kind of thing, but there was the same moment shared between the two. That was a major similarity between the two stories.

In the two stories, there was also a kind of ball or dance that takes place. Juliet's family has a ball for her, and Romeo and his friends go to it. In both stories, this dance or ball is the meeting place of the two lovers, and the spot where the two families/groups meet and become furious with each other again. When Romeo and Juliet meet without knowing they had also sealed their fate by daring to be together even though there was a major feud between their families.

So as you have read in the previous paragraphs,