west side story became the smash hit stage musical of 1957 through a combination of leonard bernstein’s dramatic score with jerome robbins exuberant dance routines. the long awaited film version arrived in 1961 and starred richard beymer as tony, rita moreno as anita and natalie wood as maria. its original soundtrack album clocked up 53 weeks on top of the billboard stereo albums chart and 12 on the mono, making it the album with the most weeks at number 1 of the rock (post 1955) era.