A variety of films have helped extend the popularity of the Shakespearian text by setting the story in the modern age and in places other than Verona.
In 1961 the musical West Side Story was built around the wonderful yet desperate love story between the members of two enemy gangs, in the West Side of New York. To make the background¹ more cruel the Puertorican-American race barrier was added, and to increase the emotional impact words were often replaced by beautiful songs which became classical pieces, such as Maria, Tonight, America. A cast of excellent actors, from Natalie Wood to George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn, under the direction of Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, with music by Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sanheim and Robbins himself, got the film ten well-deserved² Oscars.
The hostility between two different ethnic groups, this time Chinese and Italian, living side by side in New York (China Town and Little Italy) was also exploited³ in China Girl, directed by Abel Ferrara and issued4 in 1987. Here Tye (Sari Chang) and Tony (Richard Panebianco) fall in love but they clash against the conservative mentality of their families, who are against inter-racial marriages and want to protect their mafia interests.
Similarly in Romeo+Juliet, produced in 1996, Baz Luhrmann transformed the feud⁵ between the Capulets and the Montagues into the fight between two clans for the control of Verona Beach, a suburb of a fictional American city. Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes are the convincing protagonists of this pop opera, which mixes philological truth and film modernity. It is a world where drugs circulate freely, pistols are frequently used, people weep and cry in wild agony, a world set against a background dominated by neon crosses and blue-plastered6 saints.