In London, they almost failed to restart it again. Encore upon encore. The ballads . . . 'Tonight', 'Maria', and 'Somewhere' . . . graced the airwaves.

Fifty years on, West Side Story is the show everybody wishes they had written. Two of the collaborators . . . Arthur Laurents (book) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) . . . were new to the Broadway musical. It was a volatile mix of talents, but they shared and shared alike. To a point. Bernstein always regarded West Side Story as his baby. During the Washington try-outs, the programme read "Lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim." Eventually, Sondheim did get sole credit.

For Bernstein, West Side Story was "a tragic musical comedy".

But by 1984, around the time Deutsche Grammophon proposed its disastrously wrong-headed recording with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras, Bernstein was calling West Side Story "an opera".

None of his concert works had garnered the respect of West Side Story. To his peers, West Side was still 'just' a musical, albeit a legendary one. Calling something 'an opera' somehow elevated its status. West Side Story didn't need elevating, but Bernstein was persuaded so. The whole sorry enterprise was filmed in all its gruesome detail. It made riveting viewing and sold thousands of CDs. Now, in celebration of the show's 50th anniversary, the best that the record industry can come up with is another poorly cast recording. This time, Tony and Maria come from the pop end of operatic crossover. There's Hayley Westenra, whose little-girl-lost voice is so 'white' as to deny Maria any of her feisty Latina spirit, and Vittorio Grigolo, singing prettily enough but sounding like he's on an exchange visit from Milan.

This recording conveys no feeling that these songs are part of a living, breathing, dramatic entity.

In the original, you feel that you can see and hear them in the scenes leading up to each song.

They belong. But then, for the best Broadway and West End performers, engaging with the words comes before adding the music. That isn't the case with operatic voices . . . whether fullblown or half-baked, legitimate or crossover.

The Hayley Westenra recording of 'West Side Story' is out now on UCJ