Does ‘West Side Story’ Speak to Today’s World? : Theater: Yes, says Arthur Laurents, who wrote its book. He wouldn’t change anything to contemporize it.

Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for “West Side Story,” rejects the notion that the most electrifying musical of the 1950s doesn’t fit the 1990s.

“People who say it’s dated are people who take theater literally,” he explains. “Theater is not literal. It never was.”

So when the producers of the new touring version of “West Side Story” came to him for suggestions on mounting their $3-million, 33-city revival, Laurents gave them a simple piece of advice.

“Cast as young as possible,” but change nothing else.

The international road production, which opened last month in Detroit, premieres tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. It will make additional California stops in Fresno, Palm Desert, San Diego and Pasadena (Jan. 23-28, at the Civic Center).

In a recent telephone interview from his beachfront home in Quogue, N.Y., where he has lived for the last 40 years, Laurents, 78, said he wouldn’t think of changing so much as a word to contemporize the script.

“Once you start that, it’s like pulling a card out of a house of cards. You have to keep it where it was, or the thing falls in.”

Laurents recounts that he and the creative team for the original 1957 Broadway production--composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins--sidestepped the question of age in casting the two street gangs who frame the show’s tragic love story.

“At the time, we didn’t want to face how young these kids were when they got involved in gangs,” he said. “Today it’s quite obvious they’re even younger.”

But he contends that even though the two gangs in “West Side Story” do battle with quaint weapons next to the arsenal of today’s gangbangers, they nonetheless take their revenge as “savage killers” and are easily seen as emblematic of our drive-by shooters, albeit more chivalrous.

“One gun,” Laurents said, “is a metaphor for a whole bunch of Uzis. ‘West Side Story’ was a metaphor then. It’s more of [a] metaphor now.”

The initial idea for the musical came from Robbins, who wanted to stage a modern retelling of “Romeo and Juliet.” The two lovers would be torn apart by their families over religion. Though based on Shakespeare, the story would be a Jewish-Catholic sort of “Abbie’s Irish Rose” set to music.

“Jerry wanted me to write the words and Lenny to write the music,” Laurents recalled. The trio talked the concept over as early as 1949. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1955, when Laurents and Bernstein ran into each other at the Beverly Hills Hotel, that the collaboration truly began.

“Lenny and I were sitting by the pool,” he recounted. “It was just a coincidence. He was out there to conduct something at the Hollywood Bowl. I was out there working on a movie, ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ for Otto Preminger.

“Jerry had been after us. We were talking about the Chicano gangs in California--there was a lot about ‘juvenile delinquency’ in the papers. So Lenny said, ‘Let’s put the story in California.’ I said, ‘No, let’s put it in New York. We’ve got the Puerto Ricans.’ Lenny liked the idea immediately, and there we are.”

They kept the concept of warring immigrants but transformed the Jewish-Catholic family conflict into a racial conflagration between the Jets (white) and the Sharks (Puerto Rican), caught up in a battle for turf on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

When the creative team realized that Bernstein’s lyrics wouldn’t do, Laurents recommended that Sondheim, who at 25 had yet to make his mark, come in to write new lyrics.

“I saw him at an opening night party for an awful thing called ‘Isle of Goats,’ and I remembered that he’d played some of a score for us that was never done. We were looking for a lyricist, and I thought, ‘Oh God, you’re it!’

“I felt Steve’s lyrics were brilliant then. I still do. I think he’s the most brilliant lyricist there ever was. No one is as good as he is, and I’m going all the way back.”

Laurents, who has collaborated with Sondheim on three other musicals (“Gypsy,” “Do I Hear a Waltz?” and “Anyone Can Whistle”) and is a close friend of his, is not known for effusive praise. Indeed, he is rather terse about Sondheim-the-composer.

“Steve’s gotten better. I won’t comment further. Let’s just stick with the compliments. He’s the only one I’d do another musical with, which is possible. We’ve talked about it.”

But it is Bernstein’s music that Laurents is in thrall to. The score for “West Side Story” is “unparalleled theater music that nobody has ever come near,” he said. “ ‘Candide’ is wonderful, but the music has more pastiche. ‘West Side Story’ is by and large pure .”

Not that he doesn’t have quibbles. Laurents believes that “I Feel Pretty” doesn’t belong in the show. “It’s too Broadway. Steve and I both think that Maria would never have sung it.”

Once or twice an incriminating musical phrase shows “Lenny also going around the bend toward opera”--bad form in Laurents and Sondheim’s scheme of things.

“There was a snobbism then, and it still exists,” Laurents said. “I don’t doubt that Lenny, whom I liked enormously and got on with wonderfully, might have wanted ‘West Side Story’ to be an opera. But he was the only [one] of us who did.”

* “West Side Story” touring production is at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight-Fri., 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. $19-$49.50. (714) 740-2000 or (213) 480-3232.