This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the film West Side Story. If you’re only familiar with this landmark musical from the innumerable spoofs of it in sitcoms and sketch comedy, you’re at least vaguely aware of the way it portrayed the violent conflicts of warring street gangs through song and dance numbers. See the late, great Norm Macdonald in the “Cobras and Panthers” skit on Saturday Night Live, as just one of many examples.

It’s clear that some degree of machismo motivates a lot of these spoofs, along with the waning of the once enormous popularity of the film musical since the late 1960s. But even in its heyday, it was startling — and, to some, off-putting — to find such intense topical issues tackled in a genre thought of as the frothiest, lightest, and most romantic of them all. The hitmaking team of Rodgers and Hammerstein had been building toward this, addressing themes like racism in shows such as South Pacific as far back as 1949. But the 1957 stage version of West Side Story took a far more radical approach, with its gritty slum setting, depictions of deadly gang violence, and scornful satire of corrupt, racist policing.

If you’ve never seen West Side Story, or not recently, you might not realize how hard-hitting it is. Both warring gangs vying for turf hate the vicious goon cops policing their neighborhood and refuse to cooperate with them. In a scene in which the gangs are planning a rumble at the local candy store, the bigoted cop Lieutenant Schrank kicks out the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks, saying scornfully, “Oh yeah, sure, I know. It’s a free country, and I ain’t got the right. But I got a badge. Whatta you got?” The Sharks leave, sardonically whistling the anthem “America,” the opening lyrics of which go, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing . . . ”