“Go Home” says a prominent piece of graffiti scrawled across one of the set pieces of this year’s Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour production, West Side Story. The two words speak reams, summing up the backdrop to the musical’s tragic plot, which updated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and set it in the crowded tenements of Hell’s Kitchen in the West Side of New York in the 1950s.

Julie Lea Goodwin and Alexander Lewis in West Side Story on Sydney Harbour. Photograph © Prudence Upton

“Back where ya came from” spits one of the Anglo-American Jets to a Puerto Rican Shark: a phrase that still sounds all too familiar. West Side Story premiered on Broadway in 1957. Some elements in the show may now be showing their age, but its themes around immigration and the struggle for acceptance between different racial groups still feels utterly relevant as terrorism and nationalism take an ugly toll around the world. With the horrific events in Christchurch last week painfully fresh in everyone’s mind, the message couldn’t be more timely or heart-breaking. Composer Leonard Bernstein apparently scribbled “an out...