- Carol Rosegg
- Bernardo vs. Riff
West Side Story opened last night to a standing ovation. A favorite musical for lots of people, this is the first national tour of the show and the 2009 revival version (a little darker and different than the original 1957 premiere).
Unlike other musicals, West Side Story grows younger!
That’s the tagline for the production—a gimmicky contradiction, but I see their point. It’s dated at times, but after 50 years West Side Story is still pretty damn clever and fresh, which seems a particular feat as it is a pop culture reference so engrained in our minds. Most people probably grew up with the movie: the ‘50s take on Romeo and Juliet, of racial tension and gang violence. I know I watched the film three times just during grade school. And yet we keeping coming back!
In the end it’s the music (thanks Steven Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein), not the storyline, that’s carried the piece all these years. It’s the excitable horns, with their melting pot of jazz, opera, and symphony, that keep you caring. The Jets’ “Gee, Office Krupke” is still hilarious, or at least amusing; they make it cruder for the stage—with the gang punting invisible babies and pulling open their waistbands to examine their “social disease.” Reading that now, it doesn’t sound like it would be funny. But it is! Lookit, the film version:
Seeing the production live adds tension and conflict, exemplified by the scene just before Tony (Ross Lekites) is shot: you have Tony, the Jets, Anita, and Maria all onstage, singing different songs simultaneously, all holding their own. The casting is mostly excellent; Maria (Evy Ortiz) maybe has too much of a Snow White-like vibrato in her voice, but has the right innocent charm. Riff (i.e. Mercutio—arguably everyone’s fave—played by Drew Foster) is nice n sassy.
The lighting and sets are particularly great—they’re like the angles and edgy lines of an Expressionist film paired with a Technicolor vibrancy similar to the movie. (Best set pieces include the giant gate that drops down and screens the stage during the fight scene, and the gymnasium with its symmetrical streamers.) It’s noteworthy that the film was a feat in itself, especially in cinematography, with the crew using cool new panoramic lenses and digging holes in the ground to capture lower-angle shots.
As in the movie, the fight scenes are always so ridiculously satisfying, I think because it requires so much coordination and cooperation to rumble like that—though this is also part of what feels dated: the fighting is a little too polite and rigid. (I imagine them as if it was the Fonz, a slightly more coordinated Fonz, who actually fought in Happy Days.) There’ve been complaints about the tight hold the Jerome Robbins estate has on the choreography of the production. In spite of this stalemate, it’s still quite alive. Watch this mildly cheeky montage put together by Broadway Across America, and judge for yourself:
<cemter?
WHO THE FUCK IS JENNA LECHNER? IS THIS A NEW INTERN?
@Graham – She’s been around since March!
Her first post was great, and I still plan on getting myself one.
Also, Scrummy’s profile pic perfectly matches his last comment.
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/Blogto…
Jenna is a former arts intern who made the perilous leap to freelancer a few months ago.
I’m always curious what the best WSS production actually looks like. Then ones I’ve seen (including the one PCS put on when it opened) have been entertaining nights out but average in comparison to the film. The dancing just can’t be replicated on stage. Nothing’s come close to the amazing athleticism of the school dance scenes.
If I remember correctly from the DVD, Robbins was released half-way through the making of the film for basically being a prick and I wonder if the tight hold the estate has on productions has to do with this still.
The O claimed that this was a grittier, more realistic version of the story. That claim ran with that photo. I laughed my dick off.
I would be in so many gangs if real gangs snapped all the time.
@Graham, yea, I’ve been here since last February (as intern, at least). THANKS FOR NOTICING. Btw I think I met your girlfriend at the holiday party. But not you.
And, @TSW, they released a new, blu-ray, 50-year anniversary edition of WSS this past year, and it has a lot of cool extras. Not sure about the Robbins thing, but sounds about right.
The Broadway stage revival of West Side Story that my sister in law, my niece and I saw in late June of 2011 was enjoyable, but, being a devout fan of the film version of WSS who’s also seen several really good stage productions of West Side Story prior to seeing this one, there were a number of things that bothered me about this particular revival of the Broadway stage version of West Side Story:
A) The finger-snapping and the Jet gang whistles, which, imho, were a rather vital part of the story in the stage production and the film version, were taken out of this revival of West Side Story altogether. It’s a shame, because it’s sort of messing with a classic.
B) It’s all very well to have the Sharks speaking in Spanish, which is an interesting idea on the face of it, but this, too, is another example of messing with a classic.
C) Having seen a number of other stage productions of West Side Story that I found very good, I also felt that, while the dancing was good, and some of the voices were good in this latest WSS stage production, I have never before seen a production of West Side Story that sort of screamed at you pretty much the whole time, and that was so overly emoted by the various characters. Inotherwords, this particular production was somewhat bombastic for my tastes. Moreover, Tony’s singing voice sounded very artificial, with very slow, wide vibratos that one could practically skip-rope through (if one gets the drift), plus Tony’s singing voice sounded really forced in many places.
D) The basic musical score was retained, and it was interestingly, a somewhat more jazzed up flavor, but it did sound somewhat shrill and tinny in many places.
E) In both the film version of West Side Story and the several other stage productions of WSS that I’ve seen prior to this particular production, several Jets and Sharks come together in the end to carry Tony’s body off after he’s been shot, providing a ray of hope, and hinting of a possibility of reconciliation between both sides. Unfortunately, this production of West Side Story lacked that scene in the end, which was sort of a downer.