AmericanTheaterWeb Original News & Reviews

Updates, 3:00PM EST, March 20, 2009

AmericanTheaterWeb

Review - West Side Story
A Beautifully Compelling Revival

New York Times

Our Gangs
Arthur Laurents has exchanged insolence for innocence in the new revival of “West Side Story,” and, as with most such bargains, there are dividends and losses.

New York Daily News

'West Side' revival is halfway there
Forget the Sharks' and Jets' bad boys. It's the girls who rule in this uneven new Broadway production of "West Side Story," which manages only intermittently to take us "somewhere" special.

amNY New York City Theater

Theater Review of West Side Story
This is not your grandmother’s “West Side Story.” Tony and Maria are making out like bunnies at first sight. The Jets, once a clean-cut gang, now resemble skinheads covered in grit and grime. And in an attempt to make the musical more realistic and relevant, the Puerto Rican Sharks now occasionally speak and sing in Spanish. For example, Stephen Sondheim’s lyric “I Feel Pretty” is now “Siento Hermosa.”

Newsday

Review: 'West Side Story'
The much-anticipated rethinking of "West Side Story" is neither revelation nor vandalism

New York Post

Shark attack!
'West Side Story' feels pretty...good

New York Magazine

Come Again?
Revivals of West Side Story and Blithe Spirit work, more or less—more thanks to two performances

Bergen Record

Powerful dance in an age-old story
The Sharks and Jets are back in Broadway's revival of 'West Side Story.'

Washington Post

Theater Review: Broadway's 'West Side Story' at the Palace Theatre
At last, Josefina Scaglione gets the Tony she deserves. And we're not talking about a certain coveted statuette. No, it's Matt Cavenaugh's portrayal of Tony, the reformed hoodlum who sweeps a Puerto Rican girl off her feet, that has risen to the occasion in the newly, slightly improved...

Los Angeles Times Culture Monster Blog

Review: 'West Side Story' on Broadway
The further we get in time from when “West Side Story” was written, the more the musical’s mythic dimension come into focus. This beloved 1957 classic earns its timeless status not through the authenticity of its snapshot of gang-ridden New York but rather through its re-envisioning of “Romeo and Juliet” as a ravishing fusion of drama, dance and song.

Associated Press

Dancing, music still shine in 'West Side Story'
The Sharks and the Jets are facing off again for turf supremacy, and that's the good news. More than a half-century after it first opened on Broadway, "West Side Story" remains Broadway's best dance-driven musical.

Wall Street Journal

Tough Guys Don't Dance
Arthur Laurents's "West Side Story" has been revised and reconfigured to appeal to a new generation of theatergoers, but with disappointing results.

Bloomberg.com

`West Side Story' Revival Is Tight, Tough, Not to Be Missed: John Simon
“West Side Story” is back! The Laurents-Bernstein-Sondheim-Robbins landmark musical returns in an important production to Broadway’s Palace Theatre, tweaked and directed by its indomitable 91-year-old librettist, Arthur Laurents. Whether you’ve seen several mountings of it or none, you will want to catch this one.

USA Today

'West Side Story' revival gets a cultural makeover
... The irony is that Laurents' attempts to be inclusive and grittily realistic — the final scene in particular suffers for his insistence on technical accuracy — make the show seem no fresher, only a tiny bit less magical.

Variety

Review: West Side Story
The consummate craftsmanship of "West Side Story," with its matchless ability to weave a solemn narrative through music and dance, still dazzles after more than 50 years.

Hollywood Reporter

Theater Review: West Side Story
Bottom Line: A grittier, tougher, bilingual “West Side Story” that doesn’t necessarily improve on the original.

Back Stage

West Side Story reviewed by David Sheward [critic's pick]
It happened for me during "America." I forgot I was sitting in a Broadway theatre watching professional actors in a revival of West Side Story.

TheaterMania

Review: West Side Story
Arthur Laurents' Broadway revival proves that the classic musical remains vital after more than 50 years.

Talkin' Broadway

Review: West Side Story
They’re at it again, those two bloodthirsty factions battling for limited space. Their conflict may seem meaningless to you, but to them it’s literally a matter of life and death. So when you see them duking it out onstage at the Palace, in the new revival of West Side Story that just opened there, you can’t help but be reminded of the countless other times they’ve played their violent game in the name of some primitive notion of progress.

CurtainUp

Review: West Side Story
Emotions run both caliente and frio in this close to perfect revival in
which Puerto Rican Spanish has been integrated into the spoken text and sung lyrics.

 

For people who scoff at the idea of love at first sight, plays like Romeo and Juliet and the musical West Side Story, which draws upon Shakespeare's tragedy for its plot, require a rather hefty suspension of disbelief. In both of these works, a pair of "star crossed lovers" see one another and are instantly catapulted into a desire for and adoration of one another that leads to death. Such cynics, and I count myself among them, will have to reconsider their thoughts on instantaneous rapture after seeing Arthur Laurents' thrillingly haunting revival of "West Side" which opened last night at the Palace Theatre.

The object of adoration in the show is Josefina Scaglione, a young Argentine making her Broadway debut in the role of Maria, the Juliet of this 1950s teenage gang revision to the Bard's play. Scaglione certainly makes for a captivatingly beautiful heroine from her first appearance, but when she begins to sing, in a sweet, clarion, almost birdlike soprano that belies the power and passion that it can hold, love is not only in the air for Tony (Matt Cavanaugh), the Anglo who falls for this FOB Puerto Rican, but also for theatergoers.

To say that the world, or the show, "went away" – to borrow from one of Sondheim's lyrics for "West Side" – after Scaglione and Cavanaugh delivered a ravishing "Tonight," would not be entirely accurate, but I will admit to tearing from Scaglione's first notes, and eagerly anticipating the next moments in which Maria would sing.

Before and after this duet, the pleasures of "West Side" are considerable and even if Scaglione were less movingly impressive, this revival is vital and vibrant. From the moment the curtain rises on James Youmans' black and white rendering of city buildings and the old elevated train tracks – expressionistic to start but made more so by Howell Binkley's striking lighting design – the production captivates and the menace that dooms Tony and Maria's sweet love is palpable.

When the two gangs – the gringo Jets and the Latino Sharks – confront one another in the street, the ensemble performs Jerome Robbins' legendary choreography (reproduced by Joey McKneely) with edgy precision as Leonard Bernstein's jagged, urban-souding music plays. The tension felt during the show's opening moments makes the meeting between the innocent Maria and, in Cavanaugh's appealing performance, almost doe-eyed Tony all the more heart-racing. One wants them to have the chance to fall in love and be happy, and yet, even if one has never experienced the piece, or its Elizabethan ancestor, that such bliss will never materialize.

How could it when anger is the primary emotion that characters express alongside their love? When the Jets, led by Action (Curtis Holbrook), offer up the comic "Gee Officer, Krupke," their bitterness with the world into which they've been born is palpable. Later when Anita (performed with passion and danced beautifully by Karen Olivo) arrives at the drug store where Tony works to deliver a message from Maria, the Jets' assault on her is wince-inducing.

The intensity of these sequences is only enhanced by the fact that they are preceded by "Somewhere," a standard that has become something of a chestnut. But when sung in a beautiful boy soprano by Nicholas Barasch, it sparkles with an innocence and hopefulness that touches before cruelly disappearing into the eddy of hatred and prejudice.

If theatergoers feel themselves hurtled along with the lovers to the show's tragic conclusion, Laurents' judicious trims to his original book, economical to start, may be one reason why. Another factor may be the new Spanish translations provided by Lin-Manuel Miranda, of In the Heights. While non-bilingual audience members will not lose their way with the plot of the emotions, they will find themselves experiencing a disorientation in moments that's similar to what Maria, Tony and their friends are finding with one another's cultures.

Given how well the revisions work and the truly compelling performances from Scaglione and Cavanaugh, it's difficult to not wish that some of the other principal performances were more compelling. Both Cody Green and George Akram, playing Jets' leader Riff and Sharks' leader Bernardo, respectively, offer solid, but unremarkable, interpretations of the characters whose animosity for one another truly dooms the lovers for whom audiences care and cheer from the moment they meet.

---- Andy Propst

---

West Side Story plays at the Palace Theatre (1564 Broadway). Evening performances are Tuesday at 7pm; Wednesday through Saturday at 8pm. Matinees are Wednesday and Saturday at 2pm and Sunday at 3pm. Tickets are $46.50 - $121.50 and can be purchased by calling 212-307-4100 or by visiting www.Ticketmaster.com. Further information is available online at www.BroadwayWestSideStory.com.

Printer-friendly version