JUST MET A GIRL NAMED MARIA
ONE of the great joys of watching Ivo van Hove’s fresh, youthful, exhilarating production of the golden-age musical West Side Story is studying the audience: the young people seeing it for the first time and utterly transfixed by it.
I saw an early preview at New York’s Broadway Theatre last month and was bowled over, despite the fact that several of the leads were off with busted ankles, knees and arms.
On Wednesday I got to see Isaac Powell’s Tony for the first time. Although I’ve heard the number Maria more times than I care to remember, listening to Powell’s handling of the song was like hearing it anew. This guy has just met a girl named Maria and he’s so knocked out by her that the name will never sound the same again.
And what a Maria! As played by Shereen Pimentel, who is new to me, she’s like a lioness one minute; tender as a cub in love the next. Her voice reaches high registers with effortless ease. In fact, the singing throughout is sublime.
Van Hove’s stage is bare but for panels at the back that reveal Doc’s drugstore, Maria’s bedroom, a sweatshop and a gym. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s exuberant choreography employs the entire space and is relayed by video on the enormous back screen, rendering it even more potent.
Initially, I thought the show reflected divisions here in America. But seeing it again, I realise it’s about what divides all of us.
On the way out I heard a rabbi observe that ‘only love can bring us all together’, and I thought, yep — with a little help from Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, the giants who created this work of art in 1957.
Love, music and dance is the way to go, daddy-o.