West Side Story heats up the Jube
West Side Story Broadway Across Canada touring production Directed by: Arthur Laurents, re-created by David Saint Starring: Jarrad Biron Green, MaryJoanna Grisso, Michelle Alves, Michael Spencer Smith, Benjiman Dallas Redding Where: Jubilee Auditorium Tickets: Ticketmaster (1-855985-5000, ticketmaster.ca)
“Something’s coming,” sings a boy named Tony at the start of the something that knocked the socks off the musical theatre half a century ago. “It may come cannonballing down through the sky, gleam in its eye, bright as a rose … .”
Tony, poor lad, thinks he’s talking about a life-changer, like maybe falling in love at first sight. As you’ll see when you catch the rockin’ touring revival of West Side Story that has cannonballed onto the Jube stage, Tony is actually talking about an impossibly demanding musical where the lustrous complexities of Leonard Bernstein’s score and the visceral, nervy dance conceived by Jerome Robbins were combustible — and inseparable.
Improbably, a company of 33 has taken a period landmark on the road, with its ’50s “teenage” hoodlums, its street gang warfare ballet and, embedded in the physical exuberance, its classic Romeo and Juliet tale of star-cross’d love impaled on the gang divide of homegrown and immigrant hatred in America. West Side Story is all about movement and music. The spectacle is youth (in peak aerobic condition) not chandeliers. The design (by James Youmans) is a stark, artfully minimalist arrangement of urban indicators — hints of fire escape gridwork, brick tenements, highways. The lighting (Howell Binkley) is a pattern of spotlights and shadows.
West Side Story needs the stage to move in, not to decorate. To see David Saint’s kinetic cast, full of great dancers, charge and leap into the Jerome Robbins choreography, as re-created by Joey McKneely, is to be reminded that you don’t get many chances to see a West Side Story where you don’t have to just applaud youthful high spirits, decent singing and good intentions — and leave it at that. This is the real thing. And even if the sound mix has a tinny sheen — a frequent problem with touring shows in the Jube and one that renders too many of the lyrics indecipherable in English or Spanish — and some of the characters remain flat, you shouldn’t miss this chance to experience it.
The opening ballet for machismo-fuelled hoodlums, is explosive. It sets forth a street landscape of Buddy-Boy and Daddy-O where ethnic hostility between the territorial Polish-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, the more recent arrivals, is always primed to ignite into violence. It’s all swaggering provocations, nearmiss collisions, flare-ups into body slams that subside at the last second. This is the musical that made the finger-snap the equivalent of throwing down the gauntlet. Michael Spencer Smith is particularly distinctive as the swaggering Bernardo, the short-fused, possessive leader of the Sharks who, as you know from the offensive insults of the cop, has received more than his share of sneers from his adoptive country. Riff, by contrast (Benjiman Dallas Redding), though a powerhouse dancer, looks as if he’s been in high school too long.
At the “Dance at the Gym” the stakes, and the heat, are raised further with the arrival of the girls. They play fearlessly along the sectarian divide, ’50s American sexy vs. hot Latina salsa. Michelle Alves is outstanding as Anita, Bernardo’s spitfire consort, who has a charismatic sensuality and ferocity, in both joy and fury, about her. She’s a commanding presence. And America, the multi-syllabic anthem she leads, is the evening’s highlight.
In many a West Side Story, Tony and his virginal new Puerto Rican love Maria are cardboard ciphers, nondancing innocents who get great ballads from Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Jarrad Biron Green and MaryJoanna Grisso are livelier, more animated, more affecting in their attraction than that. And the silvery-voiced latter has the kind of secret power that galvanizes Maria’s scenes with Anita, and makes it possible for her to command the final scene.
Nothing much can be done with the unintentionally goofy Somewhere fantasy ballet, a Utopian sequence in which Maria and Tony take themselves out of their hatefilled world, and the Jets and Sharks show up in pastel sand make nice with each other for a change. But the finale has been focused into a single operatic gesture by original director Arthur Laurents for this 2009 Broadway revival version that includes Spanish translation for some of the lyrics. And it lands with more seismic force than the usual parade of shamefaced thugs, suddenly reformed.
Bernstein’s score, a striking weave of jangly modernism and lush romantic ballads, is astutely reduced for the 10-piece band directed by J. Michael Duff.
It’s no accident that West Side Story programs must be annotated with “entire original production directed and choreographed Jerome Robbins.” The muse is choreographic here, as this touring production knows. Its strength is a company of hot dancers who know how to turn melodrama into excitement, physically. Catch it if you can.