More UK rehearsal room than New York melting pot
West Side Story Manchester Royal Exchange ★★★★★
Ripping a streak of bleakness across the 1957 Broadway stage a year after the feelgood My Fair
Lady, West Side Story was, at heart, a sob story, with the feuding households of Montague and Capulet in Romeo
and Juliet transmuted into the warring New York gangs of Jets and Sharks.
Conjuring forbidden love and mortal threat, Leonard Bernstein’s score – jagged, ingenious, symphonic (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) – threw down the gauntlet to musical theatre to broach the toughest subjects, with complexity.
Jerome Robbins’s legendary choreography bolstered the original show’s beauty, and expressed its macho turbulence. Yet it is sometimes seen as a constraining corset.
Paradoxically, this means that the restrictive, in-the-round dimensions of the Royal Exchange, Manchester are an opportunity for liberation – you can’t replicate the supposedly integral Robbins moves if they would fly in the face of the front row. So director Sarah Frankcom has brought in choreographer Aletta Collins to put a different spring in the show’s step.
I wish I could enthuse more about this departure, which gives those familiar finger-clicks their marching orders, and reins in the big balletic stuff. To her credit, Collins’s approach has an organic quality. It makes room for understatement, with bodies congregating and dispersing as if by unspoken intuition, sudden stand-offs and peelings-away. It’s busy rather than hectic, and impressively stamina-testing.
What’s missing, though, is bladesharp synchronicity and a killer instinct: the mood must come from the gut, not pre-plotted thrusts. Robbins’s original choreography didn’t just break the mould – it almost broke his cast, stoking animosity all the time.
Between them, Collins and Frankcom have produced a welldrilled but rather too clean-cut bunch. American accents aside, this West Side Story feels more UK rehearsal room than NYC melting pot.
The tenderness between the leads – Gabriela Garcia’s graceful Maria and Andy Coxon’s initially downbeat Tony – is well caught, the singing is a delight, and the sound (take a bow musical supervisor/orchestrator Jason Carr and team) is thrilling at such close quarters. Elsewhere, though, as the song Somewhere has it, it’s “halfway there”.