A Bernstein revival so thrilling it’s almost overwhelming
West Side Story Curve, Leicester ★★★★★
Perhaps more than any other musical before or since, West Side Story (1957) gives us the inside scoop on the American meltingpot – and it’s no cosy tale of peace, love and communal harmony. Transplanting the strife of Romeo and Juliet to a New York beset by cutthroat territorial battles between rival ethnic street gangs, it bares the violent dark side of the land of opportunity.
No one expected it to be a hit. Sure, it affirmed the beauty of youth, the saving grace (albeit the deadly spur) of desire and even valour among the white-american “Jets” and the Puerto Rican “Sharks”. But it also showed human behaviour at its ugliest. It set a new bar for artistic innovation – Leonard Bernstein’s score sounding as if an orchestra had been forced at gunpoint to hurtle through a neurotic jukebox of colliding genres, while Jerome Robbins’s choreography pushed the body to the musclepopping limit. Audiences were wowed, but also abrasively challenged.
It has never fallen out of favour, but it is experiencing a surge in vogue. Next year sees the arrival of Steven Spielberg’s new film version, with book by Tony Kushner. And next week sees the first previews of a radical new Broadway production by Ivo van Hove that has already caused ructions: in a bid to maximise the piece’s hurtling momentum, the Belgian director has excised I Feel Pretty, the second half ’s deceptive expression of romantic calm and gaiety before the final storm.
After decades of West Side Story being frozen in aspic, risk-taking approaches are being sanctioned
– with Robbins’s work given the respectful elbow in favour of new choreographic treatments. The Manchester Royal Exchange recently suited the action to its in-the-round confines, making the movement less balletic, more bird in a cage. At Curve,
Leicester, there’s ostensibly more room for manoeuvre, but director Nikolai Foster and choreographer Ellen Kane (both scaling artistic heights) create a walled-in boisterousness and restlessness, the dance action exploding like a fusillade of pent-up tensions.
It’s exhilarating stuff, almost overwhelming to watch, such is the sinuous, often synchronised, movement, rippling with chestthumping muscularity, but also graceful too, as riotous exuberance yields to passages of calm and yearning. The music (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) is about creating ambushes and surprises, and here the sound of it – with the orchestra sometimes visible – has the force of a flame-thrower.
Michael Taylor’s set affords a monumental vision of a collapsed American dream – a soiled Stars and Stripes overhead, a rubbish-mound sunk with discarded appliances, emblematic of disposable lives.
In the opening sequence, we see a line of Puerto Rican immigrants, barked at by officials and given jostling warnings from the watching local hoodlums. There are wire-mesh fences to shinny up and hang from, and these fences acquire a menace of their own. Pushed together, they form constrictive spaces and eventually the vacant lot in which our hero, Jamie Muscato’s Tony – the dreamy refusenik street-warrior – will launch a fatal attack on the brother of his sweetheart (Adriana Ivelisse’s Maria), as the “rumble” goes hideously awry.
Every moment has been thought about, every look and move invested with a do-or-die intensity, even the buffooning. The swooning scene in which Tony clambers a concrete building to kiss his girl radiates sweetness, yet Foster undercuts it by letting the lighting around them chill.
“Hold my hand and we’re halfway there” runs the famous line in Somewhere; here, such is the nuance that you’re acutely conscious of the blood on that hand and hear no tweeness in the tune. I can’t recommend this thrilling revival more highly; it needs a further life.