REVIEW - West Side Story

This brand new production of West Side Story has had some reworking from the original creative team. Some things work REALLY REALLY well, others I am still questioning!

The first and most obvious thing is that the show is bi-lingual. A lot of the PR dialogue is in Spanish. This ads another dimension to the show. In most, only the boys speak it showing how they want to hang onto their original culture and the girls will speak in English showing how they are trying to adapt and adopt the new American culture. There are a couple of scenes between Anita and Bernado where he speaks to her in Spanish and she answers back in English. This builds some great tension between the two of them.

I guess this is the show I knew the best before seeing it so can be most critical of it. Everyone I spoke to however does agree with me on the following points though. The Dream Ballet doesn’t work anymore! The first major change is a young boy soprano walks out and olds hands with Tony and Maria and sings Somewhere while everyone dances around them. The next thing that didn’t work was that the ballet doesn’t end with the Rumble which turns into the nightmare – it ends all happily ever after! That was really somewhere where the re-write didn’t work.

That aside, the dancing was AMAZING. Possibly the best I have seen in any musical EVER. The Jets boys – especially Baby John were fantastic! A lot of the choreography was a recreation of the original, but it was meant to be, but some of the new bits were great.

The set reminded me of the Savoyards production in some ways. Except these guys had a fly tower. The one thing which I think Savs / Jack as director achieved was setting up separate territories for Jets and Sharks which this production lacked.

Some of the arrangements in the music had changed slightly as well. Baby John and A-Rab are now left out of Krupke. I don’t know what the reason for this is but I didn’t like it. Maybe because I was A-Rab and would have missed out on singing a great song.

Anyway, West Side Story is definitely one of the greatest pieces of Musical Theatre – in my opinion. It combines all elements that others don’t – it has comedy, drama, dance, great orchestrations and music and is really well written. I am looking forward to seeing it again at QPAC

REASON FOR SEEING: LOVE IT, Was interested in the bi-lingual of it, To see something a little bit more ‘traditional’; Broadway with a full Orchestra etc…
BEST OF: Best dancing (only dancing show I saw though – Broadway actually has a lack of dance musicals at the moment – not including Burn the Floor and Stomp… and visually the best show – sets, lighting, costumes – Jets always were wearing orange somewhere and sharks purple.