Street Scene

By T. E.Kalem

WEST SIDE STORY

Directed and Choreographed

by Jerome Robbins

Music by Leonard Bernstein

Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by Arthur Laurents

The finest musicals are subject to sociocultural jet lag. The biorhythms of the societal clock seem organically out of kilter. No time machine can transport the audience to the 1943 spirit of Oklahoma! or the 1957 of West Side Story. Separate components (songs, dances, acting) can be marvelously exciting, but the core of the musical, what it is rather than what it does, recedes into an odd realm of detachment. The original galvanizing impact is dissipated.

Not so much so that one cannot experience a thoroughly enchanting evening in the theater. The current production of West Side Story at Broadway's Minskoff Theater surely qualifies as that. The story, if anyone needs to be told, closely parallels Romeo and Juliet. The warring feudal factions of the Montagues and the Capulets become turf gangs, the Jets (whites) and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans).

The ethnically star-crossed lovers are Maria (Jossie De Guzman), sister of Sharks Leader Bernardo (Hector Jaime Mercado), and Tony (Ken Marshall), the best friend of Jets Leader Riff (James J. Mellon). In a switchblade rumble between the two gangs, which Tony tries to prevent, Bernardo/Tybalt kills Riff/Mercado, and Tony plunges a lethally avenging blade into Bernardo. Love conquers clan loyalties as Maria clings unswervingly to Tony.

Among the key actors, De Guzman brings a radiant innocence to Maria that is quite affecting. Marshall's handsome Tony is more wood than flame, and the incendiary performance is given by Debbie Allen as Bernardo's girlfriend Anita. This woman sizzles like a severed power line. When she dances, sings and blasts her way through America, the roof of the theater starts to buckle.

Bernstein's score moves with envious ease from the melodic lyricism of Tonight and Maria to the trip-hammer tempo of menace that animates The Rumble. As for Sondheim's lyrics, what can anyone say that he can't say better?

Every court must have a king. Jerome Robbins is the monarch of West Side Story. Beyond that, he is the Jove of theater choreography. His dances are thunder bolts of invention, and his dancers are the messengers of his precise, uncompromising will. From the faintest twitch of a shoulder to hurricane tides of mass action, he is the master of the rhetoric of bodily motion. He can turn his dancers into airborne balletic Ariels who touch the ground merely to skip skyward again.

The Minskoffs may have built this theater in Times Square, but for the duration of West Side Story's run, Jerome Robbins owns it. --T.E. Kalem

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