West Side Story
But to fully appreciate this American classic you have to see the original Jerome Robbins staging–the fully realized theatrical vision that links dance and gesture, script and score, drama and design. The genius of Robbins’s conception goes far beyond turning Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a story about the turf war between two 1950s youth gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the European-American Jets. (The details are dated, but the conflict is still with us: the Jets’ declaration of war–“We’re hangin’ a sign / Says ‘Visitors forbidden’– / And we ain’t kiddin’!”–could be the anthem of today’s antiimmigrant movement.) In the enclosed space of a proscenium stage, with Robbins’s direction and choreography carefully reproduced by Alan Johnson, West Side Story is revealed as Gesamtkunstwerk–the Wagnerian ideal of total theater in which music, text, staging, and design unite in a seamless whole.
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But West Side Story transcends any individual performers’ strengths or limitations. Almost 40 years after its debut, it remains the product of an enormously talented group whose unique collaboration created a masterpiece. This touring version is a revelation.
