Every so often, if you’re lucky, a song that you’ve known and loved forever becomes a revelation. One such instance is when Isaac Powell delivers Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s rapturous ballad “Maria” in the new Broadway revival of West Side Story. As most reading this review know, Powell’s character, Tony, the increasingly ambivalent co-founder of a New York street gang called the Jets, has just met Maria, the sister of the leader of a rival gang, the Sharks, and to say that Tony is besotted would be a vast understatement.
“Ma-ree-ah,” Powell utters, adorably, before launching into a performance that is—like his Tony, generally—at once delightfully goofy and dead serious, desperate and indomitable, brimming with the unbridled joy and sheer sense of wonder particular to young love. Whether he’s raising his lilting lyric tenor to caress a high note or simply shrieking in ecstasy, you believe that this Tony will, truly, never stop saying Maria.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Powell’s portrayal is both a high point of this production—helmed by Ivo van Hove, one of the most sought after and controversial directors of our era—and of a piece with it. Van Hove has assembled a magnificent cast for what is, not surprisingly, a distinctly contemporary, graphic, brooding (but not humorless), and powerful take on one of the greatest and most groundbreaking works in musical theater. Watching fog rise off the stage, and listening to what sounded like a faint rumble in between certain songs, I was reminded of a colleague’s comment that the Belgian director likes to stage the subtext of plays—and of how I irritated I was by the tics and tricks in some of his previous New York efforts.
Not so here. Most notably, scenic and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s longtime collaborator, has teamed with video designer Luke Halls to make the latter aspect central to this production. An enormous screen projects both live and pre-recorded images, threatening to overshadow the actors at times but also providing vivid insights, not all of them dark. During “The Jet Song,” we see the different individuals in the gang preening and clowning through the streets, even as the young men glower as a collective.
Tony and Maria—the latter played by Juilliard undergrad Shereen Pimentel, with both earthy spunk and a refined, glistening soprano—are also revealed as fleshed-out modern teenagers, with van Hove mining the awkwardness and humor in their rapid-fire courtship, and nurturing a wonderfully playful rapport between his leading actors. Meeting in secret in the sweatshop (a bridal shop, in the original book) where Maria works—which can appear, like other sets, like a dollhouse as it also looms large on the screen hanging over it—Powell and Pimentel giddily follow each other into hidden nooks, like tiny figures defying the injustices that will doom them.
One of the most disputed features of this West Side Story may stem from van Hove’s decision to jettison Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, a dazzling watershed for dance on Broadway, to work with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, an accomplished veteran but a musical theater newbie. But De Keersmaeker has retained a sense of tension and release, of allowing frustrated youth to express their burning stories through movement, crafting exhilarating vehicles for the supple, charismatic performers—among them Yesenia Ayala, who exudes sexual intensity as Anita, Maria’s feisty protector and confidante and her brother’s girlfriend, and Broadway newcomer Dharon E. Jones, whose strong singing and nuanced acting as Jets leader Riff unveils a new triple threat.
A bigger problem for purists might be van Hove’s gutting of a good chunk of what was the second act. In shaving his production down to an hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission, the director has eliminated the breezy standard “I Feel Pretty,” so that the tragic momentum that begins building with “The Rumble,” originally the Act One finale, isn’t disrupted. More significantly, he and De Keersmaeker have eliminated the iconic “Somewhere” ballet, and replaced the original “America,” a ferociously witty, all-female showstopper, with the watered-down, co-ed number featured in the 1961 film adaptation.
There’s also a noble attempt to inject more racial diversity into a show that specifically highlights bias against Puerto Ricans, even as it exposes the general dangers and idiocy of intolerance. A number of the actors playing Jets, including Jones and even Powell, are non-Caucasian or of mixed race—as many Puerto Ricans are. But with Arthur Laurents’s original libretto and Sondheim’s lyrics intact, little is done to reflect the gang’s evolution from what has commonly been perceived as a posse of white xenophobes in the 1950s to a group dealing with our current, equally troubling dynamics—aside from a video montage documenting police brutality, juxtaposing the traditionally comic “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in which a black youth is attacked with particular force.
Then again, perhaps that’s part of the point—that just as the Jets have been, from the start, descendants of people from other lands, they share more with the Sharks than they realize. In any case, it’s a tribute to this unsettling, transporting production that its quirks and departures do little to diminish its overall potency. If you were going to choose only one West Side Story to see in your lifetime, you might miss this one. But I would strongly advise against either option.
West Side Story opened February 20, 2020, at the Broadway Theatre. Tickets and information: westsidestorybway.com
