West Side Story

The rain started a couple of minutes before the opening bars of stirring music. It grew worse as the Jets and the Sharks circled each other menacingly, even worse as Maria met and fancied Tony, and bucketed down when Anita sang of the glories and follies of ‘America’. Among the audience there was much wiping of dripping glasses and struggling to put on the available $5 macs, but the cast sang and danced with sure-footed ease, a tribute to their non-slip footwear. The weather was expected: it’s Sydney in late March. 

After about an hour the rain cleared away and we could concentrate fully on a production by Francesca Zambello that absolutely blew your socks off. ‘Entire Original Production Directed and Choreographed by Jerome Robbins’ shrieked posters and program. Contractually that may be so, but Robbins died in 1998, and Zambello has devised and developed this marvellously wide-staged, harbour-side version, and you shouldn’t have to go searching through the $25 program to find out.

The marvel of this great production, with the Sydney skylight as a magnificent ground row, is the music, the songs. One after the other they come, either sung or danced to: an outpouring of Bernstein brilliance – he was also writing Candide and a violin concerto at the same time. Jazz, Latin American, opera, musicals, concertos – all were within Bernstein’s range and command. And then there was the writer of the lyrics: Stephen Sondheim, at 25 on his first big-time assignment.

On a setting by Brian Thomson that swung and pivoted all over the place, young Maria (Julie Lea Goodwin in good voice) fell instantly in love with handsome Tony (Alexander Lewis). Finely played also is Anita (Karli Dinardo), torn between loyalty to her best friend Maria and her Puerto Rican family.

The gang kids are finely differentiated, you dig me, buddy boy, daddio; and there’s excellent support from the adults in the cast: David Whitney as the supportive Doc, Scott Irwin as the tired detective Shrank, and Jay James-Moody as the camp Glad Hand. 

With an unseen orchestra of nearly 30, Conductor Guy Simpson leads a company of over 40 on an intense journey. The real fireworks that explode marvellously after ‘America’ bring us a sharp reminder that we are in Sydney, on the harbour, watching this splendid revival of a timeless American classic.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Prudence Upton.