NYT Review: West Side Story

Via The New York Times: In the production that opened Thursday night at the Palace Theater, which lovingly replicates Mr. Robbins’s balletic choreography, what prevails is a tenderhearted awareness of the naked vulnerability of being young and trapped in an urban jungle. Half a century ago middle-class adult theatergoers were shocked and appalled by the brutality of the ethnic gang warfare of “West Side Story.” (The first sentence of Brooks Atkinson’s review in The New York Times said that “the material is horrifying.”) This time audiences — the grown-ups, anyway — are more likely to respond with feelings of parental protectiveness.

Yet the show seems haloed in a softening mist of compassion, turning its sidewalk Romeo and Juliet — and most of its young characters — into imperiled babes in the
woods. And as designed by James Youmans, the mean streets of Manhattan exude
a rainbow lyricism, even in inky darkness. David C. Woolard’s costumes, as Peter Marks previously observed in The Washington Post, bring to mind the color-coordinated peppiness of Gap ads. Mr. Laurents has exchanged insolence for innocence and, as with most such bargains, there are dividends and losses.

The best news is how newly credible and affecting the show’s central love story becomes in this context, with Matt Cavenaugh and Josefina Scaglione as the doomed Tony, an idealistic Polish-American, and the virginal Puerto Rican Maria. As Mr. Sondheim has observed, “There are no characters in ‘West Side,’ nor can there be.” They are by necessity, he said, “one-dimensional characters for a melodrama.”