Stage REview
WEST SIDE STORY
Book by Arthur Laurents. Music by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by Bob Richard. Original choreography by Jerome Robbins, adapted by Diane Laurenson. At North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly, through Nov. 20. Tickets: $54-$79, 978-232-7200, www.nsmt.org
BEVERLY — “West Side Story’’ is one of a very small handful of universally recognized — and almost universally beloved — musicals. Politicians would kill for that kind of name recognition and those approval ratings.
The show brought together a Dream Team for the ages, providing a showcase for the boundless invention of director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, inspiring Leonard Bernstein to write perhaps the greatest music he would ever compose, allowing librettist Arthur Laurents to hone skills that would come to fruition two years later with “Gypsy,’’ and introducing a lyricist named Stephen Sondheim, only 27 when “West Side Story’’ premiered on Broadway in the fall of 1957.
In the six decades since then, this Americanized version of “Romeo and Juliet’’ has been produced countless times, including a sparkling production last year at the Strand Theatre by Fiddlehead Theatre Company, and a 2011 touring show at the Colonial Theatre that featured the innovative use of Spanish in some dialogue and lyrics, translated by none other than a pre-“Hamilton’’ Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Innovations are few and inspiration is scarce in the straightforward “West Side Story’’ that has arrived at North Shore Music Theatre. Directed by Bob Richard, it’s a sprightly production that boasts a genuinely captivating Maria in Evy Ortiz, who glows in every scene she’s in, and a fiercely compelling Anita in Michelle Alves. But overall it could use more sizzle, more soul, a sharper edge of danger, and a stronger sense of mortal stakes in the star-crossed love affair at its center. The upshot is that one admires aspects of this “West Side Story’’ without ever really surrendering to the show as a whole — and certainly without feeling shattered by it.
As Tony, the supple-voiced Bronson Norris Murphy nails “Something’s Coming,’’ “Maria,’’ and “Tonight,’’ the latter in a duet with Ortiz. But he’s just not plausible as the onetime leader of the Jets street gang, conveying little of the raw charisma and flinty street-smarts such a position would have required. (This has been true, by the way, of virtually every Tony I have ever seen onstage.)
For a tragic romance like “West Side Story’’ to fully work, both the romance and the tragedy need to get under our skin more deeply than they do in this incarnation. The relationship between Tony and Maria does not register here as a consuming passion.
The in-the-round configuration of North Shore Music Theatre does no favors to the staging of a musical that is all about impulse: toward confrontation, toward violence, toward love. In the speeded-up narrative of “West Side Story,’’ emotional transformations occur in the blink of an eye, and it can be frustrating if you happen to be looking at an actor’s back or profile when one happens.
More successful is Diane Laurenson’s adaptation of Robbins’s original Broadway choreography, a succession of dynamic and convulsive movements, as quick as the snap of a switchblade. Better than Laurents’s pseudo-tough-guy dialogue, the dance sequences communicate the restless, self-destructive energy of the Jets and the Sharks and their vain attempts to contain it, especially in the largely wordless prologue that establishes the rivalry between the gangs while offering hints of the deadly doings to come, and in the Act 2 “Somewhere Ballet,’’ in which hope evaporates and despair takes hold.
In the current immigrant-bashing political environment, there’s a grim timeliness to the deadly turf battle between the Jets and the Sharks, complete with ugly epithets and “Go back where you came from’’ mockery directed at the Puerto Rican Sharks. “My old man says the Puerto Ricans are ruinin’ free enterprise,’’ one of the Jets says. The show’s portrait of law enforcement, willing to abuse its power while siding against minorities, also has a dispiriting aura of topicality.
An insouciant Alves leads the Shark Girls through a spirited performance of the satirical “America,’’ but “Gee, Officer Krupke,’’ an authority-mocking number by the Jets, does not yield the comic gold it should.
David Coffee, familiar to NSMT audiences as Scrooge in the theater’s annual productions of “A Christmas Carol,’’ brings impressive moral weight to the role of Doc, proprietor of the drugstore where the Jets hang out. Tyler John Logan and Alexander Gil Cruz are solid as Riff, the leader of the Jets, and Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks.
But it is the radiant Ortiz, as Maria, whose all-or-nothing urgency carries this “West Side Story’’ to its highest points.
WEST SIDE STORY
Book by Arthur Laurents. Music by Leonard Bernstein. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by Bob Richard. Original choreography by Jerome Robbins, adapted by Diane Laurenson. At North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly, through Nov. 20. Tickets: $54-$79, 978-232-7200, www.nsmt.org
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.
