Well, here's another bad review of a play. This time, It's West Side Story. You'll have to wait a while to get the scoop about the LHS production from me, because, well, it's still a few months off. So sue me, I'm anxious. Well, here it is.
This weekend [April 3-5, 1998], the Fox is hosting a somewhat downsized tour of one of the unquestioned classics of musical theatre, West Side Story. The term "classic" gets thrown around quite a lot in the entertainment biz, and it usually winds up being a synonym for "old". In the case of West Side Story, however, it's fully justified. After all, the people who created it - Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins - either already were or would soon become theatrical legends. Now that we've passed the show's fortieth anniversary, it's obvious that West Side Story is one of the crowning achievements of American musical theatre, and that its moving, complex, and energetic score is one of Bernstein's best efforts in the genre.
I'm pointing this out because you wouldn't guess any of it from seeing this production. The small orchestra doesn't do justice to the complexities of the score, the pacing is slow, and while director and choreographer Kevin Backstrom seems to have done a good job reconstructing Robbins' original steps, they're executed in an imprecise fashion that robs them of much of their energy.
In fact, energy is in short supply throughout the show. As the doomed lovers Tony and Maria, Jeremy Koch and Denene Mulay are vocally persuasive and generate considerable chemistry on-stage - partly due, I suspect, to the fact that they're engaged to be married off-stage - but the rest of cast struck me as consistently flat and unconvincing. Part of this, of course, may be due to Backstrom's direction, which seems to lack any sense of the dynamics of the script. The entire affair comes across as a minimal effort by actors who need the work but are otherwise unenthusiastic about being in a small troupe doing three-night stands of a forty-year-old show in undistinguished venues.