© Sadler's Wells 'West Side Story' reviews more Graham Watts reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

This isn’t to say that it is not without some downside. The diction of many of the actors is lost in translation, even to Row H in the stalls: in the First Circle, I gather that much of the dialogue was indecipherable. I can live with that because no-one goes to see ‘West Side Story’ for its script (I’d leave that to Shakespeare’s original). But, more problematic for me was the mish-mash confusion of costume. Sometimes clothing was spot-on: the pale green, embroidered satin jackets of the Jets were perfect for the age; but elsewhere clothes were desperately wrong. In one scene, a Jets’ girl wore a boob-tube and short, tartan skirt that could have walked straight from the shelves of ‘Top Shop’. The character of Tony was dressed in chinos and a shirt but they were fifty years removed from being a 1950s chinos and shirt and that’s the point. It distressed me a little that such a lively performance was let down by the odd modern costume that was just so wrong for the times in which the story is set.

These quibbles don’t detract from it being a fantastic show, made the more so by two extraordinarily good leads as the tragic “Romeo/Juliet” lovers, Tony and Maria. Ryan Silverman has a wonderfully expressive vocal range, shown to powerful effect in his first two solos (‘Something’s Coming’ and ‘Maria’, sung as well as I’ve ever heard) and he manages to convey the same gawky, vulnerable idealism that the unheralded Richard Beymer achieves in the film. As Maria, Sofia Escobar is outstanding, as uncompromisingly beautiful as Natalie Wood but much more Puerto Rican. Her voice is angelic and ‘I feel pretty’ has also never sounded so good. Here, I feel, a star is certainly being born.

West Side Story
© Sadler's Wells

Robbins’ choreography for the gang scenes is as fresh and powerful as the day the steps were made and the dance team exploded with energetic precision through the Rumble’s fight sequences. The danced interaction between members of the Jets gang in ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ was crisp and funny, as was the Sharks’ girlie rendition of ‘America’, a rare occasion where the dance outshone the song.

I guess that there’s a tendency to think of a fifty year-old musical as a museum piece, of its time, but sadly a story of racial gang violence culminating in the knife murder of two teenage boys is all too redolent of our own days and has a special tragic significance at this time, in this part of London. The message of the beauty of love and the futility of hate that spreads through and out of ‘West Side Story’, specifically in Bernstein’s great score and Sondheim’s bittersweet lyrics, is hauntingly and brilliantly portrayed in this revival. It is the must-see of the year!