West Side Story – Sadler’s Wells

West Side Story at Sadler’s Wells, London. Picture: Roy Tan

West Side Story continues at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London until 22 September and then tours.

Simply stunning! There may have been productions of West Side Story as good as the current revival but it’s hard to imagine a better one since this iconic show was launched on Broadway in 1957.

The combined genius of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents produced a masterpiece which is as fresh and relevant to today’s problems about race, violence and hatred as it was all those years ago. It broke the boundaries of musical theatre then with its contemporary Jets versus Sharks re-telling of Romeo and Juliet and it will be played and loved long after we are all gone.

Songs like ‘Tonight’, ‘I Feel Pretty’, ‘Somewhere’, ‘America’, ‘One Hand, One Heart’, ‘Something’s Coming’ and the hilarious ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ that have become unforgettable with the passage of time combine with Joey McKneely’s thrilling, electrifying choreography to get the audience on their feet for multiple standing ovations.

The names of the cast in this international touring production that has been travelling all over world, from Paris to Sydney, from Berlin to Sao Paulo, from Tokyo to Madrid, are mainly American but with a Canadian, Liam Tobin, as Tony and a Spaniard, Elena Sancho Pereg, who completed her opera course at the Guildford School of Music and Drama, as the ingenue Maria.

They may not be familiar names but, my goodness, they’re good. Practically all have to be triple-threat performers, able to act, dance and sing with equal facility. Finding young people with all three talents is never easy but director/choreographer McKneely has come up trumps with a vengeance. This is a reprise of the West Side Story that played at Sadler’s Wells for five weeks for a 50th anniversary production in 2008 but it is even slicker now.

Tobin has come a long way since finishing runner-up in a TV reality show. Since then he has done a number of shows like Blood Brothers, but surely nothing matches his clear-voiced and moving Tony, while Pereg’s soprano marries innocence with passion in ‘Tonight’, ‘One Hand, One Heart’ and ‘I Have a Love’.

This pair sang the leads when I saw the show at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris last November but there’s a new Anita, and a sexier, sultrier one, with New Yorker Penelope Armstead-Williams replacing Yanira Marin in the role made famous on Broadway by Chita Rivera and won a 1961 movie Oscar for Rita Moreno. Hard to believe they did it better. The rape scene in Act II is as powerful and surprising as ever.

Donald Chan directs the orchestra with flair but occasionally too much power, particularly in the ‘America’ sequence, but that is a minor blemish which will quickly be ironed out.

Even if Sondheim now almost disowns some of the songs that made him famous, calling some of the lyrics “bloodless” – Bernstein always used to say that Steve hated ‘I Feel Pretty’ and ‘One Hand, One Heart’ “and never lost an opportunity to say so” – please don’t miss this treat.

 Jeremy Chapman