National Youth Music Theatre – West Side Story

Picture: Katja Ogrin

West Side Story was performed by members of the National Youth Music Theatre at the Birmingham Hippodrome.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Founded in 1976 by Jeremy James Taylor, National Youth Music Theatre (NYMT) has premiered 30 new musical theatre works and staged more than 50 productions at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe over five decades, but its London pedigree runs just as deep.

NYMT staged the London premiere of Jason Robert Brown’s 13 at the Apollo Theatre in 2012, and has made Southwark Playhouse Elephant something of a recent home (productions have included Merrily We Roll Along, Into the Woods and the new musical Catastrophe Bay from Two Strangers writers Jim Barne and Kit Buchan).  

The company’s bold new production of West Side Story, staged at Birmingham Hippodrome’s Patrick Studio as part of NYMT’s 50th-anniversary autumn season could easily transfer to an Off-West End house, as it gives a fresh look to and new perspective on Arthur Laurents’ book, Leonard Bernstein’s immortal score and Stephen Sondheim’s sharp lyrics, brought to life by a company of young performers who sing, act and above all move like professionals twice their age. 

Choreography is its beating heart, and George Beet’s work is its unqualified triumph. The ‘Dance at the Gym’ crackles with the kind of split-second ensemble precision that West End casts spend far longer rehearsing, while ‘Cool’ turns barely controlled adolescent aggression into something genuinely dangerous to watch.

‘America’, happily including the boys at the end of the number like in the movie versions, is sharp, funny and propulsive enough to earn the mid-show ovation it received, but Act II offers a resolutely modern version of the ‘Somewhere’ dream ballet, never used in either of the two movies. However, the surprise showstopper is the 11 o’clock, fierce, tapping version of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’, a great idea of Beet’s, since it perfectly conveys the boys’ frustrations in the number. 

Beet – a decade-long West End dance captain and swing and more recently associate choreographer on the Oklahoma! concert at Theatre Royal Drury Lane — has clearly built his own steps around what this cast does best rather than reproducing Jerome Robbins’ original wholesale. The result never feels like young performers straining to execute the choreography; it feels like the show’s whole reason for being.  

Libby Todd gives the show an unfussy, mobile set, built to suggest tenement fire escapes and back alleys with a few well-chosen structures rather than elaborate scenery, and it never once slows the show down; a scaled-back design that consistently earns its keep.

Molly Fraser’s costumes, overseen with assistant Lucy Howarth, do useful visual storytelling of their own, dressing the Sharks in blue and the Jets in white so the two gangs read instantly as rival tribes even in the busiest ensemble numbers. Peter Small’s lighting sharpens the shift from sunlit street to menacing nighttime rumble, and Sam Glossop and Harry Greatorex’s sound design keeps the score’s brass and percussion punchy without swallowing the lyrics. 

The leads match the choreography’s ambition. Marco Dennis brings a clear, unforced tenor to Tony and finds real tenderness in ‘Something’s Coming’ and ‘Maria’ without tipping into sentimentality.

Carolina Alegria’s Maria pairs a bright, controlled soprano with a performance that tracks the character’s journey from wide-eyed innocence to devastation with real conviction.

Adam Byrne gives Bernardo a coiled, watchful authority, and Maria Zureiqi’s Anita is the production’s other standout: her ‘A Boy Like That’ lands with genuine force, and she leads ‘America’ with the sharp comic timing the number needs.

Jobe Hart’s Riff and Claudio Keita’s Chino round out a quintet of principals who never let the show’s darker turns overwhelm the production’s sense of forward motion. Andrea Rodriguez-Gomez – doubling as Doc, Glad Hand and the Somewhere Girl – gets to deliver a heartfelt, but intimate, rendition of ‘Somewhere’, exactly like Rita Moreno in the Spielberg movie remake.

Rupert Hands directs with a clear sense of pace, trusting the choreography and the score to do much of the storytelling and keeping the book scenes lean. Musical director Flynn Sturgeon draws confident, well-balanced playing from the pit, and Andrea Peláez’s work as Latin American cultural and movement consultant, dialect coach and intimacy coordinator gives the Sharks’ half of the story a specificity that this musical doesn’t always have.  

Around the named principals, the production’s numbers are carried by a Jets line-up of Joe Butler-Smith (Action), Joe Johnson (A-Rab), Nathan Ayo-AJayi (Baby John), Olly Rymer (Snowboy), Lucas Shirtcliffe (Big Deal), Thomas Slater (Diesel), Toby Mocrei (Gee-tar), Cillian Ryan (Mouthpiece), Vinicio Korch (Tiger), Amy-Pearl Watt (Graziella) and Rachel Lee (Velma), set against a Sharks ensemble of Santiago Lopez (Pepe), Juan Esteban Manrique Ciceri (Indio), Mario Davis (Luis), Hayden Stevens (Anxious) and Nicolas Torres Haglund (Juano), with Felix Cole O’Sullivan and Michael Reeve taking Krupke and Schrank alongside further Jets roles.

The wider company – Kaia Stainton, Lucyanne McAuliffe, Amélie Dekker, Olivia Ko, Amber Grace Midgley, Sophie Abboud, Nia Murray-Gonsalves, Sriana Chandrasekera, Paula Sarmiento Caceres, Beatriz Rivera, Maya Gupta, Marianna Micallef, Laryssa Pereira and Rosie Rodriguez-Vassiliou – fills out the ensemble numbers with the same discipline that makes the leads’ work land. 

It adds up to a small-scale, but nonetheless spectacular new take on West Side Story which would surely make its late creators proud. It was very much worth the trip to Birmingham, I hope audiences elsewhere get a chance to see it too. 

Patrick Honoré