Review: West Side Story

I entered the Playhouse already slightly bored at the prospect of sitting through two and a half hours of West Side Story. I’ve seen it twice already, I know all the songs backwards and the amount of versions of Romeo and Juliet I’ve seen makes even the Leonardo Di Caprio version slightly tedious.

However, that’s really the point about Shakespeare’s epic tale of love that quite arrogantly defeats every other attempt at a love story; it doesn’t go out of fashion and neither has this production.

The leads were, well, beautiful…that’s the only word I can really think of to use. And they can sing too! The harmonies between Maria and Tony seemed to soar and flutter around the vaulted ceiling of the Playhouse, interchanging between alternating octaves.

 An unlikely runner up to the leads was Maria’s sister Anita. At the start, she seemed quite unspectacular – ok at acting, ok at singing and dancing. But the only word that came to mind was ‘ok’. But when Bernardo dies she transformed into something, in fact, quite spectacular. Watching her being roughed up by the Jets when she was only trying to help the killer of her dead lover made me so angry that I just cannot help feel actual resentment towards the Jet that I know in real life. I fear our relationship may be clouded by his behavior.

But don’t you think that’s the mark of a great musical? It has to really make you believe that you in fact live in this happy-clappy, merry-go-round world in which random outbursts of song and dance are just you average Friday night. This West-Side Story is a well-rendered, albeit very long, piece that transfers Shakespeare’s savage beauty to the streets of New York and into the Oxford Playhouse.