Several cast members of West Side Story (photograph by Jeff Busby)

This particular production is the result of a partnership between Opera Australia and GWB Entertainment and forms part of a multi-year international tour by German-based musical events company BB Promotions to mark the show’s sixtieth anniversary. The sets by Paul Gallis, costumes by Renate Schmitzer, and lighting by Peter Halbsgut are, appropriately, all world-class. They, along with the polished work of choreographer and director Joey McKneely, pay homage not only to the original Broadway production and its (now historical) New York setting but also to the 1961 film in all its Technicolor glory.

The thirty-one-piece orchestra is drawn from members of Orchestra Victoria, and under director Donald Chan it delivers Bernstein’s score with accuracy and a good deal of precision, though the overall effect was constrained by some unusually fast tempi and by the limited dynamic range that general amplification inevitably conveys. Another casualty, perhaps, of both, was that ‘swing’ of the Latin groove in numbers like ‘A Boy Like That’ was not as entrancing as it should have been.

While that did seem a missed opportunity, it was, ironically, the belief that the stage representations of Puerto Rican life in West Side Story must also be as ‘authentic’ as possible that led to a controversy around Opera Australia’s casting of a non-Latinx singer (Sophie Salvesani) as Maria. But as the Puerto Rican scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz has elsewhere noted, the show ultimately constructs its stylised Puerto Rican identity within the confines of a theatrical genre in which ‘references to reality are ... mediated at best’. Or to put it another way, music theatre has never really been interested in achieving cinematic realism. Thus, to seek to condemn the work, or the casting, on such a basis is to miss the point of the medium entirely (as I have argued elsewhere).

Several cast members of West Side Story (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Music theatre does, however, demand exceptional vocal, dramatic, and physical skill, and here the production was a bit of a curate’s egg. Standout principles were Chloé Zuel as a show-stealing Anita, Lyndon Watts as Bernardo, and Salvesani’s vocally assured Maria. Todd Jacobsson as Tony, however, lacked the requisite vocal dexterity and security of pitch to deliver the dramatic range required in and across numbers like ‘Something’s Coming’ and ‘One Hand, One Heart’. Noah Mullins’s Riff was more impressive and assured vocally, but in the end both lead male characters ultimately couldn’t quite deliver the kind of the compelling charismatic stage presence that their respective characters demand.

On the other hand, despite a rather tentative opening number (those iconic ‘clicks’, for instance, were hard to hear), and notwithstanding some lack of clarity and vocal precision from the men in particular, the hard-working ensemble impressed; ‘America’ was a particular highlight (as indeed it should be).

This was just as well, because a good deal of West Side Story’s ultimate dramatic power resides in the effectiveness of these ensemble scenes. The very medium of dance, the fact that individuals from the same social group are made to move in step with each other, but also with apparent spontaneity, enables the work to project more mythic (rather than ‘merely’ ethnographic) representations of its rival, inner-urban communities. It also helps to draw our attention to the homosocial and homoerotic undertones of this kind of adolescent gang life. And the communal force of dance is surely one reason why the simulated rape of Anita by the Jets remains so shocking – the culpability for it must be shared (here, even the gaze of the audience feels complicit).

Todd Jacobsson as Tony and Sophie Salvesani Maria in West Side Story (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Against this, the passionate love that Tony and Maria have for one another also enacts its own kind of violence; it is consummated at a terrible cost both to themselves and to those they profess to care for. As Maria sings to Anita close to the show’s second terrible denouement, ‘When love comes so strong / There is no right or wrong’. The ultimate message of the work, should we need to look for one, is perhaps therefore not a simplistic ‘love conquers all’ but rather the fact that we all long to find ‘a new way of living … Somehow, Someday, Somewhere.’

West Side Story is being performed by Opera Australia at Arts Centre Melbourne, State Theatre, April 10–28 2019. The production will continue at the Sydney Opera House (August 16 to October 6) followed by a season in Canberra and Adelaide later in the year.