“Sexy if tragic love story” has pretty much been the calling card for “Romeo and Juliet” since the late 16th century. In 1957, “West Side Story” added “hummable” to the tale’s résumé, though not everyone thought so at first. Back then, Leonard Bernstein’s music was considered longhair for Broadway. Now it is so deeply embedded in our ears it’s almost impossible to distinguish it from the rest of the soundtrack of our lives. Even the 2 train sings “Somewhere.”
But Barrington’s lean and conventional production helps us hear it again. (For an unconventional “West Side Story” we’ll have to wait until December 2019, when Ivo van Hove and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker have a stab at it on Broadway.) That there are fewer Jets, fewer Sharks, and fewer instruments in the orchestra — only 11 instead of the original 28 — makes each one count more, and reveals the bones sometimes hidden in the strings and schmaltz.
Those bones are excellent. The book by Arthur Laurents not only updates Shakespeare but also, in terms of plot efficiency, tops him. (“West Side Story” condenses the timeline from four days to 31 hours.) Having done that, Laurents then let Bernstein and Sondheim swallow most of his work to feed their score; the result is one of the shortest (and best) books of a Golden Age musical.
The Barrington version — staged like a punch in the stomach by the company’s artistic director, Julianne Boyd — takes that speed as its cue, delivering the show, uncut, in barely 2 hours and 15 minutes. All of the Jerome Robbins choreography, here recreated by Robert La Fosse, is intact, and creditably performed by dancers impetuous enough to render it believable.
In that context it takes only the slightest underlining to make certain themes stick out. I heard, as I hadn’t quite before, how a police officer calls the Puerto Rican men “trash.” How, after her first night “as a young lady of America,” Maria (Addie Morales) already knows to tell Tony (Will Branner) that he must “come to the back door” when visiting her at the bridal shop where she works. And how even that life force Anita (Skyler Volpe, sensational) is defeated by the grinding force of hatred.
A homely banner hanging over the action during the dance at the gym proclaims the virtues of “Justice, Liberty, Good Neighbors.” That touch of directorial comment is enough to shove this production fully into the present. A grander, more polished “West Side Story” might not have entered the summer’s conversation so vigorously — asking, like “Dangerous House” and the distant 2 train, if there’s really “a place for us.”
