West Side Story

Review By: Carey Purcell
CareyPurcell@TheCinemaSource.com

Even the most cynical person out there has to have a soft spot. It could be a favorite CD from childhood, an old movie that only exists on VHS recording, or a recipe for a decidedly unhealthy comfort food that Mom used to make on a really bad day. For this critic, that soft spot consists of old-fashioned musicals recorded from TV broadcasts. Leslie Ann Warren in Cinderella, Mary Martin in Peter Pan and, yes, West Side Story. The movie, starring Natalie Wood, was a family favorite and there was once a little girl who used to sing along with unabashed sentimentality during “Tonight, Tonight.”

It is this sentimentality that made the characters of Romeo and Juliet eternally beloved and that propels the sweet, sentimental revival of West Side Story currently in performances at the Palace Theater. This vibrant, colorful production was intended by its creator to be an angry, dangerous show, revisiting the passionate rivalry between the gangs the Sharks and the Jets. It is not anger that is found onstage, but innocence, confusion and bliss, as two teenagers fall in love, despite their differing backgrounds and nationalities.

This innocence is both helpful and hindering to this production, which had been intended to be much more rough. But every moment between Tony (Matt Cavenaugh) and Maria (Josefina Scaglione, a 21-year-old actress from Argentina with an angelic, soaring soprano) is fueled with an innocent intensity. At times the love story between the two teenagers is difficult to believe in, and much easier to scoff at. They see each other at a dance, and after a few sentences are exchanged, they plan on running away together to live in the country. But the two leads share a natural chemistry that causes the audience to not only believe in their relationship but root for it and hope that – just, this time – the story could end differently.

It is the forces that keep the two from being together that are downplayed by the prevailing innocence in the show. Tony is an alumni of the New York gang the Jets, who are angered by the immigrant Sharks from Puerto Rico, who are led by Maria’s brother Bernardo. The rivalry – expressed mainly through elaborate ballet choreography (Jerome Robbins’ original dances, reconstructed for this revival) – never feels truly tangible, despite the many confrontations, war councils, rumbles and fights between the two groups. Even when a knife is brought into a fight and murder is executed, albeit, unintentionally, onstage – the danger these boys are in is never truly palpable. They are simply too nice-looking and too clean-cut to be gangsters. Even with strategically placed smudges of dirt on their face, or their shirtsleeves ripped off, they appear more like the boys next door than the boys from the street.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments of suspense and fear in this production. The rumble between the sharks and the Jets is extremely ...