Theater Review: “West Side Story” at Kodak Center

“West Side Story” may be nearly 60 years
old, but it’s remarkably spry. The 1957 musical blended drama, music, and
especially dance as no musical before it had quite done, and few musicals after
it have completed the equation quite as elegantly. It’s an ambitious
choice for a joint production by RAPA and The Rochester Latino Theatre
Company.

The two organizations joined forces last spring for a
successful production of a more recent musical, “In the Heights,” and now
they’re tackling this classic. This “West Side Story” is a pricey
ticket by community theater standards, and though the venue is impressive, it
is also problematical. But your ticket does give you the opportunity to
see a stage full of talented young people demonstrate what made this show a
classic in the first place.

Nobody needs to be told how good Leonard Bernstein’s music
and most of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are, but Arthur Laurents’s laconic book for “West Side Story” is pretty
good itself. Not only is it an ingenious retelling of “Romeo and
Juliet” on the mean streets of 1950’s New York, but some of the
dialogue about Latin immigrants and their bad treatment might
have been written last week. (The lyrics include a few pieces translated into
Spanish; I assume not by Sondheim.)

One drawback for directors and choreographers of
“West Side Story” is Jerome Robbins’s original production. Like a few
other classic Broadway stagings — including Robbins’s
own “Fiddler on the Roof” — the director’s imagination served the
material so well that it’s to imagine anyone doing it differently
with much success.

So this production of “West Side Story” looks
pretty much like most other productions of “West Side Story.”
This is not at all a bad thing if you fill the template well, and this production
is bursting with young talent.

The leading roles of Tony (Kyle Critelli)
and Maria (Allison Macri) are ideally cast and
sweet-voiced; Macri makes Maria a pleasantly spunky
character from her first scene. This pair’s scenes and songs together are
charming and romantic, and highlights of the show.

The show calls for a huge cast. Laurents (and I suppose Robbins) differentiated each
gang member with a name and a characterization, and this cast had me looking
all over the stage to catch individual reactions and bits of
business. The showiest supporting role is probably that of Maria’s
cousin Anita — who gets to sing “America” and “A Boy like
That” — and Yvana Melendez is a real
spitfire in this part. Alec Powell portrays Riff gently but
effectively, and the adolescent attraction he has for Tony is
sensitively played. Michael Cantatore has already won
an RBTL Stars of Tomorrow Award in the past for playing Action, and he’s
exactly the bundle of angry nervous energy the part calls for. Even the four
non-singing adult roles are cast for strength (Billy DeMetsenaere
makes a very credible and emotional Doc).

The singing, directed by Tamar Greene, is uniformly
excellent, but the orchestra, directed by Jeff Wilson, was extremely
uneven on opening night, sometimes spot on but often
noticeably sour-toned and tentative.

“West Side Story” is a big show, but the
enormous Kodak Center for Performing Arts almost dwarfs it. This is a huge
venue, and it’s good to have it back in circulation, but this was a bit like
watching a show at Radio City Music Hall. The young voices need miking, and the sound system didn’t do them
many favors on opening night: it sometimes dropped out completely or became
irritatingly staticky.

Artistic director Eric Vaughn Johnson and choreographers
Stefanie Cheshire and Jayme Bermudez have done a good job of filling an
enormous stage with meaningful movement. The backdrops and set pieces fill the
stage, but it is telling that the two most effective scenes may be the dance at
the gym and the “Somewhere” ballet scene, both which appear on a
virtually bare stage. Solo or duet numbers, like “Something’s Coming” or “One
Hand, One Heart,” can get a bit lost on the huge stage, no matter how well they
are performed.

This “West Side Story” moves swiftly, as it must, and the
cast always delivers. And unlike the original cast or the movie, they don’t
look like a bunch of ballet dancers in sneakers, but are a
realistic-looking bunch of young people of all sizes, shapes, and ethnicities.

This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2014.