Tonight, tonight, the world is filled with light.
Giving voice to the new-found love of her life, Maria expresses what each member of the audience felt, those lucky enough to see this remarkable production of West Side Story.
It was a show that will live long in memory – and in the heart too. It was three nights, in fact, when Merchant Taylors’ School reverberated to the sounds of 1950s West Side Manhattan, the Great Hall its own island of energy, dance and song; but for the many people involved in this most ambitious of musicals, there will have been many more nights and days just as long that went into the three months of rehearsals. There will have been teams within teams, so many moving parts… and when they all came together, the result was unforgettable.
West Side Story is a musical that bites. Right from the very beginning there was New York edginess on stage: partly the latent danger of Savio Gimmi’s set of fire escape ladders, gang graffiti, the cynical Coca-Cola billboard and the switch-blade spotlights; partly the dark, stilted dissonance of Bernstein’s music; but above all, the razzle dazzle of the cast, who never moved but with swagger and posturing and if that very moment would be the be all and end all. Nearly every movement, Assistant Director Alan Richardson was telling me, is stylised, and progress in rehearsals could be painstakingly slow. But didn’t it pay off?
This is the American Romeo & Juliet of the 20th Century, one where the tragedy of star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria, the brilliant Jai E and Anoushka B, is almost engulfed by the desperate hopes and fears of those around them. It’s a familiar story. There is no going back to Puerto Rico for those who want to live in America and there is nowhere else to go for the immigrants who got there before them: “When You’re a Jet You’re a Jet”. And didn’t those numbers set the tone for the whole production: unequivocal, no backing down. In many ways it was Ben W’s Riff, Ravin A’s Bernardo and Maahi D’s Anita who carried the deeper story of the show, characters fatefully locked together by circumstance in a dance of death. Ben was all quick eyes and movement, quicker still to anger, febrile, proud, afraid. Ravin embodied the Latino machismo, the protective call of his kind, impetuous, proud, afraid. But it was Maahi’s Anita who, for my money, attracted the most sympathy of the night. Like Maria, she loses her lover to violence, but she has been in America long enough to lose her idealism too; the man she loves is wedded to the ways of the old country and in Maria she sees the dream of a girl that was always beyond her. In a mature performance, Maahi captured the sadness that lies at the heart of the most complex and vivacious character in the show.
It was from these characters that nearly everyone on stage else took their cue, and there were memorable performances from among the supporting cast of Jets and Sharks. Reese R played a good Chino as the decent boy driven to revenge. Cormac A’s sleeveless A-Rab was all wired muscle and David A always looked dangerous and frenetic in the role of Big Deal. But it was Milan A’s bravura as Action that whipped up an energy of almost iconoclastic proportions on stage, leading a glorious ensemble performance of ‘Officer Krupke’ which brought the house down. There were others, too, transformed from the courteous gentlemen of our classrooms – Matt M, Owen S, Alex E, Peter B, Jos W, Yuvraj B, Harry P, Praniv A, Charlie S, Oscar R, George R and Monty H (swapping the Scouse accent of Our Day Out this time for a Puerto Rican burr) – into hardened gang members, as ready as to fight as to dance as to sing.
