The original West Side Story was a musical that almost never got made. Dreamed up in 1949 by Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins, who wanted to do a dance-driven contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it took eight years to bring it to the stage, along the way changing its cultural focus (Irish to Puerto Rican), its locale (NYC to LA and back to NYC), and its creative team. Robbins quit more than once, and composer Leonard Bernstein sometimes got confused about what the show’s musical language should be (opera or Broadway) as he was concurrently working on Candide. Arthur Laurents struggled to write the book, and it wasn’t until a young, unknown writer was brought in that the work gained some momentum. That young writer was Stephen Sondheim. Still, there were problems raising money. The production finally opened in New York in 1957, after out-of-town trial runs, including in Washington, DC, and became a groundbreaking American musical, garnering many awards, multiple global productions, and two blockbuster movies to date.
Now, the Washington National Opera brings its own production to town, or to put it more precisely, to two towns (Baltimore and Greater Washington), with its own orchestral force of a hefty 50 pieces. But the journey to get here, though shorter, was similarly perilous and involved the WNO leaving its home of many years at the institution formerly known as The Kennedy Center, after a decidedly hostile takeover.
On opening night at the Lyric Baltimore, the audience gathered into the 2,000-seat house, and the air crackled with excitement. Ardent followers of the company mingled with first-timers. Some wondered if the show would sound “opera-ish”; others were surely asking whether an opera company could sing and dance with Jerome Robbins’ jazz flair. But when the city’s beloved Marin Alsop stepped onto the podium to conduct, the applause and cheers that greeted the former head of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra left no doubt as to who was the star of the evening.
Director Francesca Zambello and her WNO team have created a show, despite all the challenges of being “on the road,” with the highest production values. Peter J. Davison designed a magnificent set with multistory building facades that transported us to New York City’s West Side, with looming iron girders, crowded dwellings, and urban playgrounds with chain-link fences. A.J. Guban has beautifully expanded on Mark McCullough’s original lighting design, painting New York’s changing skyline with light on the upstage cyc. (McCullough passed December 31 of last year. He had been a fixture at the WNO and a prized member of the creative team; he will be sorely missed.)…