In 1949, choreographer Jerome Robbins phoned Leonard Bernstein with an idea for updating “Romeo and Juliet” into a contemporary Broadway musical. Robbins didn’t know what it would be, but he knew what it wouldn’t be: An opera!
When “West Side Story” had its premiere eight years later, it had become a gripping, tragic reflection on racism. But still not opera. Bernstein insisted that opera is resolved by music and Maria’s last lines in “West Side Story,” an impassioned plea against gun violence, are spoken.
Los Angeles Opera opened its 40th season Saturday night with “West Side Story” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. No one, and especially not Bernstein, ever said “West Side Story” was operatic. In fact, the show’s brilliance, its indelible mark on music theater is its treatment of song and dance, in the ability of Robbins’ stylized and now iconic movement and Bernstein’s score to give us both the physicality and interiority of people and place. The only time Bernstein himself ever conducted “West Side Story” was for a glorious, if controversial, recording with opera stars.
Nevertheless, lots of ink continues to be spilled, and lots of podcasts streamed, to justify or not the operatic credentials of “West Side Story.” If there is anything symbolic about this show at the Chandler this moment, it is that the first major L.A. opera announced itself 40 years ago with the greatest opera based on a Shakespeare tragedy, Verdi’s “Otello,” and has now marked its latest anniversary with the greatest musical theater based on a Shakespeare tragedy.
Francesca Zambello’s production has much of the look of the Broadway original. Robbins’ dances have been maintained, as has Arthur Laurents’ original book. But attending L.A. Opera in the Chandler doesn’t feel in any way like being in a Broadway theater.
In the most basic way that means that more attention is given to music. The orchestra is not more-the-merrier (28 players) and not as feisty as a Broadway band, but is able to produce a lushness and lyricism under James Conlon, who is beginning his own 20th anniversary season (and last) as the company’s music director. He provides a grandeur, out of place on Broadway, that suggests an instant depth to the Jets and Sharks, the Anglo and the Puerto Rican gangs. All are from immigrant families, the Latino teens seen as intruders and outsiders.
The production maintains Jerome Robbins’ original choreography while James Conlon conducts with operatic grandeur at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
(Brian Feinzimer/For The Times)
The lovers — Tony (Polish) and Maria (Puerto Rican) — are, here, opera singers. Tenor Duke Kim happened to have been Romeo in L.A. Opera’s production of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” last season. Soprano Gabriella Reyes, in her company debut, is familiar to Metropolitan Opera audiences. Their voices are big. They don’t need, though get, amplification, which is thankfully respectful.
A problem of “West Side Story,” from day one, was the need for singers who could manage the expressive complexities of Bernstein’s songs and the physical complexities of Robbins’ choreography. If it seems odd that eight chorus singers would be listed in the program for a show without a chorus, that is because L.A. Opera offers superb chorus singers to be hidden backstage to subtly reinforce out-of-breath singers. Sounds like that shouldn’t work. It does.
There is, though, an anachronistic unreality to all of this. Although L.A. Opera advertises Robbins’ choreography as an attraction, and the dancing thrills as advertised, it is very 1957. For years the Robbins’ estate didn’t let anyone touch his dances or production. Putting on “West Side Story” also means challenges about changing any of Laurent’s text. There are further Bernstein and librettist Steven Sondheim overseers to consider. Contemporary relevance to deal with.
Contemporary casting updates classic 1957 material, creating timeless relevance to current immigration conflicts and gun violence debates.
(Brian Feinzimer/For The Times)
In 1957, the Music Center was a dream, Dorothy Chandler having only begun fundraising two years earlier for an arts Olympus on a well-scrubbed Grand Avenue that would harken a new business district. Yet this is the same downtown that became the first locus of a new national crackdown on Latin immigrants that has evolved over the past seven decades to a now operatic-scale conflict between the military and the populace.
There is but a hint of modernity in Zambello’s production. The Jets are no longer Anglo, just not Latino. Kim is Korean although still identified in the text as Polish. The original racial slurs must remain, which produces outright operatic shock.
Kim has a natural ease on stage. It takes him a while to project a sense of character. There is not yet much coming with “Something Coming,” but his agile voice is a clean, clear tenor projectile expandable into operatic fortissimos and toned down into sweet, soft Broadway-esque whispers. He soon comes to life.
Reyes’ presence is mostly opera. She has a vibrato that is out of place. She is not particularly girlish. Love music suits her more, and Kim pairs well with her operatic-sounding “Tonight” and “One Hand, One Heart.” “Maria” is grand and a little weird for a young woman with a big Bad Bunny poster in her room (one of the few updates).
She is, however, a compelling tragedian — a teen who matures before our eyes into a force of nature. Her greatest moment may be the spoken, but her accusatory horror at gun violence is something that takes a powerful opera singer to turn into a sermon from which it is impossible to turn away.
Of the singing actors that come from musical theater, Amando Castro is a fiery Anita; P. Tucker Worley, buoyant Riff; Yurel Echezarreta, a suave Bernardo. But it is the collective cool, rage, outrage, toxic masculinity, hatefulness and terrible, terrible sorrow of the large splendid that makes the production matter.
“West Side Story” is not about good and bad, but conditions. An old-school opera production may be a little light on the conditions, but the show’s essence is to engender our sympathy for all the characters and their inherent value, showing violence is our fault, not theirs.
L.A. Opera elevates this into a telling timelessness. We walk out onto Grand Avenue or slink into the garage and drive away, afraid to see what is before our eyes — our society in the manner of its operation.