Archives for March 20, 2009

I review three shows in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, the new Broadway versions of West Side Story and Blithe Spirit and a Rhode Island revival, 2nd Story Theatre’s production of William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. The first two are so-so, the third a treat. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Having staged an all-but-unimprovable revival of “Gypsy,” Arthur Laurents has upped the ante by bringing “West Side Story” back to Broadway. Mr. Laurents’ “West Side Story” is a spruced-up version of the show that took New York by storm 52 years ago, revised and reconfigured to appeal to a new generation of theatergoers. Nothing wrong with that–“West Side Story” is a musical, not a sacred text–but the results are disappointing, not just by comparison with the original “West Side Story” but in their own unconvincing right.
The most talked-about change is that the 91-year-old Mr. Laurents, who wrote the book, has made the Sharks, the Manhattan street gang whose members come from Puerto Rico, speak and sing partly in Spanish. The purpose of this new wrinkle is to add dramatic muscle to a musical that he now believes to be too ballet-pretty for modern audiences. For the same reason, Joey McKneely, who restaged Jerome Robbins’ dances for this production, has altered them in ways that will be immediately apparent to anyone who knows “West Side Story” more than casually….
The show’s bilingual aspect comes across as a gimmick, one that works well in some spots and less so in others. The second act, for instance, starts out with a long, bumpy stretch of untranslated Spanish that feels like an opera without supertitles. The changes in the dances are far more fundamental and problematic. The steps remain familiar, but the feel is entirely different–the men dance as though they were on steroids–and almost entirely untrue to the spirit of the original show. According to Mr. Laurents, the real-life counterparts of the Jets and Sharks were “vicious little killers” whose brutality was softened in the 1957 production. But that, of course, is the whole point of “West Side Story”: It’s not a cinéma-vérité documentary but a poem, a piece of lyric theater. The hyper-masculine faux-realism that Mr. Laurents has ladled over it simply doesn’t square with the idealized romanticism of Robbins’ choreography and Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy score…
Few modern farces are as bulletproof as Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” which doesn’t have to be done especially well to make a willing audience laugh. Michael Blakemore’s revival is better than good enough, but its virtues are mainly to be found in the indispensable persons of Angela Lansbury and Rupert Everett. Ms. Lansbury, needless to say, is Madame Arcati, the dotty medium who inadvertently summons up the ghost of Mr. Everett’s first wife (Christine Ebersole), much to the displeasure of his second wife (Jayne Atkinson)….
I wish I had more good things to say, but Ms. Ebersole proves to be both unexpectedly unseductive and unsatisfyingly shrill, while Mr. Blakemore’s staging, a couple of slick bits of slapstick notwithstanding, is efficient rather than inspired….
William Inge was a great American playwright whose work is rarely done in New York nowadays, so I drove up to Rhode Island to catch a revival of “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” a family drama that hasn’t been seen on Broadway since the original production closed in 1959. I’m happy to report that 2nd Story Theatre, an ambitious little troupe whose 130-seat upstairs auditorium is located in a harbor town not far from Providence, is performing “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” with exceptional sensitivity and understanding….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
This is my video review of West Side Story:

“Jealousy is often the tribute artists pay one another.”
Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (Instead of an Autobiography)