What would Jerome Robbins think?

West Side Story — a new production of the great musical by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and of course Jerome Robbins — has arrived on Broadway, opening last night. It’s an event.

Since I haven’t seen it yet, I asked my friend Amanda Vaill — who has — to weigh in. Amanda wrote both Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (2006) and Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, the American Masters documentary that aired on PBS last month. Robbins was billed as the choreographer, director and conceiver of the 1957 original production, which was seen as a radical show.

What was Robbins trying to do with his staging of West Side Story?

Since 1944 — just after his and Leonard Bernstein’s triumph with the ballet Fancy Free — Robbins had dreamed of creating what he called a new form for theater, a “braiding” of action, music, and dance. West Side Story was the result: a play in which dancing, and music, wouldn’t just complement the action– they would be the action. The dances he made for his cast of young gang members were supposed to convey the anger and passion of inner city kids, show off the individual characters of each, and carry the plot forward — just like the non-dance scenes, which he also directed.

What changes have been made, why, and do they work?

The most obvious change doesn’t really affect the Robbins staging — it’s the decision to translate much of the Puerto Rican characters’ dialogue and many of their songs into Spanish, which — says the current director, and the show’s librettist, Arthur Laurents — “gives the Sharks infinitely more weight.” I never thought of them as lightweights — but the change certainly deepens the feeling of alienation between the two sets of characters. So does making the Jets’ taunting of Anita into a near-rape: the intention was always there in the original, but current sensibilities may need to have it spelled out.

Other changes cut more painfully into Robbins’s design, though.

The “Somewhere” ballet, for instance, has been shorn of its second half, in which the tenement walls closed in around the sunlit dreamworld Tony and Maria had imagined for themselves, and the chaos of the first-act rumble was reenacted. That segment made the passion with which the lovers clung to each other in the succeeding scene all the more urgent and poignant — it’s a shame to lose it.

And instead of of having an offstage soprano sing “Somewhere,” as if giving voice to Tony’s and Maria’s thoughts, the song is now given to a mop-haired boy soprano who sings it to Tony and Maria — an inexpressibly mawkish touch that Robbins, whose use of children in theater was never bathetic, would have recoiled from. Finally, the show’s ending dispenses with the ritual bearing away of Tony’s body by both Jets and Sharks, precariously united in grief. Laurents says the police would never allow anyone to tamper with a crime scene in this way — to which I’m tempted to reply, “Gee, Officer Krupke, krup that.” I want my catharsis.

What will people who saw the movie of WSS, which came out in 1961 and is available on DVD, or “West Side Story Suite,” which is performed by several dance companies, think of this show?

West Side Story Suite presents the dances in isolation, cut from the dramatic fabric they were an integral part of; and although Robbins staged and shot the dance numbers in the movie, the book scenes were directed by Robert Wise and have a very different, less fluid feel. In this production audiences can see these numbers erupting out of the action; onstage, in real time, the effect is thrilling.

What would Robbins think of this revival?

Perhaps fortunately, I don’t have a direct line to him! I suspect the Robbins temper might have been provoked by a number of things, such as the aforementioned boy soprano; the non-period-specific costumes (Robbins always wanted his shows to have a very authentic look); the use of a Beaux-Arts wrought iron balcony instead of a fire-escape (in a tenement???) for the balcony scene; or the fact that Matt Cavenaugh, as Tony, simply plants himself downstage and sings “Maria” without moving a muscle. (“What is he doing?” Robbins demanded of lyricist Stephen Sondheim when directing the original.) And the man whose credit still appears in a box under the authors’ names might bristle at having Laurents, with whom he had an ultimately contentious relationship, re-staging yet another of their collaborations.

On the other hand, listen to what Robbins told his co-director, Robert Wise, about the staging of scenes in the film of West Side Story: “I don’t care about the choreography or the steps themselves.” he said. “But I feel forcibly insistent that the story and emotions be saved.” If he’d heard the audience weeping and cheering last night, he would have felt that what he called “the true gesture of the show” had been honored.

Here’s a link to Amanda’s website. I was going to post links for the book and DVD on Amazon, but since Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, is a major supporter of the arts, it seems more fitting to send you there for the book and the American Masters program DVD.

Photo: “The company.” Credit: Joan Marcus