Word: side
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WEST SIDE STORY...
...finest musicals are subject to sociocultural jet lag. The biorhythms of the societal clock seem organically out of kilter. No time machine can transport the audience to the 1943 spirit of Oklahoma! or the 1957 of West Side Story. Separate components (songs, dances, acting) can be marvelously exciting, but the core of the musical, what it is rather than what it does, recedes into an odd realm of detachment. The original galvanizing impact is dissipated...
...much so that one cannot experience a thoroughly enchanting evening in the theater. The current production of West Side Story at Broadway's Minskoff Theater surely qualifies as that. The story, if anyone needs to be told, closely parallels Romeo and Juliet. The warring feudal factions of the Montagues and the Capulets become turf gangs, the Jets (whites) and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans...
Every court must have a king. Jerome Robbins is the monarch of West Side Story. Beyond that, he is the Jove of theater choreography. His dances are thunder bolts of invention, and his dancers are the messengers of his precise, uncompromising will. From the faintest twitch of a shoulder to hurricane tides of mass action, he is the master of the rhetoric of bodily motion. He can turn his dancers into airborne balletic Ariels who touch the ground merely to skip skyward again...
...Minskoffs may have built this theater in Times Square, but for the duration of West Side Story's run, Jerome Robbins owns it. -T.E. Kalem