West Side Story

No conductor would say "I'm going to lead Beethoven's Fifth Symphony just the way Arturo Toscanini did 60 years ago." No actor would declare, "My performance in Death of a Salesman will replicate Lee J. Cobb's in the first production." Yet Jerome Robbins' iconic dances are such a part of West Side Story that the piece might seem odd if the Jets and Sharks didn't leap through their aggressive mini-ballets.

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We're talking Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and the late Arthur Laurents here. We're talking the gangs of New York and ill-fated love. A story we all know. No surprise, the house was packed.

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It is easy to run down the checklist of "relevance" when watching "West Side Story" — everything from the way it captures ethnic tensions, youthful passion, police tactics and gang violence at school and in the streets, to the contradictory ache for separation and assimilation among immigrant populations. But all that is really quite beside the point when watching and listening to this groundbreaking musical first seen in 1957, and now at Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre in a national touring production based on the 2009 Broadway revival.

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The 2009 revival has closed in New York. This tour — which features Laurents' direction, re-created by his longtime associate David Saint — dances on for a little while longer, including for these four summer weeks in Chicago. So I think it's fair to say that this is your last chance to take an impressionable young person to the theater and say, "Look, this is 'West Side Story' as I remember it," and as it was intended to be realized by those who were there when the masterpiece was forged. And what a masterpiece! Who could listen to the aching melody of "Somewhere" or "Maria" or "Tonight" and not feel a jolt in the heart?

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The show: "West Side Story"

The place: Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford.

What is it?: The national tour of the well-received 2009 Broadway revival, directed by the show's book writer, the late Arthur Laurents, who died earlier this month at the age of 93. Laurents just didn't dust off this classic of the American musical stage. He re-thought it in a fresh way, while staying true to the 1957 original which takes Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and places it on the mean streets of Manhattan and focuses on the battle between Anglo and Latino gangs. (Most memories of the show may be from the 1961 film version which made some changes to the original script).

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Fine performances, exceptional dancing and an exciting new take on an American classic make the touring production of West Side Story at the Music Hall a memorable theatergoing experience.

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So beloved is West Side Story that some fans seem unable to resist the temptation to sing along to "America," "I Feel Pretty" and all of those other amazing songs. If you fall into that camp, consider this a plea from your fellow audience members: Please don't. The cast of the touring production tearing up the stage at the Majestic Theatre is so strong, and the overall production so sensational, that none of that should have to compete with sing-alongs in the house.

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The Jets and the Sharks are rumbling again, tangling with a fierce grace. Tony and Maria, a mid-'50s Romeo and Juliet, are tumbling into a giddy love that won't end well. And one of the greatest American musicals has been reinterpreted for new generations to discover.

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To be young is to be impetuous: to fall in love at first glance (or first song), to rise to anger in an instant, to not think beyond the next 30 seconds, if that. And that's what this West Side Story, playing through Sunday at the Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre, has going for it: Its fresh-faced actors look as though they're skipping school to sing, dance, love and fight on the streets of 1950s New York.

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During the opening moments of the compelling new West Side Story at the Fox Theatre, the tension between the Sharks and Jets brews to a stare-down of menacing looks between pacing street toughs. Time ticks, and the orchestra punctuates the awkward silences with the energy of Leonard Bernstein's magnificent latter-day Gershwin score. What you are hearing, Buddy Boy, is the shrill, edgy sound of a neighborhood about to snap.

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There's no question West Side Story is a masterpiece of musical theater. Arthur Laurents' tautly compelling book, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's timelessly brilliant score and Jerome Robbins' dazzling choreography see to that as surely today as when the ground-breaking show premiered in 1957.

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If you've only seen the movie, you've never seen West Side Story. That's a fact even if you don't share 1957 librettist Arthur Laurents' antipathy to the 1961 Mirisch/UA Oscar winner, which (to Laurents at least) lowered the stakes and compromised authenticity. The piece's ambition and adventurousness, still startling after 50 years, fully comes through in the current Gotham revival shepherded by the nonagenarian, though the touring version now gracing the Pantages stage is a patchier affair. Still, in live performance West Side Story asserts its primacy as a living masterwork, not a mere historical stepping-stone for subsequent serious tuners.

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West Side Story's sparkling and emotionally engaging new revival opened Wednesday night in San Francisco's Orpheum Theatre. But there was quite a bit of sparkle and emotional engagement before the overture could start — much of that due to the glowing embers of cell phones flickering like tiny campfires in the palms of the Giants' faithful.

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They say Shakespeare's plays are timeless because they still speak to the human condition today.

Well, 53 years after it opened on Broadway, West Side Story feels as fresh and alive and as sadly relevant as ever. Based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the story of forbidden love and ethnic gang conflict set in New York City can still clobber an audience, as it did Tuesday night at the Orpheum Theater. The Broadway musical's revival tour is here through Sunday.

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A brand new touring production of West Side Story launched its national run Wednesday night at the Fisher Theatre, and it may safely be christened a triumph right out of the gate.

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