WEST SIDE STORY Reviews — Page 2

I'm sorry to disagree, but to feature Graziella as one of his only stand outs in the show show is VERY Telling. It's hard to believe you can't read through those lines.

Ok. I re-read Murray. While he managed to praise certain things, it was always done by knocking others. He was pretty nasty, but most of his reviews are. He HATED Gypsy last year.

I'm not actually reading the reviews right now because I have a nasty migraine brewing, but I am reading everyone's "mixed-to-positive" type desciptors, and I must say I am pleased. I was expecting much worse.

---

I remember being wowed by her dancing both times I saw it earlier this month.

The Wall Street Journal is Very Negative:

"Mr. Laurents's down-and-dirty approach might have been made to work if he'd scrapped Robbins's dances and had the whole show rechoreographed from scratch. Even so, he would have had to reckon with the blandness of his stars. The only one who stands out is Karen Olivo, lately of "In the Heights," who is blowtorch-hot as Anita. Not so Matt Cavenaugh (Tony), Josefina Scaglione (Maria) and Cody Green (Riff), all of whom are competent but uncharismatic. Nor are James Youmans's big, ugly inner-city sets an improvement on the stylized fire escapes and chain-link fences that Oliver Smith created in 1957.

I give Arthur Laurents credit for wanting to make "West Side Story" new -- especially given the fact that the Robbins-supervised 1980 Broadway revival, a carbon copy of the original production, wasn't very successful -- but no amount of tough-guy retouching can make "West Side Story" into anything other than what it is, a starry-eyed group portrait of a bunch of basically nice kids who find themselves caught up in an unforgiving world of violence and hate. To pretend otherwise, as this staging mostly does, is to get wrong what Mr. Laurents and his collaborators got so gloriously right a half-century ago."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123749621032288405.html

---

Theatermania is Positive but has a problem with the new ending

Much of the current West Side's appeal depends on the cast -- which is to play off a Sondheim lyric -- not only large and funny and fine, but up to fulfilling the tragic dimensions that Shakespeare and Laurents built into the show. The real discovery here is Argentinian import Josefina Scaglione, who has every ounce of innocence required of Maria and whose soprano is pure and steady. Matt Cavenaugh, last seen on Broadway in A Catered Affair, is a tough yet compassionate Tony, and his singing of "Something's Coming" and "Maria" is all a fan of the seminal tuner could ask.


In revising West Side Story to guarantee it feels as persuasive as possible, Laurents does make a few missteps. The most obvious is the scene at the very end when Maria is tending to Tony's fallen body in the playground. Originally, members of both chastened gangs formed a respectful retreat while the policemen looked on. Now, claiming that no law enforcement officer would allow such a brazen removal of evidence, Laurents has trimmed the number of witnesses and keeps them on the spot. At the very least, he should have brought all gang members back -- and contrite -- at the slow curtain.

But although Laurents dilutes the ending of his own work, he nonetheless retains the heated theatrical magic that always was and always will be West Side Story.




http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/reviews/03-2009/west-side-story_18140.html

Updated On: 3/19/09 at 09:59 PM

The pants-down was Arthur's SINGLE improvement in the show and he cut it.

All of his other changes made the show worse.

---

I'm actually surprised at some of these.

---

Interesting. Brantley seems pretty positive: he put the show on his Critics Pick list.

"The teenage hoodlums who maraud through Arthur Laurents’s startlingly sweet new revival of “West Side Story” seem like really nice kids. Youth has always been the engine of this epochal musical from 1957, created by one of the most talented teams in showbiz history: Mr. Laurents (book), Leonard Bernstein (score), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Jerome Robbins (director and choreographer). But usually it’s the scary, adrenaline-stoked energy of youth that sets the tone and rhythms of the show. In this production, which lovingly replicates Mr. Robbins’s balletic choreography, what prevails is a tenderhearted awareness of the naked vulnerability of being young and trapped in an urban jungle. Half a century ago middle-class adult theatergoers were shocked and appalled by the brutality of the ethnic gang warfare of “West Side Story.” This time audiences — the grown-ups, anyway — are more likely to respond with feelings of parental protectiveness."

---

:)

His pants were down on Friday night.

---

The pants up/down changes whether the scene is played as assault or rape.

---

Updated On: 3/19/09 at 10:42 PM

so wait... a gang member moons the audience?