Rebirth of Cool: West Side Story in concert

In this the centenary of his birth, celebrating Leonard Bernstein is the order of the day across concert halls and theatres in America. Tonight was a rare chance to hear the complete score of that all-American masterpiece West Side Story in concert, and the opportunity was energetically seized. There was to be no dancing, the concert contract had specified, as Yannick Nézet-Séguin and stage director Kevin Newbury mused afterwards. What odds? The music itself is the dance, and Nézet-Séguin himself was, as he promised, the dancer. It struck me as the show went on (and it was more “show” than concert) that Nézet-Séguin is that rare breed: a consummate classical musician with, it would seem, genuine street credibility. He is cool, of the people. There is nothing posturing about it. It’s not just the buzz cut, the bulked-up biceps, or the red jeans and black t-shirt combo (changed into long sleeves in the second half), although they do play with our usual expectations of the conductor. It’s something about his cheery, unaffected manner which, when combined with extraordinary musical flair, is fresh and compelling. One gets the impression that he would have something to say about music of any genre, that he laps everything up from Baroque to cha-cha. This quality certainly helps with the eclecticism of Bernstein.

The staging positioned the singers slightly elevated behind the orchestra, so as to emphasise this as a primarily orchestral performance. It did mean that one’s view of the singers differed according to one’s place in the theatre, but I think it worked well. We heard the score undistracted by dance, but complemented by appropriate gestures. As the two gangs sized each other up, confronted each other, taunted, killed, and stood off, their conflict was symbolic of all the divisions between “us” and “them” that can be constructed in any society. The Hispanic “Sharks” were colourfully dressed, dominated by their females; the all-male “Jets” laddish in blacks and grey. The spectacle and the clashing sound-worlds were energetically conveyed.

There were lots of highlights, best of all the barrage of rhythms and pulses, revealing both the violence of gang life and its strange, compulsive attraction for those caught up in it. “Dance at the Gym” was superb: sassy, loud, brassy, uncouth and unashamed. Life is cheap among these warring gangs – sound is cheap too, and there’s lots of it. “Get Cool, Boys” had a spontaneous, unscripted feel. Isabel Leonard (Maria) and Ryan Silverman (Tony) were melting in their love passages, the latter thinner in the high register. “Somewhere” was movingly sung by Morgan James, and included an allowable if sentimental vision of peace gestures between the gangs. The politics of aspiration is never far absent in the USA, and in any case, given the Puerto Rican theme of the work, politics would have been hard to avoid this week of all weeks. On the contrary, it was embraced. There was a special collection for the troubled island on the way in, Nézet-Séguin dedicated the performance to friends and fellow Americans there, and the sassy “America” (properly, raucously sung by the Shark Girls), included a part where, at the words “Puerto Rico’s in America”, all Jets and all Sharks were united in united gesture of patriotism. It received the loudest and longest ovation of the evening.

There were moments where the intonation felt a little unsettled (in “Officer Krupke” for instance), but nothing could detract from what was a spirited, unique performance. Jack Kerouac, evocatively writing about Robert Frank’s photographs of The Americans, once said “you end up not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin”. Indeed. The lonely futility of the jukebox on stage at the end of tonight’s performance was all of a piece with the untimely deaths of these doomed youths. I want to be in America? At a price.