Review: West Side Story, York Stage Musicals

10:07am Thursday 14th September 2006

WEST Side Story is Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet with a harder edge, gunfire and clicking fingers, but the same divisions.

Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's musical is 50 years old next year, and yet events in Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bradford and London affirm how nothing has changed.

"It's the way we found it," shrugs Jets gang member Action (Nick Holbek), when a despairing Doc (Glyn Morrow) asks why the turf wars never abate despite yet more freshly spilled blood.

The American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks clash in the claustrophobic heat of the last days of summer in New York City's Upper West Side, a mesh of brick and steel that feels even hotter on a muggy Grand Opera House night.

The opening number, with its leaps and lunges, shakes any stiffness out of Robert Readman's company before gang leaders Bernardo (a strutting Jean-Pierre Bolet) and Riff (James Fackrell's irascible peacock) lock horns again.

James Fackrell's choreography in his freshman show for York Stage Musicals gives off a sense of remorseless descent into tragedy: the stage is a blur of whirling bodies in the ensemble scenes, suddenly clearing for Tony (Callum O'Connell) and Maria's first, love-struck sighting of each other when all around them has been turbulent.

O'Connell's Tony is a young romantic lead in the fifties mode and a too-clean T-shirt, while Jenny Scoullar, her hair dyed black for Maria and her accent as Hispanic as you could wish, gives her best performance yet on a York stage, especially when she rises to the heartbreaking fury of the finale. Her pretty, high singing voice bonds wonderfully with O'Connell's naturally sweet tone in One Hand, One Heart, and his rendition of Maria is a swooning delight too.

Liz Nicholson's Anita excels in the flambouyant America and a stand-out cameo comes from Claire Horsley, as tomboy Anybodys, while Holbek's Action and Martin Lettin's Schrank maintain their ever high standards.

Director Readman has a track record for spotting and nurturing talent, be it Scott Garnham in the recent past or James Fackrell here. Fackrell's routine for Cool is as sharp as the Jets' ties and menacing too. The Rumble and Nightmare sequences have a volcanic energy that can only spill over.

West Side Story, York Stage Musicals, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0870 606 3595.