Maybe it was the light breeze coming off the water, ruffling the performers’ hair just so. Maybe it was the brightness and hopeful promise of the orchestra as young Tony (Billy Bourchier) promised us that something was coming to change it all. Maybe it was the gentle spin of a disco ball, held aloft by a crane and slowly spilling new stars over the stage.
Or maybe it was just this: when Tony and Maria (Nina Korbe) locked eyes for the first time during the opening night of West Side Story at Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, it felt like falling in love for the first time.
There’s a surprising new magic to the return open-air season of the classic musical, which first played Sydney in 2019. Francesca Zambello’s production was just as stylish in its first run, and revival choreographer Kiira Schmidt Carper’s translation of Jerome Robbins’ balletic, beautiful shapes, like then, filled the enormous stage as an exaltation of movement.
But the original run felt dated. The dialogue (peppered with invented slang that was designed to be timeless but now feels deeply silly) creaked in the actors’ mouths. It was hard to swallow the show’s message – a call for racial tolerance – when the star-crossed Polish-American and Puerto Rican lovers were both played by white actors. It didn’t quite connect.
Later in 2019, Opera Australia staged a second, indoor production of the musical, cast more thoughtfully but with less directorial clarity. Between this double-dose onstage and a new movie musical helmed by Steven Spielberg released in 2021, it felt like we might be ready to leave West Side Story behind.
After all, there are shows better at interrogating violence, and examining racial prejudice. There are shows that make an effort to give dignity, agency and interiority to its non-white characters (still largely lacking in West Side Story; it doesn’t want you to think too long about how little we see or hear from Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks and Maria’s brother, compared to Jets leader and Tony’s best friend Riff).
We have, since the musical first premiered 1957, come a little further (not far enough) in our collective understanding that “tolerance” is too low a bar when it comes to living and thriving together. What could this show have left for us now?
In 2024, on the harbour under a canopy of stars and a backdrop of water, with a new cast and a new sense of itself, there it was: the magic. The way love comes into a life and rewrites the world.
What remains is Romeo and Juliet, the story on which the musical is based: the pure message of hope from the first time we fell in love, and the ways we change when the world crashes in and makes us grow up a little too old, and a little too hard, too fast.
It’s there, always, in that music by Leonard Bernstein – in all its surging, heartfelt reaching for feeling (Guy Simpson’s musical direction is astonishingly lush here). Bourchier and Korbe interpret it beautifully, singing the lyrics of a young Stephen Sondheim like they’re the first to do it, just like first love feels like an invention discovered by you and your partner alone; they’re a dazzling pair of young lovers who reach for each other and remind us what it is to be held.
The Jets, led by gung-ho Riff (Patrick Whitbread, heartbreakingly puppyish), feel like children; they play at violence until it transforms into something deadly. The Sharks, led by Bernardo (Manuel Stark Santos), cannot afford the same luxury of play. They protect themselves in other ways: a head held high, a shared language of dance. When Riff and Bernardo’s rumble turns deadly, the production allows all that bravado to crumble: by allowing these kids to show us fear, we remember they’re kids.
And the lovers, too, are children. We see it as they sing together for the first time on Maria’s balcony, swept up in their harmonies like they can will the world to bend enough to allow them a happy ending. Korbe and Bourchier are remarkable: they can’t seem to stop reaching for each other, touching hands, reaching for each other’s arms as though it’s a wonder the other exists, voices soaring above it all. Later, when they play at marriage in a bridal shop, trying on a veil and jacket, they look giddy and grave; it’s devastating to watch their nascent awakening to a new world when we know it won’t last more than a day.
Yes, the book is still silly, some of its jokes and jabs still dated enough you wish they would be cut; they can be hurtful for audience members to hear, especially when they’re not in service to the greater story. It’s still painful to watch the Jets attack Anita (Kimberley Hodgson), though at least this moment is given its appropriate sense of horror. This massive outdoor event can’t always balance heart and spectacle; Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour always includes a round of fireworks and when they happen at the close of the song America, it feels like a grim celebration of American imperialism.
But its love story rings true. Its tragedy still summons the grief we all hold in a world where children still die for the most senseless reasons. And in 2024, this revival digs deep, uncovers its beating heart where it lies within its new, excellent cast, and shows it to us. Reminding us not to ignore our own.
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