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Powells superb Tony vibrates with energy and puppyish optimism; his rendition of Maria is revelatory, a show-and-heart-stopper.
Attention, both the audiences and the performers, is critically divided.
To be clear, this isnt a blanket condemnation of fixing something that wasnt broke.
Ofcourseits understandable that a director would encounter this material and want to rebel.
In musical-theater terms, thats all our daddies in one place, and the content is pure teenage fury.
They stop along the edge of the unadorned stage, staring outward like suspects in a lineup.
The Sharks stride out, glaring menacingly at us in their turn.
So we have plenty of time to size up the delinquents.
(Call it elevated gang-leisure.)
Soon, the enormous back wall fills with their images.
Seen from the audience, they look so grim!
But onscreen, they look … so pretty.
Thats the first gesture the video undermines; it wont be the last.
Van Hoves interpretation is Hobbesian: brutal and short.
emphasize the shows savagery.
And real-world trouble already touches the show.
Theprotests continue some on the streets outside the theater over Amar Ramasars casting as gang leader Bernardo.
After intervention by an arbitrator, he was reinstated.
Bernardo sets the tone: Its a tough acting challenge.
Van Hove leaves him exposed.
So far, so good.
But when van Hove introduces those video components, his control wavers and crashes.
At his best, hes a minimalist, skilled with compression and reduction.
And what good do they do?
(Man, One Direction gotserious.)
Worse, though, are the live images.
Onstage, actors sometimes shoot one another from unsteady iPhones, which makes a dizzying, distracting backdrop.
So is it all trash?
Switch off the projectors.
The good moments are already the ones that dont rely on video.
He generalizes the central pairs plight out to the entire company.
Its in this simple Somewhere that van Hove touches the live wire of his own show.
West Side Storyis at the Broadway Theatre.
