‘West Side Story’ revived as gritty, witty and bright at Lyric Opera

It all sounds simple enough. Choose one of the great American musicals, “West Side Story,” cast it with those rare triple-gifted performers who can act, sing and dance, invest in classy, gargantuan sets, and realize Leonard Bernstein’s rich score with a full-sized orchestra. Voila! Musical theatre euphoria!

Of course, it isn’t simple, but in the case of Lyric Opera’s superbly executed production of the 1957 musical inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” it certainly manifests aesthetic euphoria.

The performers don’t just need to act and sing, but do so simultaneously, as lyricist Stephen Sondheim — this show was his Broadway debut — incorporated witty, sophisticated storytelling and angry emotion as he and Bernstein unearthed the characters’ deepest emotions and the drama of the most significant scenes with the songs.

Corey Cott and Mikaela Bennett portray the doomed lovers Tony and Maria, who fall in love instantly and then find themselves on opposite sides of a growing gang war between the Jets — a mix of Italian, Polish and Irish used to having their way in their Manhattan ‘hood — and the Sharks, filled with newer arrivals from Puerto Rico.

Cott sets us up perfectly with “Something’s Coming,” in which he captures Tony’s optimism so strongly that it even later explains his failure to recognize how badly everything is about to go wrong.

Bennett, who must be considered the breakout star of this production, possesses a clarion soprano voice that’s bigger and more immaculate than traditional musical theater but far more grounded than opera. She’s the best Maria I’ve ever heard, and on top of that she captures the character’s naïve but absolutely unwavering passion.

The rest of the cast — including excellent performances from Amando Castro as Anita, Brett Thiele as Riff and Manuel Stark Santos as Bernardo — keeps up that high bar, and adds in the dancing. And it’s not just that they and the ensemble of Sharks and Jets have to dance well; it’s that they have to execute Jerome Robbins’ fast-paced, athletic-balletic original choreography on an opera-sized stage. It’s a workout just watching them.

“West Side Story” set a new standard for the sheer amount of choreography that could be in a Broadway show; Robbins even insisted on a highly extended original rehearsal time. There aren’t a lot of theaters in the country with the resources for a national search to draw a set of performers who can all execute at this level, and I can’t think of any recent show with such constant, thrilling injections of dynamism and adrenaline, always supported by that giant orchestra conducted by James Lowe.

Francesca Zambello’s production sticks to the script, you might say, providing a straightforward but always compelling take on the teen tragedy. The costumes from Jessica Jahn get an update — there are plenty of moto-pants and camo designs onstage that you might see in this month’s GQ, and the guys have a lot of tattoos, including on their shoulders and necks. I’m pretty sure that was a picture of Sonia Sotomayor hanging on Maria’s second-story bedroom wall, thanks to set designer Peter J. Davison.

But with only an exception or two, these were not particularly in-your-face infusions of the contemporary. After all, the use of fisticuffs and even switchblades for gang battles brings us back pretty quickly to a time where the appearance of a gun could still surprise. If you authentically update “West Side Story” too much, you either get each scene abbreviated with the entrance of AK-47s, or perhaps a bar fight between rival Wall Street firms attending Lincoln Center, which now sits where this action was set in the ’50s. Zambello’s goal here seems to have been to add modernisms so as not to distract us from the story — so you don’t wonder, “Oh, that’s what they were wearing in those days?”

Smartly, though, Zambello does amp up the corrupt potential of the cops. The cops here can often tend toward the comic, but here actors Bret Tuomi and Jerry Kernion manage to make the cops genuinely menacing without losing the touch of buffoonishness so expertly mocked with the sociologically astute piece “Gee, Officer Krupke,” which serves as a bit of comic (but still biting) relief as the show descends into the tragic.

That number is followed by my personal favorite scene in this whole show, which is saying a lot in a show that’s as consistently great as this one. The duet “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love,” performed by Bennett and Castro with realistic but inflamed intensity, captures all the swirling emotions — love, anger, grief, despair — that Bernstein and Sondheim and book writer Arthur Laurents and Robbins have to offer.

Steven Oxman is a local freelance writer.