The Revivals Of the Fittest

One compensation of New York City life is that even the unpleasant parts come wrapped in legend. Your commute to Brooklyn might be a drag, but hey, Walt Whitman did it before you, and immortalized it in a poem. For generations, no art form has done more to make the city a place of fables than the Broadway musical. From Rodgers and Hart's "Manhattan" in 1925 to "Christopher Street" in "Wonderful Town" to "Another Hundred People" in "Company," songwriters haven't just reflected their madcap city—they've helped to define it.

Now, just when New Yorkers are in the midst of a spiritual flogging—upstaged by Obama's Washington, humbled by Wall Street's collapse, perplexed by real-estate prices that are almost reasonable—the two greatest New Yorkmusicals have returned. If staged well, "West Side Story," with its native-born and Puerto Rican gang warfare, distills the violence, frustrated dreams and tragic undertow of this immigrant town. And "Guys and Dolls," with its hustlers and zealous (though badly outnumbered) religious believers, captures the ingenuity of New York's street poetry, the hard-edged sense of humor that is constantly demanded of people forced to navigate these sidewalks every day. Both of the revivals take liberties with the material, in hopes of speaking more directly to our vexed moment. Each tells a very different story about the way we live in the nation's artistic capital now.

The chief novelty of the revival of "West Side Story" directed by Arthur Laurents, the show's 91-year-old librettist, is that considerable chunks of the sad tale of Tony and Maria are now spoken and sung in Spanish. When this happens the first time, in a scene between Maria (Josefina Scaglione) and Anita (Karen Olivo, who just became a great big star), your eyes flick instinctively to the proscenium arch for a translation to appear. It doesn't. This prompts two thoughts in quick succession: (1) Hey, you have to know Spanish to understand what they're saying. (2) Wait—why don't I know Spanish?

Having the Sharks speak in their native tongue is a gimmick—and a dubious gesture toward realism, considering the show's hardened killers still face off in un-Crip-like shades of orange and purple, and sing quaintly of what happens when "the spit hits the fan." But it's a brilliant gimmick. It reminds us that 52 years after the premiere of this tragedy about New Yorkers failing to understand one another, at a time when a quarter of the city's households are Spanish-speaking, we still don't entirely grasp what's being said around us.

But fear not, gringos. The excitement and emotional force of this revival don't need translation. Laurents makes shaky choices here and there—this is not going to be anybody's favorite version of "Gee, Officer Krupke"—but his revival does justice to the twin sources of its power: Leonard Bernstein's music, which balances symphonic grandeur with the punch of pop music, and the immortal dances of the show's original director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins (reproduced here by Joey McKneely). They give Act I a 15-minute stretch of overpowering beauty: the mambo at the gym (those flying bodies, those jabbing arms), then Tony and Maria's quiet first meeting (such an eloquent translation of Romeo's "Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!/For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night"), then "Maria" (sung with extraordinary sweetness by Matt Cavenaugh), and finally "Tonight" (the lovers on a balcony high above a city street, but with an empty void behind them—an abstract gloom that makes the lyric doubly poignant).

We've had half a century to get used to all of this. But even after the film and the hundred thousand high-school productions and the commercials that use "Somewhere," the show still feels fresh. Partly this is due to some savvy casting. If you haven't seen many fawning Q&As with the celebrities who were hired to punch up ticket sales, it's because there aren't any. A few names in the Playbill are familiar, but mainly this show will give its actors the biggest (and, if there's any justice, most glowing) notices of their young lives.