by Maybe it was the light wind coming off the water, blowing the actors’ hair. Perhaps it was the brightness and promise of hope of the orchestra as young Tony (Billy Bourchier) promised us that something He was coming to change it all. Perhaps it was the gentle spin of a disco ball, being held aloft by a crane and slowly pouring new stars across 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 he had fallen in love for the first time .
The open air season of classical music, which premiered in Sydney in 2019, has a wonderful new magic. Francesca Zambello’s production was just as stylish in its first run, and revival choreographer Kiira Schmidt Carper’s translation of Jerome’s beautiful, balletic Robbins. shapes filled, as it were, the huge stage as a rise in movement.
But the original run felt dated. The dialogue (in invented slang that was designed to be timeless but now feels deeply silly) came from the actors’ mouths. The show’s message – a call for racial tolerance – was hard to swallow when the stars were played by white actors who were Polish-American and Puerto Rican. It didn’t quite connect.
Later in 2019, Opera Australia staged a second indoor production of the opera, treated more sensitively but with less directorial clarity. Between this double dose on stage and a new movie musical directed by Steven Spielberg released in 2021, it felt like we might be ready to leave West Side Story behind.
After all, questioning violence, and examining racial prejudice have better performances. There are shows that try to give dignity, perception and interiority to its non-white characters (still largely missing in West Side Story; it doesn’t want you to think too long about how little we see or hear from Bernardo, the the leader of the Sharks and Maria’s brother, compared to the leader of the Jets and Tony Riff’s best friend).
Since the musical premiered in 1957, we have come a little further (not far enough) in our collective understanding that “tolerance” is too low a bar for living and thriving together. What could this show have left us now?
In 2024, on the harbor under a canopy of stars and a backdrop of water, with a new cast and a new sense of self, it was: magic. The way love comes into life and rewrites the world.
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What remains is Romeo and Juliet, the story on which the musical is based: a pure message of hope from the first time we fell in love, and the ways we change when the world knocks in and to grow up a little too old, and a little too hard, too fast.
It’s there, always, in that music by Leonard Bernstein – a rousing, heart-felt contribution to feeling (Guy Simpson’s musical direction is particularly touching here). Bourchier and Korbe interpret it beautifully, singing the lyrics of a young Stephen Sondheim as if they were the first to do it, just as first love feels like an invention you and your partner discovered alone; they are a wonderful pair of young lovers who reach for each other and remind us of what is going to happen.
The Jets, led by gung-ho Riff (Patrick Whitbread, heartbroken puppyish), feel like children; they play with violence until it turns into something deadly. The Sharks, led by Bernardo (Manuel Stark Santos), cannot afford the same luxury. They defend themselves in other ways: head high, shared dance language. When Riff and Bernardo’s rumbles turn deadly, the performance enables all those people to crumble: by letting these kids show us fear, we remember that they are kids.
And the lovers, too, are children. We see it when they sing together for the first time on Maria’s balcony, swept up in their harmonies as if they can bend the world enough to give them a happy ending. Korbe and Bourchier are remarkable: they don’t seem to stop finding each other, touching, reaching for each other’s arms as if the other’s existence is a surprise, voices rising above all else. Later, when they are playing married in a bridal shop, trying on a veil and a jacket, they look giddy and grave; it’s terrifying to watch them wake up to a new life when we know it won’t last more than a day.
Yes, the book is still silly, some of its jokes and jabs are still dated enough that you wish they’d be cut; they can be harmful for audience members to hear, especially when they are not in service to the larger story. Jets attack Anita (Kimberley Hodgson) is still painful to watch, although at least this moment is given the appropriate horror. This huge outdoor event can’t always strike a balance between heart and spectacle; Handa Opera on Sydney Harbor always includes a round of fireworks and when they happen at the end of the song America, it feels like a grim celebration of American imperialism.
But their love story is true. His tragedy still brings the sadness we all feel in a world where children die for the most senseless reasons. And in 2024, this renaissance is digging deep, revealing its beating heart where it lies within its excellent new team, and showing it to us. Reminding us not to ignore our own.
