LA Opera's West Side Story Pulls No Punches

LOS ANGELES—Stage director Francesca Zambello’s wonderfully faithful-to-the-spirit-of-the-original production of West Side Story has been around since 2018—and it probably should be around forever. Using Joshua Bergasse’s  “reproduction” of Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, it captures the energy, the tension, the pizzazz, and most stunningly, the shock that the Broadway original must have generated when it opened in 1957.

I saw this staging for the first time at the Lyric Opera of Chicago two years ago, and at the climactic moment in which Chino shoots Tony from a sniper’s perch, there was an anguished scream from several girls seated in the balcony. One even started crying. Whether or not they were familiar with the plot, it was an acknowledgement of the power this musical has to arouse our emotions.  

Duke Kim and Gabriella Reyes’ as Tony and Maria in LA Opera's production of West Side Story

Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Sep. 20), it was Los Angeles Opera’s turn to host the Zambello production as the kickoff to the company’s 40th season. The audience was of a rather different mix than the one in Chicago, populated with few young people and dotted by tuxedoed and gowned high rollers headed to the opera ball afterwards at the Music Center. No matter, all responded enthusiastically to the turbocharged ballets and production numbers, and cheered long and loudly for South Korean tenor Duke Kim’s bravura rendition of Tony’s song “Maria.” This time when the shot rang out, there were no screams but an audible gasp of shock and anxious murmuring among the gala crowd. The impact of West Side Story, when done authentically, can grab any audience of any era.

The season opener was in fact the long-delayed culmination of LA Opera’s commemoration of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary in 2018, having left the project dangling after performing Wonderful Town and Candide. There was a local angle as well, for the pivotal meeting between Bernstein and Arthur Laurents that turned the scuttled East Side Story draft into West Side Story occurred poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Bernstein’s birthday in 1955.

Zambello’s staging is gorgeously, spectacularly, and moodily lit, set in a deliberately ambiguous period with costumes and sets that can suggest the 1950s but could also be interpreted as something more recent; the poster of Puerto Rican rapper/activist Bad Bunny in Maria’s bedroom helped blur the timeline. One wondered whether Zambello had a future WSS in mind when she directed Wagner’s Ring cycle at San Francisco Opera in 2011, staging the fight between Siegmund and Hunding in Act 2 of Die Walküre underneath a freeway viaduct.

The company assembled a superb, youthful ensemble cast of singing actors who could also execute Robbins’s highly athletic choreography. It might be easier t to find such combinations of talents today than it was in 1957, now that WSS has long since become part of what remains of our shared culture. Yet it was still something special to experience the rush of energy of the snazzy dance sequences and the stylized horror of the violent scenes.

The Dance at the Gym in West Side Story

For James Conlon, beginning his final season as LA Opera’s music director, West Side Story was a return to the scene of his musical beginnings, having absorbed the cast album and film versions as a child growing up in Queens just a ride across the Triborough Bridge from its setting. And it was a welcome surprise to hear this conductor, who usually deals in traditional European fare, getting the LA Opera Orchestra to swing the big band jazz of “Dance at the Gym” and the quasi-bebop “Cool” ballet. He could also make the Latin American dances and mambos percolate in a way that kept this listener uncontrollably bobbing and weaving in his seat to the beat (my apologies to the sedate folk around me).

At the same time, aided by an expanded violin section, Conlon found the places where some operatic swelling of style and emotion could be applied, while making sure that WSS remained a Broadway musical at its core. Heightening the operatic elements would have pleased Bernstein in his last decade. He had always wanted to write a serious opera that would stamp his name into the pantheon.

The originally scheduled Riff, Taylor Hawley, had turned an ankle, so P. Tucker Worley stepped out of his role as A-Rab (he was also the Fight Captain) to take over on opening night. He went for it hammer and tong, investing Riff with all of the over-the-top vitality and gung-ho hoodlum brutality a gang leader would muster. (From the Jets’s ranks, Peter Murphy took over as A-Rab.) 

Soprano Gabriella Reyes’s Maria started out as a giddy young girl but soon moved into the (somewhat wobbly) operatic voice of a Tosca to convincingly portray the Maria that became overwrought and embittered by the close. Duke Kim, who was Romeo in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet for LA Opera in 2024, played Romeo’s direct descendant Tony here—and managed the stylistic bridge to Broadway convincingly. In Yurel Echezarreta’s Bernardo, I missed the sense of suave menace that George Chakiris brought to the role in the 1961 film, while Amanda Castro extended the tradition of sizzling Anitas, particularly in her dancing during “America.”

As traditional curtain calls go, the ensemble cast and its conductor looked unusually solemn as they lined up in a straight line, reluctantly taking the usual star turns for applause. It was as if they were as stunned by West Side Story’s impact as much of the audience was. So it is in 2025, where the ethnic, gun violence, and economic divides in America addressed in West Side Story are, if anything, widening faster than ever.

Classical music coverage on Musical America is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Musical America makes all editorial decisions.