Francesca Zambello’s West Side Story, restaged this year for Opera Australia’s annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour (HOSH), is a masterful combination of high-budget production values and gritty social awareness. “I watch how we are failing to address the humanitarian crisis at our border in America – and in countries around the world,” Zambello remarks. “The story feels richer and more complex every time I revisit it.” Ethnic tension is front and centre the moment you see the stage: splashed across the set, in large, angry white letters, is the graffiti: “GO HOME”.

Zambello’s production displays remarkable empathy with the vision of the original composer, Leonard Bernstein, who relocated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet amid the gang wars of 1950s New York. Over the first page of his copy of Romeo and Juliet, Bernstein scribbled: “An out and out plea for racial tolerance.” And in the margin: “…prologue interrupted by street fight”. His urgent handwritten scrawls mark West Side Story’s genesis as a dark social narrative.

Bernstein, working with the creative dream team of Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (book) and Jerome Robbins (choreography and direction), reset Shakespeare’s Verona as grimy Manhattan and recast the star-crossed lovers as Tony the Polish-American gangster and Maria the newly migrated Puerto Rican teenager. In place of Shakespeare’s evocative sonnets, Bernstein composed a rich melting pot of sounds reflecting New York’s bustling diversity. The sweeping strings and woodwind of classical music back the brassy tones and syncopated dissonance of jazz, followed by the percussive strikes and dance beats of Latin America and the soaring melodies of musical theatre and opera. In an era of family-friendly musicals, early detractors feared the complex music was too risky to stage.

“Everyone told us that the show was an impossible project,” Bernstein recalled. “No one, we were told, was going to be able to sing augmented fourths – as with ‘Ma-ri-a’… Also, they said the score was too rangy for pop music: ‘Tonight, tonight’ – it went all over the place. Besides, who wanted to see a show in which the first-act curtain comes down on two dead bodies lying on the stage?”

But the team persevered and the result is an enduring masterpiece: a soundscape speaking louder than words of a Manhattan pulsing with multifaceted social tension.

Productions that forget these dark-hearted origins risk descending into twee sickliness, which Zambello avoids. Her emphasis on gritty realism benefits enormously from the HOSH outdoor stage. Like the gangs roaming Manhattan, the audience can see a real city skyline, hear the rumble of distant traffic and feel the cool night breeze. Brian Thomson’s magnificent set is a highway overpass echoing the Harbour Bridge behind it, lit with streetlamp coldness by John Rayment. Even the stage floor is not the usual shiny dance Tarkett, but something akin to gravelly bitumen: you can hear the dancers’ sneakers scrape as they move across it.

Despite focusing on realism, Zambello spares no expense, maintaining a big-budget sense of scale. HOSH productions, after all, are huge extravaganzas, featuring fireworks, a massive 25-metre over-water stage and a custom-built grandstand seating 3000 people. Zambello takes full advantage of the space: the dancers leap and sprint the whole 25 metres (Kiira Schmidt Carper’s revival choreography) and Thomson’s set pieces – Doc’s drug store, Maria’s apartment and Anita’s bridal store – are larger than life, rolling across the set as if being cinematically zoomed in and out.

With this level of scaling, the ensemble needs near-explosive energy to fill the space. Happily, Zambello’s ensemble is one of the production’s great strengths, performing with a sincere, committed enthusiasm and the superhuman ability to dash in 25-metre bursts while singing. I was especially impressed with “Gee, Officer Krupke”, a song that can easily be reduced to bumbling slapstick. This ensemble – fantastically led by Luke Jarvis as Action, boiling over with frustrated rage – laced it with a humour so dark it spoke compellingly of the toxic roots of youth dysfunction. As Jarvis remarks drily to Doc (Wayne Scott Kermond) on being accused of making the world “lousy”: “That’s the way we found it.”

Other critics have remarked the dancing lacks unified precision, but in my view this is simply a natural – and pleasingly realistic – consequence of casting dancers of diverse body types. The absence of military-style unity gives West Side Story its necessary coarse realism: after all, the performers are meant to be street kids, not a corps de ballet. Physical variations allow Robbins’ balletic choreography to shine while offsetting its heavy stylisation which – if produced to the extreme – can make West Side Story ridiculous, prompting one satirist to observe: “How would you even manage to complete everyday gang activities like leaping and twirling if you aren’t classically trained in ballet? Everybody knows a cornerstone of organised street crime is frolicking down your turf like you’re Ginger Rogers.”

For the lead roles, Zambello prioritises freshness, chemistry and singing ability. First Nations soprano Nina Korbe is an endearingly attractive Maria, singing with fiery vocal strength and polished technique. Billy Bourchier is a vocal crowd-pleaser as Tony, with a velvety easy-on-the-ear tenor, a gorgeous sense of musical dynamics and the ability to connect by singing directly to the audience. His renditions of “Something’s Coming” and “Maria” are smooth as butter. But the drawback of emphasising likeableness is an absence of darkness, making Tony’s killing of Bernardo and desperate run from the law not as believable as I would have liked. Korbe and Bourchier look good together but their vocal blending was also unbalanced on opening night, with Korbe’s classically trained soprano overpowering Bourchier’s musical theatre crooning in “Tonight” and “Somewhere”. Hopefully these are problems easily fixed with sound booth tweaking.

The powerful Kimberley Hodgson delivers another knock-out performance as Anita. Her deep, impassioned mezzo-soprano makes “A Boy Like That” the evening’s emotional high point. She has fantastic chemistry with Manuel Stark Santos’s winning Bernardo, supported by Patrick Whitbread’s well-sung Riff and Scott Irwin’s many-sided Lieutenant Schrank.

Hodgson’s harrowing gang rape scene is one of those moments where you realise West Side Story remains enduringly fresh because it’s unafraid of grappling with complex, intersectional social issues. Police corruption, generational conflict, youth dysfunction, male-female dominance, poverty, racial intolerance, gender stereotyping, the migrant experience and second-generation cultural identity are all masterfully, compassionately depicted. And all rise to the fore in Zambello’s big-budget production. It’s a tragedy that such issues remain as relevant today as they did more than six decades ago when Bernstein first scribbled his “plea” across Romeo and Juliet. But productions like this remind us that – as the ensemble sings – there remains untapped good. 

West Side Story is playing at Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquaries Point, Sydney, until April 21.

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