Westside Story (Signature Theatre, Arlington, Virginia)

Westside Story is one of our favorite musicals, and we jumped at an opportunity to see it performed at a small, intimate theatre just outside of DC. It was well worth going to see. Putting aside the fact that we appeared to be the youngest attendees by a good 10+ years (and we are NOT young, as much as we’d like to think otherwise), it was a very enjoyable production.

Signature Theatre is an intimate theatre (it seats around 300), so there is no such thing as a bad seat.

Westside Story, like all musicals, has some challenges with respect to casting. You need two strong female leads, a strong male lead with some strong secondary male voices, and the ensemble needs to know how to both sing and dance. Given the size of the stage at Signature, my guess is that the choreography was also a bit challenging.

The leads, Tony and Maria, were excellent in their singing. Anita was also strong in both singing and dancing. The rest of the cast also was excellent, although I thought their dancing was slightly stronger than their singing. (I also thought about the fact that the female dancers did everything the male dancers did, only in heels. Additional comments omitted.)

The only criticism we had was at the end, during the emotional climax of the story. The scene when Maria reacts to Tony’s death and the conflict between the Jets and Sharks was painful to watch. And not painful as it should be when watching a heart-wrenching emotional moment kind of painful either. Painful in that it lasted too long and was a little off-kilter for whatever reason.

Nonetheless, it was a production that overall was well done and well worth watching.

Note: I would have put in a spoiler alert, but since the first performance of Westside Story was in 1957, I didn’t think it was necessary.