‘West Side Story’ Review: Sharks vs. Jets vs. Video
Ben BrantleyFebruary 20, 2020: No one should be surprised to hear that Ivo van Hove has blown up “West Side Story.” This industrious, experimental director is celebrated, after all, for taking an artistic detonator to sacred classics — by authors like Shakespeare, Molière, Miller and O’Neill — and letting the pieces fly. But the blowing up I’m talking about in this curiously unaffecting reimagining of a watershed musical, which opened on Thursday night at the Broadway Theater, is the kind associated with photography, the process by which a picture is enlarged to outsize proportions. This means that most of the performers onstage here have video doppelgängers, projected on the wall behind them, who are many, many times their natural size. As such, those fatally rivalrous street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, have probably never loomed larger. Yet these disembodied Goliaths wind up upstaging their flesh-and-blood selves. As real, human-scale people, those crazy, mixed-up kids from New York’s mean streets have seldom seemed smaller, blurrier or less sure of their purpose — as characters or as performers.
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