West Side Story

West Side Story

When it comes to Broadway musicals, girls have plenty of options aimed squarely at them—Wicked, The Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins—but few tuners seem to cater to boys. If you're determined to get your little guy hooked on musicals, Arthur Laurents’s mesmerizing bilingual revival of West Side Story, which speaks directly to young men, is the show to see.

But isn’t West Side Story a mushy Romeo and Juliet revamp? you may be wondering. On one level, yes. But it's also rife with grit, fighting, bullish male pride and teenage testosterone. Written more than 50 years ago, it still works as a searing examination of the male adolescent mind, plumbing the depths of teen boys’ confused morals and, in many songs (“Gee, Officer Krupke,” “Cool” and “Tonight”), pinpointing the forces that drive them to act out. In this production, all the gang members—particularly the Jets’ Riff (Cody Green), Action (Curtis Holbrook) and head Shark Bernardo (George Akram)—make their angst palpable while gliding across the stage in elegant faux-fights. Director Laurents, who wrote the original book, has retained all of Jerome Robbins’s sleek choreography, which is particularly impressive in the blockbuster group number “School Dance” and the emotional ballet “Somewhere.”

This revival's most notable change is linguistic: Two songs and some dialogue are performed in Spanish without supertitles, a switch that actually infuses the story with greater authenticity. The conversations are both expressive and short, and English translations of the lyrics appear in the program.

As reformed Jet Tony, Matt Cavenaugh may be the production’s only (slight) downfall. His character is supposed to be good-natured, but Cavenaugh takes the earnestness too far, at times seeming like he'd be more at home in the burbs than on the mean streets of the city. But he absolutely shines in his scenes with the operatic soprano Josefina Scaglione (Maria), a Broadway newcomer. She and Karen Olivo (Anita) are the production’s knockout performers, and they ensure that your daughters will fall for the show just as hard as your sons will.

A few scenes may be a bit harrowing: The rumble under the highway, the near-rape of Anita and Tony’s death are undeniably dark. But frankly, they're probably gentler than what your tweens catch on the evening news, and the overwhelming sadness with which these sequences are framed makes it clear that violence is to be reviled, not imitated.—Julia Israel

West Side Story is playing at the Palace Theatre. Tickets: $45-$300