Staging a more operatic 'West Side Story'

Los Angeles Opera opens its 40th season and turns up the music for the production.

- MARK SWED MUSIC CRITIC

L.A. OPERA offers a strong, eight-person backstage chorus to reinforce the singers, helping to manage the demands of the complex singing and dancing routines.

(BRIAN FEINZIMER For The Times)

In 1949, choreographer Jerome Robbins phoned Leonard Bernstein with an idea for updating “Romeo and Juliet” into a contemporary Broadway musical.

Robbins didn’t know what it would be, but he knew what it wouldn’t be: an opera!

When “West Side Story” had its premiere eight years later, it had become a gripping, tragic reflection on racism. But still not opera. Bernstein insisted that opera is resolved by music and Maria’s last lines in “West Side Story,” an impassioned plea against gun violence, are spoken.

Los Angeles Opera opened its 40th season Saturday night with “West Side Story” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. No one, and especially not Bernstein, ever said “West Side Story” was not operatic. In fact, the show’s brilliance, its indelible mark on music theater is its treatment of song and dance, in the ability of Robbins’ stylized and now iconic movement and Bernstein's score to give us both the physicality and interiority of people and place. The only time Bernstein himself ever conducted “West Side Story” was for a glorious, if controversial, recording with opera stars.

FRANCESCA ZAMBELLO's production maintains much of the Broadway original's integrity, with L.A. Opera's 28-player orchestra adding a musical intensity.

(BRIAN FEINZIMER For The Times)