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Back in 1957, when the word street was not yet an adjective, West Side Story exploded the boundaries of what a musical could be. Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins took a very old love story and transplanted it to the streets of fifties New York, turning gang turf wars into switchblade ballet. The show was a blast of sound and movement that reveled in both the tragedy and the exhilaration of violence.

But innovation so often becomes its own mummification, and before long, West Side Story became a go-to text for community theaters and high-school drama departments everywhere (as well as a hugely popular movie co-directed by Robbins and Robert Wise). Now, as he recently did with Gypsy, Laurents, 91, tries to reclaim his own chestnut by directing a revival, the first on Broadway in almost 30 years.

Does it work? Not quite, though not for lack of trying. The production has its strong moments, particularly in the early dance numbers. (Robbins’s original choreography has been carefully re-created by Joey McKneely.) In the opening salvo the homegrown toughs, the Jets (led by Cody Green’s Riff), and the Puerto Rican transplants the Sharks (led by George Akram’s Bernardo) mark their territory with scissor kicks and finger snaps against the fluttery apprehensiveness of Bernstein’s score, suggesting there really is something at stake in this asphalt Wild West.

But even though Laurents has taken some steps to modernize the book—chiefly by enlisting Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) to translate some of the dialogue and two of the songs into Spanish, ostensibly to impart a more realistic vibe to the proceedings—the show too often comes off as perfunctory, a cursory sprucing up of a touchstone that may have been better off left dusty and authentic. And in the end, the play’s dramatic power has nothing to do with contemporary relevance and everything to do with the songs and Robbins’s choreography. In fact, this production exposes too baldly the central flaw of the libretto: Tony and Maria, the Romeo and Juliet stand-ins (played here by Matt Cavenaugh and Josefina Scaglione), may be nice kids, but they’re also the show’s least interesting characters; Tony, in particular, is something of a drip. Cavenaugh and Scaglione transmit the required innocence and purity, but neither is charismatic enough to make the production feel fully alive. Standing with his fists clenched, his inverted triangle of a torso displayed beneath a fitted shirt, Cavenaugh has the faux-casual air of an underwear model from a sixties Sears catalogue.

That can hardly be Cavenaugh’s fault: More likely, Laurents’s original conception of Tony is so comfortably familiar to him that he can hardly envision the character any other way. (Clips of Larry Kert’s Tony, from the original production, show him standing with the same stiff, assertive posture.) On the other hand, as Anita, Karen Olivo—with the feline sauciness of Eartha Kitt, and legs as long as Central Park—is the show’s most vital presence: In the still brashly effective “Tonight” quintet, she stands in silhouette dressed only in a skimpy chemise, looking forward not to the upcoming rumble between the rival gangs, but to the action she’ll see afterward, with her boyfriend, Bernardo. She’s a girl with an appetite: Not only does she like to live in America, she’s ready to eat it whole. And although the show’s newly translated dialogue comes off, overall, as more novelty than meaningful reimagining, when Anita sings “A Boy Like That” in Spanish (“Un Hombre Así”), her derision and fear are so vivid they bust through the confines of language. Olivo gives West Side Story its percussive pulse. In her, the spirit of 1957 lives. — Stephanie Zacharek

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