K.-O. upright: it is the state in which the public rose from the last dying notes of West Side Storylights off, curtain down, saluting Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece in the version staged by Barrie Kosky and choreographed by Otto Pichler, presented at the end of the season at the Opéra national du Rhin. A first in France, since the creation of the production in 2013 at the Komische Oper in Berlin.
And West Side Story you XXIe century ? The Australian director has transformed the iconic « West Side » in « Anywhere Side », extending to a no man’s land enamelled with a few New York stigmas (an omnipresent basketball court, fire escapes on the side of buildings) the universal drama that the work carries – Romeo and Juliet have counterparts in all cultures. Particularly striking is the extreme scenic stripping in which the tragedy takes place, the arena of a merciless fight where good and evil clash within a revolving world – the spinning effects are very accurate – , from which the heroes try to extract themselves without succeeding.
A few rare decorative elements punctuate the large black space open to the backstage: a bed, Doc’s fruit and vegetable stall, a fairy tale of luminous balls descending from the hangers to illuminate the meeting of Maria and Tony on the dance floor (from start to finish, magnificent plays of light bring sharpness or poetry). This eviction from the city, very present in the musical imagined by Jerome Robbins on a theatrical text by Arthur Laurents and the “musical” words of Stephen Sondheim, is embodied in the metal of the bodies, the verticality of hatreds, seismic confrontation around the same territory, to be preserved for some , to conquer for others, between the rival bands of the Jets, a youth born of European immigration, and the Sharks, young Puerto Rican wolves newly landed. A precise and detailed direction of actors gives the smallest role a face and a destiny, while the collective plays the card of violence – the gang rape of Anita, the murders of Riff, Bernardo, then Tony.
wild energy
Otto Pichler’s choreography dressed Robbins’ initial ballets (which remain at the forefront of the show) in ethnic tattoos, bulging muscles, hot blood and animality, giving contemporary ballet that added street-dance rage. (hip-hop, krump, capoeira elements). A wild energy that jumps at the throat and grabs when the knives of the fight come out. But the subject, faithful to the aesthetic created on Broadway in 1957, popularized a few years later by Robert Wise’s film (1961), more recently by Steven Spielberg (2021), remains below the political radicalism that would have doubt demanded today this message of peace, fraternity and love launched in the face of racism and exclusion.
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