Problems with sound, characters ruin ‘West Side Story’

The first news is bad news at Super Summer Theatre/Stage Door Entertainment's "West Side Story." The eight-member Nancy Westside Band lets out a blast of a Leonard Bernstein prologue from which the production never recovers. The music so overwhelms the vocals that you sometimes wonder if this was meant to be a concert.

The sound-mix problems rarely cease. A quintet nearly sounds like a solo. During a male choral number, we hear only the harmony line. An actor's heavy breathing following a dance number drowns out the dialogue that other actors are trying to engage in.

It's hard to put much blame on director Terrence Williams when the audio is consistently off-base from show to show at the outdoor venue.

Unfortunately, though, Williams deserves his own blame.

This "Romeo and Juliet" adaptation takes us into the world of 1950s New York gang warfare, with the whites (the Jets) against the immigrant Puerto Ricans (the Sharks). In the lead role of the well-scrubbed Tony, Eddie Gelhaus plays this reformed hoodlum as a saintly clean Norman Rockwell-er. We don't get a clue how Maria changes him. He's already Mr. Perfect, so what does he need the Virgin Mary for? Janay Bombino gives Maria a constant set smile so that we can't get a handle on her thoughts about the strange new life she's living.

Typical Williams approach: A social worker who's organized a teen dance is supposed to be "square," so Williams has actor Paul Chapman play the poor guy as the biggest nerd you've ever seen, complete with an Alfalfa sprout and a squeak of a voice. Williams doesn't much respect the details of the characters' behaviors, so we get a production that doesn't make moment-to-moment sense.

It's a relief, though, to see that most of the gang members look and dance like gang members. (The choreography by Evan Litt gets a lot of mileage out of various abilities). They project genuine anger, and carry themselves as threats (particularly Adamme Sosa as Maria's brother Bernardo, born with a chip on his shoulder, and Tyson Croft, who as the Jet Action, seems forever needy to rumble just to deplete his high energy level).

The ensemble numbers, when well engineered, are appropriately overpowering. The set, though, could do with just the slightest suggestion of glamour. Watching Tony and Maria sing sweet words to each other on a scaffold doesn't further the cause of romance any. No one will ever accuse Williams of overspending his set budget.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.