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Mar. 6th, 2016 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petzipellepingoReview: Carnegie Hall’s ‘West Side Story’ at the Knockdown Center
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
The headlong energy of youth was on ample — no, make that spectacular — display over the weekend in Maspeth, Queens, at the Knockdown Center, a former factory where a wonderfully energized, energizing production of “West Side Story” was presented for just three performances, under the auspices of Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute.
A culmination of the Somewhere Project, a citywide exploration of that classic 1957 musical that began in January, the production mixed professional actors with 15 high-school-aged apprentices in the cast, supplemented by a whopping chorus of 200 high school singers from 26 schools representing all five boroughs. Conducting the lush 40-piece orchestra was the eminent Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who was once a protégée of Leonard Bernstein, the composer of “West Side Story,” of course.
The site was fitting for this nontraditional but nevertheless faithful production, which essentially dispensed with sets and featured simple, contemporary costumes by Tracy Christensen. The show was performed on a long, rectangular stage made to resemble a strip of roadway — a drag strip, you might say — with the audience seated on three sides, some at tables and some in bleacherlike seating.
( Read more... )
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
The headlong energy of youth was on ample — no, make that spectacular — display over the weekend in Maspeth, Queens, at the Knockdown Center, a former factory where a wonderfully energized, energizing production of “West Side Story” was presented for just three performances, under the auspices of Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute.
A culmination of the Somewhere Project, a citywide exploration of that classic 1957 musical that began in January, the production mixed professional actors with 15 high-school-aged apprentices in the cast, supplemented by a whopping chorus of 200 high school singers from 26 schools representing all five boroughs. Conducting the lush 40-piece orchestra was the eminent Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who was once a protégée of Leonard Bernstein, the composer of “West Side Story,” of course.
The site was fitting for this nontraditional but nevertheless faithful production, which essentially dispensed with sets and featured simple, contemporary costumes by Tracy Christensen. The show was performed on a long, rectangular stage made to resemble a strip of roadway — a drag strip, you might say — with the audience seated on three sides, some at tables and some in bleacherlike seating.
( Read more... )
