West Side Story: All-student production does classic justice

Since its founding in 1995, the Middlebury College Musical Players (MCMP) has committed to putting on at least one full-scale musical every academic year. In recent years, they’ve typically produced one musical each semester, and their selection for this spring was the beloved “West Side Story,” touted as their most ambitious project to date — the cast is large, the music complicated and the dance numbers elaborate.

Considering the resources available to an exclusively student-run group like MCMP, trying to do justice to a legend could have been folly; nevertheless, they put on an impressively solid show filled with a number of moments that truly shone.

The play began on an especially ambitious note, with a long and complicated overture for the 16-piece pit orchestra, filled with composer Leonard Bernstein’s trademark key changes and complex time signatures, followed by a long, wordless dance-fighting-showdown between the story’s two rival gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.

The production started out with slightly shaky legs, but soon found its footing as it transitioned into its first musical number, the well-known “Jet Song” (“When you’re a Jet, etc.”).

Generally, the play was more engrossing and enjoyable during the large dance numbers than during the acted bits, and strongest during the songs — a testament to the “West Side” soundtrack’s durability over the years.

The catchy tunes have certainly been ingrained in our cultural consciousness. Even with some of the play’s lesser-known numbers, I felt the joy of recognition as they leaped out of some storage vault in the back of my mind’s warehouse, the memory of them clear as day despite the fact that I haven’t heard some of them for years.

But on top of this, the songs were probably the best-executed aspect of MCMP’s production, and with the talent of Chris Hershey-Van Horn ’11.5 in the lead role of Tony, wonderful tunes like “Something’s Coming” and “Maria” were quite successful. On the other end of the spectrum from these musical soliloquies, large dance numbers like the “Mambo!” scene at the gym and the difficult medley “Tonight” were a great deal of fun to watch.

Finally, Michelle Alto ’12 deserves a notice for her turn as Anita, in which she captured the character’s Act I sassiness with believability and charisma.

One of the most challenging aspects of “West Side Story” is watching the contradiction between the two storylines of love and hate. The end of Act I focuses on the downward spiral following the murders of Riff and Bernardo (or Mercutio and Tybalt, for you Shakespeareans) in the “rumble.” In Act II, the blood only continues to spill, but these relentlessly dark twists are not at the heart of the play. Rather, the play’s sentimentality allows it to act as a plea for the harmony and beauty of the world that Tony and Maria envision for themselves in their short time together.

Despite all the violence that has occurred, we are given a glimmer of hope when the two gangs find some reconciliation in the end, and the tragic melds with the hopeful in a quite remarkable way. This delicate tone is quite difficult to pull off, but the MCMP team did it winningly, and for that, they deserve the thunderous applause that the packed house in the McCullough Social Space awarded them.