Review: LA Opera’s ‘West Side Story’ Is a Sweeping & Symphonic Ode to Leonard Bernstein

The following is a review of the Thursday, September 25th performance when Daniella Castoria and Joy Del Valle played the parts of Anita and Rosalia respectively. 

LA Opera opens its season with a fascinating opera-meets-musical-theater staging of West Side Story that embraces the scale of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion without losing the pulse of street-corner youth. From the first brass snap of the “Prologue” to the hushed hope of “Somewhere,” the evening feels both grand and immediate — an orchestral love letter to Bernstein and a reminder that Laurents and Sondheim built a work that thrives on the tension between elegance and urgency. The result is a production that looks expansive, sounds luxurious, and, crucially, moves with vitality. As the company marks its 40th anniversary season, and conductor James Conlon celebrates his 50th production and 500th performance (on Thursday, Sept. 25th), the choice of this work also speaks volumes: it underscores American creativity while acknowledging the opera house as a civic forum where questions of love, belonging, and conflict still resonate.

The narrative is familiar but ever potent. The Jets and the Sharks — white and Puerto Rican teens — are in the midst of gang warfare on Manhattan’s West Side. Tony, a Jet who is trying to outgrow hoodlum life, meets Maria, sister to the Sharks’ leader, Bernardo. Their love ignites at a gym-hosted dance, but as plans harden and a rumble turns fatal, grief spreads like wildfire. The young couple dreams of a place “for us,” only to learn that hatred is swifter in drawing boundaries than love is in dissolving them. If the story echoes Shakespearean tragedy (specifically Romeo and Juliet) its heartbeat is American rhythm — jittery, jazzy, and percussive. Seeing this familiar narrative framed by the grandeur of the Pavilion accentuates the intimacy of the premise magnified for 3,000-plus attendees.

What sets this revival apart is the marriage of operatic tendencies to a Broadway standard. James Conlon conducts the LA Opera Orchestra with a symphonic eye for Bernstein’s counterpoint. Inner lines — the sly clarinets in “Maria,” the tensile strings that propel “Cool,” the burnished horn chorales that halo “Somewhere” — emerge with clarity. Conlon shapes dances like tone poems and songs like arias, but he resists gilding the music as the propulsion remains theatrical and kinetic.

Francesca Zambello’s direction favors clean storytelling and cinematic pacing. She allows character beats to breathe — the stillness before Tony’s “Something’s Coming,” the spiral of guilt encircling Anita after the rumble — and then accelerates into a larger scope where heightened stakes reside inside the urban milieu. The decision to retain Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, here rigorously and stylishly reproduced by Joshua Bergasse, anchors the show’s moral geometry. Rivalry is written in ropey wrists, split-second changes of weight, and the slicing of bodies through space. The gym mambo crackles with electricity, while “Cool” — a choreographic highlight — detonates with icy precision.

The visual design contributes strongly to this dynamic. Peter J. Davison’s skeletal fire escapes, chain-link fences, and sliding architectural fragments give the stage vertical urgency, suggesting the city as both scaffolding and cage. Mark McCullough’s lighting, with revival lighting by A.J. Guban, carves the night into zones of danger and refuge. Jessica Jahn’s costumes embrace saturated palettes without caricature: Sharks radiate heat, Jets telegraph a meandering and destructive chill. Andrew Harper’s sound design deserves recognition for balancing the electric immediacy of musical-theater mics with the warmth of an opera pit; the mix preserves textual clarity while letting the orchestra bloom.

The performers match the production’s ambition. As Tony, Duke Kim, who inhabited Romeo on the LA Opera stage only last fall, rediscovers his star-crossed longing as he sings with a shining, forward tenor that sits squarely on the breath. His “Maria” is not only buoyant, but wins over a crowd who has initial doubts, while “Tonight” frames wistfulness as lift rather than burden. Vocally, Kim partners beautifully with Gabriella Reyes’s Maria, whose soprano carries both lilt and steel. Reyes shapes phrases with an almost bel canto attention to vowel and line, and she shades the character from girlish wonder to moral resolve without losing radiance. Kim and Reyes’s balcony scene particularly feels airborne, amounting to a breathless duet of immaculate voices. And this comes across even though the opera-trained leads attempt to almost downplay their vocal tendencies to better integrate with a mostly musical-theater cast; nonetheless, the juxtaposition between them and the company as a whole is a fascinating experiment, no less, and quite a successful one at that.

The production’s lightning rod is Daniella Castoria’s Anita (usually portrayed by Amanda Castro), who fuses dancer’s attack with a vocalist’s bite. In “America,” she makes wit feel like victory; in “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love,” she erupts in grief-tinted fury before finding tremulous compassion. Yurel Echezarreta’s Bernardo exudes panther-smooth authority and real danger, making the rumble register as a clash of codes, buttressed by Andrew Kenneth Moss’s scintillating fight choreography. Taylor Harley’s Riff brings wiry charisma and a fighter’s grin, his “Jet Song” delivered as both anthem and warning. Around them, standout work comes from Juan Miguel Posada as a Chino who accrues tragedy quietly, Joy Del Valle whose zestfulness is on full display as Rosalia (the part is normally played by Castoria), David Prottas as an incisively spirited Action whose “Gee, Officer Krupke” lands without overplaying, Anna Bermudez as a grounded Anybodys, Grayden Mark Harrison as a cautiously innocent Baby John, Eric Patrick Harper as an antagonistically stern Lt. Schrank, and Tom Virtue as an amiable voice of reason in Doc. The crisp ensemble of Jets and Sharks makes Robbins’s choreography feel newly minted, anchored by a preternatural precision and exactitude of movement.

The orchestral storytelling, moreover, deserves immense praise. The pit does not merely accompany; it narrates subtext. Percussion and low brass weaponize swagger, violins galore accent the proceedings with dogged class, woodwinds tease tenderness in “One Hand, One Heart,” and the “Tonight” Quintet stacks desire, duty, and dread like harmonized weather. On this stage, the late-Act I piece’s famous hybridity — jazz, Latin idioms, classical craft — sounds less like a mash-up and more like an argument that America’s musical languages belong together.

Zambello and her team also ensure that the show’s heartbeat is steady, registering at just the right moments. The police scenes are brisk rather than bludgeoning, letting institutional cynicism register on the periphery so that youthful choices remain centered. The final tableau is mercifully spare; the company resists editorializing and trusts the music to grieve. That restraint is a kind of respect — for the audience’s imagination and for the work’s high-minded clarity. In an era when conversations about cultural representation and generational conflict feel especially charged, this production allows West Side Story to speak freshly without the need for overt updates or conceptual overlays. The timelessness of its themes on division, reinforced by the authenticity of the performances, gives the symbolic production both gravity and dignity.

Ultimately, LA Opera’s West Side Story is handsome without being hollow, urgent without being frantic, and musically rich in ways that deepen the book’s human struggles. Fans of the musical will hear familiar songs illuminated in new colors, while opera regulars will recognize how completely this score profits from a full orchestra and a hall that lets resonance become part of the drama. That dual appeal — satisfying both musical-theater devotees and opera audiences — may be the production’s greatest achievement. In a city built on reinvention, this revival feels like renewal: finger-snapping, heart-stirring, and more than worth the trip to Grand Avenue.

Cover image caption: (L-R) Duke Kim as Tony and Gabriella Reyes as Maria in LA Opera’s production of West Side Story in Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Cory Weaver/LAO.

LA Opera’s production of West Side Story runs on select days through Sunday, October 12th. For more information, including performance dates/times and to purchase tickets, visit laopera.org.