Jerome Robbins was the choreographer for the original 1957 Tony-award-winning production of West Side Story, the well known Broadway classic that was turned into a musical movie in 1961. In 1995, Robbins extracted a sequence of dances from the musical to make this ballet suite for the New York City Ballet.
While in this form Chad, unfamiliar with the storyline, found it difficult to grasp what the story was fully about, the dancing was all nonetheless engaging and suprisingly still felt very current if you didn't mind the datedness of the wardrobe. The issues of street life and racial tensions that it addressed are still very much with us, and the choreography still expressed these difficult issues in a way that felt relevant and interesting.
Update: We saw this again on 11/6/2009
I (Chad) was able to follow the store better the second time. While it is odd to have ballet dancers singing, it was pulled off mostly well and I enjoyed it better this time.
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