Saxophone sirens scream and car-horns blare in basses and brass; Coney Island’s come-hither song insinuates huskily from the woodwind, while Time Square’s lights glow tawdry-bright in the violins. If New York gets a Best Supporting Actress award for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, then the city stands squarely in the spotlight in On The Town – the composer’s first Broadway hit about three sailors on shore-leave during World War II.
But the city of Bernstein’s original musical couldn’t be further from the sanitised, Sunday-best New York we see in the 1949 film. Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing and charm and hoof their hearts out, but the hollowed-out score (which lost all but four of its original numbers) is the wide-eyed country cousin of the bolder, rougher, savvier original, in which the noise of traffic is as nothing compared to the electric hum of sexual tension.
There was a grind in the hips and a slink in the step of this brilliant show as it launched a Proms weekend of Bernstein anniversary celebrations on what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday.
Conductor John Wilson, usually seen at the head of his own orchestra, joined the London Symphony Orchestra for a concert performance of the Broadway score. What we lost in choreography (and like West Side Story earlier this season it was hard to ignore that loss) we gained in symphonic splendour – dance sequences tighter than a navy-issue t-shirt, performed with virtuosic ease, and just a smattering of sleaze by an orchestra apparently relishing unfamiliar musical territory.
A crack ensemble cast brought Broadway to the Royal Albert Hall in Martin Duncan’s efficient concert staging. Louise Dearman was an irrepressible Hildy, exuberantly direct in “Come Up to My Place” and “I Can Cook Too”, with some sweet singing from Nathaniel Hackmann’s Gabey and Nadim Naaman’s Ozzie, and a scene-stealing turn from Barnaby Rea as Judge Pitkin. Students from ArtsEd supplied a stylish chorus, and any narrative gaps were filled by the simple device of a narrator (Kerry Shale). Happy Birthday Bernstein.
