West Side Story is one of the great classics of American musicals, but remains as topical today as it was in 1957. But if you think you're in for a night of banal politically correct rants masquerading as an easy-on-the-ear romp about class divides, mobsters and love across the colour bar, that sort of thing, you're wrong.Yes, the story revolves around archetypes: warring white and Puerto Rican gangs in New York's demimonde (racial yin and yang), and a love story based on Romeo and Juliet (unfulfilled yearnings that end in deaths), but it's much more than that.Leonard Bernstein's music, operatic at times, is often difficult to interpret accurately and can backfire in the wrong hands. Under the musical direction of the conductor Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, the score becomes a major character in this story and the entire orchestra, like the cast, deserved the nearly 10-minute standing ovation it received at the end of this two-and-a-half hour production.Furthermore, the narrative does not only hinge on acting, song (Stephen Sondheim's lyrics) and music. No, the whole animus or drive, the thread that eloquently stitches the chronicle together, is the superb choreography. Directed by Matthew Wild, it's told through dance, as much as all the other parts.Here the choreographer Louisa Talbot and her troupe of sexy, raw, bouncy dancers all merit a curtsy from Terpsichore, the Muse of dancing, lyric poetry and choral song.When the leads, Jonathan Roxmouth as Tony, and Lynelle Kenned as Maria, soulfully sing Tonight on the balcony, the stage lights up with hundreds of twinkly lights that are slowly dropped from above and shimmer like stars on these two sweethearts. The audience sat spellbound.The play has the spice of life - and death. See it.Until August 23. Book at www.artscape.co.zaOn the sideIt was originally called East Side Story and also Gangway!It promoted a new kind of production that was a hybrid of a musical and an opera.It was inspired by William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.The 1961 film adaptation won 10 Academy Awards...