He is sitting casually with his flies half undone, bare-torsoed, his smooth skin contouring over hard muscle – a stark, strong illustration of why exercise is good for you. When I tell West Side Story choreographer Joey McKneely about the dancer I witnessed back stage at Sadler's Wells in London, he says: "We have no modesty issues. We speak with our bodies. We need to see line of the body, we want to see the muscles: are they working the way they should be?"
The demands of the show, coming to the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin, make casting a challenge: performers need to be able to act, sing and dance and look young enough to be in a gang.
“Some of the dancers are 19,” says company manager Rainer Tominski, pointing out that they perform away from home for months at a time. “People think there must be a backing track but they sing live,” he adds, perhaps explaining why that dancer’s trousers were undone; the microphone is tucked into the back of their trousers and runs up through their hair and over their heads.
We pop our heads into the small backstage dressing room (the main one is upstairs) where neat piles of 1950s’ clothes – dirndl skirts and jeans – are folded on chairs with names written large and clear, ready for very quick changes.
This is a slick production, where words and dance moves must stay true to composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins' conception to earn its "original" West Side Story moniker. The Bernstein and Robbins estates are strict about that and the cast is monitored. Often a choreographer will sit in the audience and the stage manager watches the show on small screens, keeping an eye out for mistakes, and the performers are then given notes at the end of the show.
“They are young,” says Tominski, “they might try to improvise. You have to rein them in. But this is their story and they tell it well.” There’s no need to change the original says McKneely: “It’s perfect. Although there were adjustments: 98.8 per cent of the choreography is Robbins’. The rest is tweaked to fit: as a dancer I see certain things that didn’t make sense to my body – I did use my own instincts as a choreographer.”
He is the keeper of the flame; teaching the complex steps to successive generations in a ground-breaking – in its day – choreography that switches from ballet to jerky, finger-clicking, aggressive moves.
McKneely's flame-holding began when he met Robbins and danced WSS for the first time in the 1980s at the age of 21.
“It changed my life,” he says. “Primarily because I had never experienced choreography on such an emotional level. It required not only my physical ability but it really gave me an outlet for my emotional state. You feel something on stage rather than just being smiley and shaking your body.
“There is some musical theatre where the choreography [is like that] but they are still few and far between. It was a major thing in the 1950s.
I experienced it for the first time in the late 1980s and in 2013 I am still living it with a new generation.”
Such were the challenges of WSS – which hit the stage in 1957 and was made into a film in 1961 – it nearly didn't happen at all. Producers were wary of this death-pocked tale based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, involving gangs (the Jets, of Polish origin, and the Sharks, whose families came to America from Puerto Rico), racism, the closing of act one with two dead bodies on stage, an unhappy ending, songs with a larger vocal range and more complex tunes than had been seen on Broadway before and then there's those challenging dance moves, which cover classical, urban and Latin styles.
“The norm in musicals was to have a singing chorus, a dancing chorus and stars, and structure the show around that,” says McKneely.
In WSS "the dancers need to act. No-one had to feel those levels of grief or violence before. You can't just walk in and do grief. It is also dealing with racism and racism is a very ugly emotion and it takes care, how you approach that."
And yet when he first met Jerome Robbins, McKneely was refreshingly, helpfully relaxed about it.
“I was so naive. I had no idea who he was, so I had no fear when I met him. I walked into the room like, ‘hey, I’m here, what’s happening? Woo!’ And I think he really loved that: me not having fear when he asked me to do something or me not wondering whether he liked me or not.”
And he learned much from Robbins’ way of working: “I spent six months in rehearsals for him so I got to watch him.
“From being in the room with him I understood that the integrity of choreography came first. I started to see how he would look at dancers. When he switched dancers, I could see why he did that. How you get that, why you switch dancers: it’s not the dancer’s fault, some are not able to get to that level.”
When he was handed the mantle, McKneely did a lot of research. “I studied the film and Robbins did a 1981 revival in New York City, which was filmed. There is a choreography manual with the exact steps so, when putting it all together, I had a great encyclopedia. It was also in my body and soul.
“It is the hardest choreography you will ever get; the kids are always amazed. I’m still dancing it and when they see it they say, ‘wow, it’s on that level’.”
West Side Story runs at Bord Gáis
Energy Theatre from October 29th
to November 9th
