Long days and nights of pressurized rehearsals are nothing new to North Carolina School of the Arts students, but the campus has become particularly charged by late March. With the all-school musical production of West Side Story opening in just a month, the tension, concern, and excitement are amplified given that participants are collectively facing a pivotal moment in their careers.

As students who aren’t involved in West Side Story are off enjoying a spring break, those who are follow an intensive 12-hour practice schedule that runs from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. When classes start up again, and until the show opens May 3, they revert to the normal NCSA plan. Classes and homework until 4 p.m., then rehearsals that last until 11 p.m.

At this point, we are two years into the planning and organizing of NCSA’s fiftieth-anniversary production of West Side Story. It has become a larger-than-life project along the way, with an all-star unit both on and off the stage.

A Remarkable Team
Paul Baswell, a sophomore in the School of Music, and Jordan Brown, a senior in the School of Drama, will portray Tony. Katharine Elkington and Mount Airy’s Anna Wood, both college juniors in the School of Drama, will play Maria.

They and all the other actors and stagehands have been guided by an extraordinary group. The original assistant director of the musical, Gerald Freedman, is directing. John Mauceri, a Leonard Bernstein protégé for eighteen years, is the music director. Kevin Backstrom, a choreographer licensed to re-create Jerome Robbins’ dance steps, has worked with many of the cast for more than a year. Top-notch professors from the School of Design & Production are captains of the technical aspects. And as rehearsals begin, the author of the musical’s original book, Arthur Laurents, agrees to make small adjustments to the dialogue in the script.

All of this work begins to jell as the cast is being put through its first paces of concentrated rehearsal. Costumes are being stitched together. Lighting, sound and projection plots are being finalized. Large set pieces have been built and await transport from the Design & Production building to the Stevens Center downtown.

At a panel discussion March 26, Freedman teases his audience with sample performances from the show and admits that the advent of real set pieces after long months of discussions and playing with models has changed the tone for him.

“I wasn’t really excited about West Side Story early on,” he tells the crowd. “I was just thinking about all the problems we were going to face. But when I went into Design & Production and saw the three-story balcony - Maria’s balcony - constructed, that’s when I got excited.”

Unparalleled Learning Experience
From the beginning, Gerald Freedman has stated the importance of maintaining a certain focus during this elaborate process. At its core, West Side Story is still one more production being undertaken at a multi-disciplinary conservatory of the arts. In other words, the production may be out of proportion because of its budget and its relative rarity, but it is still an outsized educational classroom for all of the students involved.

Peek in on a rehearsal or two and one gets a sense of how unique this tutelage must be for a group of students in Winston-Salem.

One night during spring break, for instance, the cast is gathered around Chancellor Mauceri, who will also direct the 40-member orchestra during the run of the show. In a score full of intentionally jarring and offbeat rhythms, they are working on what Mauceri categorizes as perhaps the most complex - the reprise of “Tonight” that combines a quintet (Tony, Maria, Riff, Bernardo and Anita) with the chorus of Jets, Sharks and their women.

In the course of a painstaking work-through of the tune, a man who can rightfully refer to composer Leonard Bernstein as Lenny sets a background and a music-history tone as he half-directs and half-lectures about the reprise. To help the group with the song’s rhythm, he describes how Africans and African-Americans adjusted the staid counts of European music to create ragtime - in effect, tearing the “rag” of basic beats into shreds and adjusting the beat to a more ragged approach. That, he says, is similar to what Bernstein intended here.

Later, after another run-though, he points out that Western music plays with loud and soft, and that the reprise should have a range, where softness makes the loudness that much more effective.

“One of the scary things in a live show is silence,” he says. “The cast listens, absorbs, and the difference can be heard the next time the song is worked.”

Commitment to Excellence
A few nights later, on stage at the Agnes DeMille Theatre on campus, the same sort of precise, step-by-step process is being applied to the intricate interactions of a fight scene. The confrontation with the police and the angry exchanges among the Jets lead into the “Jet Song.”

The room is scattered with scripts, pencils for notes, backpacks, a miniature version of the set sitting on a stand, and music stands with more scripts, all under the relatively unpleasant fluorescent work lights. Still, the rehearsal reveals how timing, motion and emotion are tightly planned and worked out in advance. The cock of a head, the thrust of a hand, an ebullient leap in the air - these are no accidents.

At the same time, the director is demanding the actors to dig deeper into the feelings of those disenfranchised young people of a similar age in 1950s New York City. He reflects on some of the cultural shifts. No man in 1957, for instance, would have worn an earring on the streets of West Side Story, nor would a female of the upper or middle class be likely to have pierced ears.

It’s like watching a dissection. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the scenes are taken apart and then put back together. Slowly but surely, they begin to make sense to the directors and the cast.

More subtle changes have been made to the dialogue. Mauceri says that a careful listen to the show will find very little profanity of any kind. Arthur Laurents, the book writer, created a number of words that replaced what a gang member might have actually said. In the scene being rehearsed at the Agnes DeMille Theatre, for instance, a character in the original production says, “Frigga-digga-dum-dum.” In this 2007 version, it has been shortened to “Frigga-digga-dum.” Apparently, that sounds more twenty-first century.

That’s the kind of fine tuning that will be represented throughout in this production. As Freedman said early on, while NCSA has every intention of remaining true and protective of the musical’s original intent, fifty years of technological and societal progress have intervened since it first opened on Broadway. The anniversary production can’t help but be an amalgam. No one believes, however, that a few modern intrusions will hurt.

The only way to know for sure will be when the show bows May 3. Then, in the longstanding traditions of the theater, the audiences will decide. No matter what the outcome, though, the many hours of long, hard work will likely be evident.