Musical: It's enough to melt a cynic's heart

WEST SIDE STORY PRINCE EDWARD THEATRE LONDON

I HAVEN'T been able to listen to Bernstein's "Maria" with an entirely straight face since seeing a Spike Milligan sketch some years ago, that involved him singing, with an understandably perplexed expression: "Maria - I've just met a boy named Maria..." But David Habbin's elating rendition of the song in this revival wiped away all traces of my customary smirk.

His voice, which has a terrific lift to it, repeats the name in such a soaring reverie of innocent, unguarded rapture, that it is as if we are hearing this number for the first time, and sharing with Tony the exalted newness of his experience.

Habbin's singing is one of the main pleasures of a production that studiously reproduces the original direction and choreography of Jerome Robbins. Watching it, you reflect what a con Saturday Night Fever at the Palladium is - a succession of disco dances, pretending to be a stage musical, of a film that was never purporting to be a musical in the first place. The dishonesty of the exercise is revealed in the fact that, to create a "show", the adapters have the young working-class ensemble neatly formation-dancing in the street and on bridges and any old place, whereas the sociological point of the story is that they can find this release only in the tribal rites of the discotheque itself.

Compare that with what Robbins did in West Side Story - which is to translate the tensions of New York street life into heightened, stylised dance movements that pulsate with the swagger and insecurity of gang-land life.

If some of the routines here have a slightly unspontaneous feel, the best moments are electrifying. Particularly impressive is the performance by Edward Baker-Duly's Riff and the Jets number, "Cool", where the violence simmering under the show of crouched, finger-clicking calm keeps erupting in jangling frenzies of hormonal commotion.

Normally, when confronted with a "dream ballet", I have an ungovernable urge to read the programme. And it has to be said that the "Somewhere" sequence, where Maria and Tony are swept away, in thought, to a green caring-sharing Utopia, takes some stomaching before it turns into a nightmare of recapitulated killing. In this production, though, David Habbin and Katie Knight-Adams's Maria invest the young lovers with such a touching, defenceless ardour that the cynic wilts inside you.

The man who complained that Hamlet was full of famous quotations would be likewise disgruntled by the almost ludicrous pile-up of classic hits in Bernstein's madly talented score. The cast do handsome justice to them, particularly Anna-Jane Casey who, as Anita, lets rip on "America" with just the right comic mockery and cocksure, skirt-flourishing sass.

With Jerome Robbins' death earlier this year, the stipulation that stagings stick to his choreography may not hold for much longer: another incentive to see the show before the "improvers" move in.

Until 16 January (0171-447 5400)