West Side Story’s superficial topicality is actually rather unfortunate. Gangs of youths, divided along ethnic lines, given to “rumbling” and stabbing each other in order to bolster their peculiar concept of self-esteem, is a news story straight out of Hackney. The trouble is, when so many plays around today are tackling this subject realistically, some of them powerfully well (Debbie Tucker Green’s Random, Femi Oguns’s Torn), to have a 1950s musical pop up and depict the whole thing in terms of rather camp, muscle-bound young men leaping around in jeans and tight T-shirts seems just the kind of take on current affairs you don’t want: topical, yet way off the mark.

The rumbling between the Jets and the Sharks is routinely broken up by the appearance of a fat, middle-aged cop, Officer Krupke, armed with nothing more than a truncheon. (Not a stab vest in sight.) This seems not so much sweetly old-fashioned as positively prelapsarian in a world where a policeman who asks a schoolgirl to pick up some litter results is attacked by a mob of 30, as happened in Croydon last month. Jerome Robbins’s nervy, high-energy choreography (reviewed by David Dougill), Bernstein’s score and Sondheim’s lyrics are all, of course, solid gold. Songs like Gee, Officer Krupke remain as fresh as ever, a sly masterpiece of liberal sarcasm: “Our mothers are all junkies, our fathers are all drunks, Golly, Moses, naturally we’re punks!” Yet Joey McKneely’s 50th- anniversary revival is over-reverential — to be fair, perhaps because the estates of the various creators’ regard it as the American classic equivalent of a Grade I-listed building that mustn’t be tampered with. The result is competent and entertaining enough, but unsurprising and unmoving.

Ryan Silverman, as Tony, is a kind of beefy, affable sloane in white jeans and a blue open-necked shirt. Sofia Escobar, whom I saw as Maria, manages to be simultaneously chaste yet passionate, eager, devoted and virginal, a perfect echo of the original Juliet; and, when she unleashes her singing voice towards the end, the show reaches its high points. Lana Gordon is also terrific as the sassy, high-kicking, knicker-flashing Anita.

The set, however, is disappointingly dull. For at least the first hour, the backdrops are simply two vast, interchangeable black-and-white photos of nondescript New York streets. The wooden frames, ladders and gantries would be great for climbing up or swinging from, but hardly anyone does, except for Tony in the “balcony scene”. Worst of all, a night-time setting with the Hispanics calling “Buenas noches” retains the daytime backdrop, which seems mere laziness. The action runs up to midnight on two successive days, but not once are we treated to a gorgeous skyline of nocturnal New York.

Ultimately, whereas Romeo and Juliet is an utterly compelling and heartbreaking portrayal of adolescent passion and self-destruction, set in a wider, more sober and adult framework, West Side Story — in this production, at least — seems merely adolescent, the product of a vigorous but still shallow culture.

The ending has always seemed weak to me. Arthur Laurents’s conception was for Tony to be killed, then for Maria to try to kill herself, but fail. This is psychologically disastrous — with a love as blazingly all-consuming as theirs, neither should credibly be able to live on without the other. To me, the flaw is only magnified in this production, with its grand finale giving us an upset Maria wandering off stage, leaving her beloved’s body behind. This gives Maria no tragic nobility; nor is there anything like the mournfully dignified closing speech by Shakespeare’s prince. You almost wonder what all the fuss was about.

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