Montagues and Capulets

The Montagues and Capulets have got your number!

But such symmetry, while structurally necessary to the source material — who were the Montagues and Capulets, anyway, and who really cares? — doesn’t map easily onto the West Side as Kushner and Spielberg understand it.

It’s not a Sharks and Jets arrangement, either; the Montagues and Capulets are fluent in both languages.

There was the chutzpah of converting the tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet” into a musical; the topicality of replacing the Montagues and Capulets with finger-snapping, street-dancing New York juvenile delinquents; and the stature of the show’s masterminds — composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer and director Jerome Robbins and playwright Arthur Laurents.

And in the most forceful moments — the menacing “Montagues and Capulets,” the fierce “Death of Tybalt” — the performance bit down hard and held on.