‘West Side Story’ with orchestra to open arts festival

Jamie Bernstein knows the Festival of the Arts BOCA audience wants to hear her reminisce about growing up with her late famous father, the maestro and composer Leonard Bernstein.

She’s been here before.

“I know Boca is my father’s core audience,” Bernstein said by phone from New York. In fact, she was guest of honor for maestro Aaron Kula’s concert version of Bernstein’s “On the Town” last June.

This time she’ll speak at 7 p.m. March 4 at a festival pre-event in the Mizner Park Cultural Arts Center. The re-mastered 1961 movie version of the 1957 musical “West Side Story” with a full orchestra will open the festival at 7:30 p.m. March 6 in the covered and seated Mizner Park Amphitheater, 590 Plaza Real. Performances and a famous author series runs through March 15.

The movie captured 10 Oscars, after “West Side Story” opened on Broadway in 1957. Bernstein wrote the music with Stephen Sondheim as lyricist, no small feat as it turns out.

“When it comes to ‘West Side Story,’ people want to know how it was put together,” his daughter said.

Unscripted for her talk, Bernstein said she’ll read letters her parents wrote while her mother was visiting her family in Chile and her father was finishing up the score.

“He was very fond of having us around and always invited us to rehearsals and on the road. That’s how we learned so much music,” she said about her siblings, Alexander and Nina Bernstein Simmons, also keepers of his legacy.

Guest conductor Jayce Ogren has done this show at least five times, and he’s coming in to conduct the Festival Orchestra BOCA.

“The tempos are set to go with Jerome Robbins’ choreography… For an orchestra, the first rehearsal is a shock…,” he said. “The music is nonstop and complicated, and then the task of coordinating the film with the live orchestra.”

How does he do it? With an earpiece, click track , and a video screen in front of him with different color lines.

“They show the different beats and they indicate when a number is about to start so I know when to bring the orchestra in,” he said.

A technical director travels with the production, brings the equipment and makes sure all the components work together.

“Audiences are completely enchanted by this show, and having the live orchestra heightens this great piece,” Ogren said.

The family reached out to Ogren after he conducted Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” in 2010.

“I became high on their list of conductors, so I was asked to conduct in London based on that relationship,” he said. The first time he did “West Side Story” with orchestra was with the Royal Philharmonic.

“Any conductor and orchestra can do this if they want to, and sign up and get the license,” for the music, Bernstein said. “We advocate for it. We want it done often. ‘West Side Story’ is his most well-known work, so it’s a way of reintroducing it.

“As time goes by, the next generation is less and less likely to know who Leonard Bernstein is,” she said about her father, who died in 1990 at 72. The New York Times headlined his obit “Music Monarch” and called him “one of the most prodigally talented and successful musicians in American history.”

“Today’s kids might have seen the movie, but they might not have,” Bernstein said. “We want to find ways to reintroduce his music to the world.”