HHH Middle Schools Perform 'West Side Story'

The theater departments of and middle schools performed their combined spring musical West Side Story in the Candlewood auditorium over the weekend.

This year, 82 students, comprising two casts, performed four shows May 6 through 8.

For the seventh consecutive year, Lucille Kenney has directed the students of both middle schools in this combined musical endeavor. Past musicals have included Fiddler on the Roof, Into the Woods, Alice in Wonderland, High School Musical, High School Musical 2 and Beauty & the Beast.

This year is bittersweet for Kenney, as she will be retiring from the HHH School District in June so West Side Story was her last combined musical with the two schools.

According to Kenney, she chose West Side Story in order to challenge the students, many of whom she has gotten to know well over the years.

"I have so many great singers and some really terrific dancers this year," she said.

Although she claims the parents thought she was crazy to have chosen such a mature and difficult show, she felt the kids were ready and able to handle it. The only change she needed to make was to have the music transposed into a lower key to accommodate their young voices and ranges. Music director, Sid Cherry, accomplished this tedious task.

West Side Story is the romantic tragedy, adapted from Romeo and Juliet, in which the rivalry between New York City street gangs, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, is accentuated when Maria, the sister of the Sharks leader, and Tony, the best friend of the Jets leader, fall in love with each other.

Maria, the female lead, was played by West Hollow seventh grader Lauren Leibowitz and Candlewood sixth grader Brooke Korine. Tony, the male lead, was portrayed by Candlewood eighth grader Daniel Rudin and West Hollow eighth grader Nate Bear.

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