What a stinging, contemporary resonance there is to Leonard Bernstein's classic Fifties musical in which the knife and gun do their fatal damage to Jets and the Sharks, young, rival gangsters in New York. West Side Story speaks and sings its alarming story of gangland love and feuding to a London in the grip of its knife epidemic far more urgently than it did in 1958.

Joey McKneely's fine, 50th anniversary production conveys just the right atmosphere of sizzling aggression, while the orchestra under Donald Chan's direction ensures the musical never loses its tense momentum.

Those classic songs of yearning and menace, penned by a young Stephen Sondheim - from Maria and Somewhere There's A Place For Us to Tonight and Something's Coming - are despatched with dynamic ardour too. Hundreds of youngsters caught up in gangland vendettas might well respond to the jazzy, jagged pugnacity of Bernstein's evocative, exciting score. They might even brood about the persuasiveness of Arthur Laurents's book that aims to demonstrates how cowardlyand futile these gangster killings prove in the end.

Set in the summer heat of New York, West Side story ranges Riff 's Jets, born in America but of Polish origin, against Bernardo's Puerto Rican Sharks, whom they regard as unwanted immigrants.

This racist antagonism is complicated by love that breaks out across the barriers - between Ryan Silverman's Tony who has grown out of the Jets but still belongs with them and Puerto Rican Maria. Since it was written at a time when the stage was censored, no expletivesor foul language are spat from the lips of gangsters who when first togged up look too clean and smartly dressed. Silverman's Tony, in his beige trousers and blue shirt, might even have been costumed courtesy of Middle England. Yet what a sense of simmering violence is soon projected upon the stage, which designer Paul Gallis fills with mobile sets of three-tiered wooden galleries and walkways to encompass the musical's multiple locations.

Thanks to the vanity of Jerome Robbins, the musical's original director and choreographer, no one since has been allowed to alter his applauded choreography. And the early scenes, in which the Jets and Sharks communicate their mutual hatred through dancing, bristles with balletic elegance, neatness and restraint rather than anything more dangerous. Yet under a highway overpass, when knives are for the first time drawn, a shocking dance to the death is arranged. And the Jets' rape of Lana Gordon's vivacious, smouldering Anita, Bernardo's girlfriend, similarly exploits dance in modes of high menace.The final tableau, in which the Jets and Sharks carry away Tony's bullet-laden body, raises frail hopes of reconciliation after shocking waste of life.

Not all the lead gangsters are quite threatening enough, though John Arthur Greene's Action fairly sizzles with rage, while Marco Santiago's Bernardo looks a dangerous customer. And even if Silverman's Tony looks a bit mature he sings with a rare power and passion for Sophia Escobar's bewitched and bothered Maria. It's a fabulous, emotionally power-packed revival, with a social-political punch.