During Tuesday's revival of West Side Story at the Music Hall, Peter Gantenbein, as Tony, told his old pal, Doc, that, tonight, everything was going his way. Then he couldn't pull a window shade down or get a door open on the first try.

In fact, very few things seemed to go right during opening night of this West Side Story 's 16-week tour. It's hard to assess the eventual quality of this production when the performance under examination was cluttered with sets banging distractingly offstage and sound problems that made the singers indistinct. In balance, when the jitters fade, this West Side Story may turn out to be a fair-to-middling revival.

What isn't hard to assess is how the quality of this landmark musical has endured. I admit that when West Side Story first appeared in 1958, I was far too young to appreciate the ruckus. By the time I saw the film version (which was much more responsible for popularizing the show than the mildly successful Broadway original), '60s rock 'n' roll and films such as A Hard Day's Night had dated much of the look and sound. Besides, the film looks overly stagey -- like an old-fashioned movie version of a musical comedy.

Despite various revivals over the years, it wasn't until I saw the medley of dances excerpted for Jerome Robbins' Broadway last year that the sheer, spine-tingling power of West Side Story struck me.

The musical's updated Romeo and Juliet story is dated. It always was naive, with its gang-warfare Shakespeare and well-meaning humanitarianism wringing its hands over violence that, these days, looks rather tame. Even book-writer Arthur Laurents has admitted that Tony and Maria are one-dimensional characters. A noble, lovesick youth is a noble, lovesick youth; and when placed among clean-cut dancers trying to act "Daddy-o' street-hip, the lovesick youth is in danger of looking silly.

But few things in American musical theater have ever matched the most impressive score by Leonard Bernstein this side of Candide (he worked on both at the same time, and several numbers were switched between the shows during the composing process). While the score for Candide seems all 17th-century drawing-room miniatures and intricate charms, West Side Story is very '50s New York -- lunging, jazzy and clashing when it isn't yearning and lovely.

The score is realized in the angular velocity of Jerome Robbins' superlative choreography. In particular, during the dance "throw-down" (the mambo competition between the Anglos and Puerto Ricans at the high school gym) or the Jets' Cool or the stylized rumble, Mr. Robbins' choreography has the slashing color and energy of a '50s expressionist painting -- big, bold, moving, sliding blocks of people suddenly breaking up into rhythmic isolations. It's easy to see much of the origins of Bob Fosse's later style and the cinematic flow of such choreographers as Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune.

Alan Johnson, who danced in the original Broadway production, has recreated Mr. Robbins' direction and choreography for the current revival. The dancing, like much of the production, was underrehearsed -- in the splendid ballet sequence for Somewhere, for example, Mr. Gantenbein slipped up in his partnering.

More importantly, the dance chorus in general lacked that final crispness the numbers demand. West Side Story should rocket with dangerous, youthful life. Yet only occasionally did a dancer seem to pop out because he or she had that combination of authority and brash energy: Michael Gruber as Riff, the leader of the Jets; Robert Montano as the leader of the Sharks; but, most especially, Sharon Moore in the minor role of Francisca.

The production does boast lead voices that are bell-like in their tenor and soprano purity. Mr. Gantenbein and Betsy True, as Maria, seem to have been chosen for their fresh-faced innocence and their voices, and they deliver some lovely singing in their duets Tonight and One Hand, One Heart. But again, they lacked that drop of passion, the juice, that West Side Story truly needs.

We no longer feel threatened by the kind of teen-age delinquents who hang out at Doc's drugstore, reading High School Confidential and drinking Cokes. But we can still be touched by, impressed by, bursting youthful spirits hemmed in by poverty and racial conflict, desperate to do anything to get out. It is that sense that Mr. Robbins' choreography and Mr. Bernstein's music convey so stunningly. And, beyond repairing the immediate technical slip-ups, it is that sense this revival must attain.