The NDSM Wharf is a place that impresses anyway. Old warehouses, rusty steel, the IJ right behind you. But when Young Gangsters descends there with North Side Story, that industrial setting takes on a whole new meaning. The company is known for its approach: large, musical and intended for people who might not normally enter a theater so quickly. On NDSM that fits like a glove.
Behind the production is Young Gangsters, a theater company that specializes in accessible outdoor theater on a large scale. Not a small theater with eighty seats, but open air and space for thousands of people at once. The cast of North Side Story includes Sara Afiba and Rutger Remkes, two performers with stage experience to carry the show. Sara Afiba is one of the stronger names in the cast, someone you don't easily miss on stage.
That it is being played at the NDSM Wharf is not a random choice. The wharf has a history as a shipbuilding yard, then became a squatting site, and has now become one of the city's most recognizable festival locations. The space breathes something rougher than an ordinary stage, and that suits how Young Gangsters makes theater: not polishing it until it shines, but showing what's there. The water of the IJ in the background does the rest.
Young Gangsters makes theater for people who might not normally step into a theater so quickly, and at NDSM it fits like a glove.
North Side Story is not only at NDSM. The production then moves on to Oerol on Terschelling and festival Karavaan, two of the most respected outdoor festivals in the Netherlands. That Young Gangsters chooses those three locations says something about the performance's ambition. Noord is the first stop, and the wharf on the IJ is quite an opening move. Anyone who normally ignores outdoor theater doesn't really have much of a reason to keep doing so here.