SHORT TAKES : ‘West Side’ Duo Together Again

NEW YORK — Tonight, tonight, in fact through next week, there’s a place again for Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert, who are sharing a stage for the first time since they starred in “West Side Story” 33 years ago as Maria and Tony.

This time, it’s not a Broadway theater with an inner-city backdrop but the Rainbow and Stars nightclub in posh Rockefeller Center. And they’re not sticking to the tunes they were assigned as the tragic teen-age lovers whose story put Juliet and Romeo on the gang-ridden streets of New York.

Kert gets to sing “I Feel Pretty” and together Lawrence and Kert do “America,” the fanciful Puerto Rican “anthem” by composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

Lawrence, who turns 56 today, and Kert, 59, cover lots of other musical ground in an offering a New York Times reviewer found praiseworthy Thursday. He had just one complaint.

Unlike Tony and Maria, Kert and Lawrence got to reach maturity, a point they note a bit too often “as if,” said the Times, “they’re about to move to a home for retired actors.”