TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/030689/03068900.052

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 12KB | 203 lines

SHOW BUSINESS, Page 78

Peter Pan Flies Again

Dance master Jerome Robbins returns triumphantly to Broadway

By Richard Corliss


    In 1939 a musical called The Straw Hat Revue opened at
Manhattan's Ambassador Theater. The show, which cost $8,000 to put
on Broadway, featured such future stars as Danny Kaye, Imogene
Coca, Alfred Drake and a young dancer named Jerome Robbins. This
week -- 50 years later and four blocks south, at the Imperial
Theater -- Broadway welcomes another revue, Jerome Robbins'
Broadway, with another cast of young hopefuls. But everything else
about this show is bigger, riskier and very late '80s. For one
thing, its co-sponsor is a Japanese liquor firm. For another, it
carries an all-time-high ticket price of $55. And the cost of its
opening is $8 million, a thousand times that of The Straw Hat
Revue.

    These days, that's show biz. But Jerome Robbins' Broadway is
no ordinary show. It is an unprecedented monument, a living museum
that one of Broadway's great names has erected to himself. The
master shaman, now 70, presents dances from nine of the glorious
musicals he directed or choreographed between 1944 and 1964. The
sailors from On the Town again saunter through wartime New York,
New York. The royal courtesans of The King and I restage Uncle
Tom's Cabin, Siamese-style. West Side Story's Sharks and Jets strut
toward one more epochal rumble. The shtetl Jews from Fiddler on the
Roof hold true to tradition.

    With this new show, Robbins is both appealing to Broadway
tradition and bucking it. He is a man going up against his own
legend -- as the premier American-born dancemaker, whose works for
the ballet and Broadway suavely merged high art with pop culture.
Robbins has always been a spellbinding storyteller; the narrative
clarity of each movement instantly draws viewers into the roiling
emotional life of his characters. In his comic ballets, visual gags
fly past like precision pies in a Keystone caper. This show proves
he is back where he belongs, on a street that belongs to him:
Jerome Robbins' Broadway.

    He has prepared meticulously for this moment: nine months of
research, 75 days of rehearsal and seven weeks of preview
performances. "I wasn't just putting shows on the way they were,"
he says of this elephantine gestation. "I was redoing them all,
putting as much energy and direction into them as I originally
did." The show will need 16 months of sold-out houses to break
even, and its backers are audibly apprehensive. "Robbins has an
economic interest too," says co-producer Bernard Jacobs, president
of the Shubert Organization, "but artists are very peculiar.
Finally, we are all in his hands." They are also in the hands of
the '80s Broadway babies, raised on body mikes, synthesizers and
musicals with no dance numbers. Will they care about a showman who
hasn't staged a new show in 25 years?

    Clearly, more is riding on this show than a mere $8 million.
For Jerome Robbins' Broadway is a sacred remnant of the musical at
its mid-century peak -- a fusion of wit, precision, melody and high
spirits -- that an aging generation of theater lovers miss terribly
and want back. "We are in an era of high school production numbers
and arias set to a backbeat," says Jule Styne, who wrote songs for
five Robbins musicals. "A lot of people will see this show and
realize what they've missed." Co-producer Emanuel Azenberg must
hope so too. "Shows that have been successful lately are just not
for me," he says. "Then I see the suite of dances from West Side
Story, and tears are coming. I realize that my values are not so
cuckoo -- this was good. You walk out of the theater reaffirming
the values that had you walking into the theater 30 years ago."

    Jerome Rabinowitz has enjoyed walking into theaters ever since
his childhood in Weehawken, N.J. From the start, he had an
insatiable aesthetic curiosity, especially for dance. His parents
tried to dissuade him from the hoofer's trade. He recalls, "They
sent me to every relative they could find, saying `Don't do it.'
But I wanted to do it." And as would happen so often, what Jerry
wanted, Jerry got.

    He made his dance debut in 1937 and hit Broadway a year later.
It was a time of innovation and entente. Director George Abbott
was whipping up Broadway souffles like On Your Toes, and ballet
master George Balanchine was staging On Your Toes' novel Slaughter
on Tenth Avenue. Mr. A. and Mr. B., as they were known, would be
Robbins' mentors. In 1940 he danced in the Balanchine show Keep Off
the Grass, and at the end of the decade, he joined Balanchine's New
York City Ballet (today he is one of two ballet masters in chief).
In 1944 he expanded his ballet Fancy Free into On the Town, which
Abbott directed. Betty Comden, the show's coauthor, recalls the
young Robbins: "He was wonderful looking, with his dark, dark
burning eyes and his wiry, great figure -- a compact ball of
energy. He still is."

    For two decades, Robbins commuted easily, prodigiously, between
the ballet and Broadway. One form fed the other. In 1943 he danced
in Anthony Tudor's Romeo and Juliet; six years later, he devised
his own Romeo and Juliet  ballet, The Guests; in 1957 he reworked
the theme for West Side Story and, the next year he adapted that
show's street rhythms in his ballet N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz. His
creativity and vigor seemed inexhaustible: 20 musicals and 19
ballets in 20 years. Even Robbins is impressed. "When I started
doing this show," he says, "I looked at what I did then. Frankly,
I was amazed."

    Since Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, he has devoted his time to
creating pieces for City Ballet. "I never said, `That's that, I
will never work on Broadway again.' It wasn't so much a turning
away from Broadway as it was a turning toward something else."
Stephen Sondheim (West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum) believes Robbins was corseted by the
inevitable compromises built into musical collaboration: "Jerry
would say, `It is ridiculous to put on a musical in five weeks,'
and he is right -- it is ridiculous. But those are the constraints
of musical theater."

    Robbins' return to musicals would be on his own terms: no balky
collaborators, plenty of time and money. "I didn't want a new
show," he says, "and I didn't want it to be the story of my life
-- `and then he wrote.' I wanted the pieces to stand on their own.
So I went to the Shuberts and said, `I want to put these pieces
together. Maybe I'll just photograph them and put them in a
museum.' They saw me through that period; that was a million
dollars. Then I said, `I think there's a show.' I laid out a
schedule. I told them there would be 400 costumes and 400 wigs, and
God knows what all. And they just said, `Go.'"

    For this show, that meant: go back. Because he had not recorded
or notated any of his works, Robbins assembled casts and creators
from the old productions and led a kind of seminar in Broadway
archaeology. To reconstruct the bathing-beauty ballet from High
Button Shoes, Robbins had the score and some silent footage that
had been shot surreptitiously. Luckily, the national company's
dance captain, Kevin Joe Jonson, had made notations of the ballet
on tattered sheets of paper that he carted around through five
marriages. For the Comedy Tonight number from Forum, an original
cast  member sketched out the business. "Jerry had forgotten about
half the jokes," Sondheim says, "and being the inventive man he is,
he invented some more. Some of them are even funnier."

    The new show's opening number, Ya Got Me from On the Town,
called for an all-star reunion. Four of the five leads in the
original -- Comden, Adolph Green, Nancy Walker and Cris Alexander
-- spent a day piecing together photos, props, the sound track and
their memories. "Jerry put us into certain positions," Comden says,
"and we remembered the best we could, from our ancestral bodies or
our unconscious. And then, of course, Jerry created more. We didn't
want it to stop. Jerry stayed to keep working, and the four of us
wandered into the street, clinging, clinging to whatever it was."

    Robbins, though, wasn't clinging; he was ever tinkering, ever
tightening. "One of the things I learned working on Broadway," he
notes, "was the importance of economy. I found that the more I
would edit my work, the better it got. Now I'm competing with
myself. If anything is even a little bit indulgent, I have to cut
it." Robbins also had to "adjust the pieces to another series of
bodies and personalities and talents." And he had to create suites
of dances from the "integrated" choreography of West Side Story and
Fiddler on the Roof. "The West Side Story suite had to have a logic
to it," he says. "I had to pull out of what I had created and make
another piece out of it. I was very pleased with the results of
that."

    Robbins is a hard man to please; this is one notoriously
imperious impresario. "When I work on a show," he says, "I'm a
wasp. You know how a wasp buzzes around and keeps you on your toes
and worries about everything. There's a sound in the air that keeps
everything moving." At times the buzz becomes a sonic boom. "Jerry
was still rehearsing during previews," says Victor Castelli, a City
Ballet soloist who is assisting Robbins. "The kids are exhausted
because they are not used to it, and Jerry will be frustrated and
annoyed and will yell and scream." But those who have survived
Robbins' basic training testify to its effectiveness. "The theater
is not all pats on the back," says Chita Rivera, who played Anita
in the original West Side Story, "because that does not get the job
done. Jerry forces you to go through the pain, and then you find
out that you are stronger than you were."

    To Robbins, the 62-member cast of this show might be the Straw
Hatters of a half-century ago, and he might be Abbott or
Balanchine. "We have a wonderful company," he says. "They are
devoted to the show and to each other and to the material, and I
am touched and astounded by their capacity." He is already a bit
sad that this long voyage into his shining past and Broadway's iffy
future is completed. "I'm like a cruise director," he says. "I
organize the trip and the entertainment and the luggage. Then
everybody gets on the ship, and it sails off without me. After a
show opens, a chasm opens before me. My relationships with 70
people almost come to a halt. I like them a lot, and I miss them
tremendously."

    And Broadway misses Robbins. For a decade or so after his
abdication, the American musical was dominated by
choreographer-directors in the Robbins mold: Bob Fosse, Michael
Bennett, Tommy Tune. Today, though, Broadway is little more than
a posh road stop for the British musical; the '80s' three signature
smashes (Cats, Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera) were
born in London. Jacobs tacitly acknowledges this when he proclaims
Robbins "a genius, probably the genius of our time," then adds,
"God pity me if Andrew Lloyd Webber hears that."

    So hear this: Jerome Robbins is Broadway's perennial prince
charming, and his show is a kiss of life to the Sleeping Beauty of
the American musical. "I always felt this might well be the most
exciting piece of theater in my lifetime," Jacobs says with
unaccustomed fervor. "I certainly hope so." High hopes, yes, but
Robbins has usually soared to achieve them. "He is the real Peter
Pan," says Mary Martin, who 35 years ago played that role for
Robbins. "He loves to fly."