TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.052

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.5 KB | 218 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."