Jerome Robbins : Jerome Robbins made indelible changes in both musical theater and classical ballet - 1918-98

Clive Barnes

Jerome Robbins made indelible changes in both musical theater and classical ballet.

Jerome Robbins, felled by a stroke at the age of seventy-nine, was one of the great ones. Appropriately, it was Peter Martins, his longtime colleague at New York City Ballet, who put it best: "He was the last of the titans in the world of dance. Balanchine is gone. So are Ashton, Tudor, and Graham. And now Jerry." But Robbins, like Balanchine before him, is one of the lucky ones. As Martins concluded: "He will live on through his ballets, by which the next generation will come to know him and appreciate him as we have. He regarded New York City Ballet as his family, and he will always remain so to us." And there seems little doubt that City Ballet will prove as zealous at maintaining their Robbins heritage as they have their Balanchine heritage. They know how to order these things.

He was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, of Russian-Jewish immigrants, in New York City. His father kept a delicatessen until the family moved to Weehawken, New Jersey, where he became a corset manufacturer. As a child Robbins studied violin and piano, even a little painting, and accompanied his sister to "interpretative" dance classes. In the mid-1930s he was briefly enrolled in New York University, but bad times for his family ended that, and he was gradually drawn into the theater and dance. He made his debut with the Yiddish Art Theater in 1937, and every summer was working in a resort hotel, Camp Tamiment, where he appeared as a song-and-dance man in the revues that were put on there, and even tried his hand at a little apprentice choreography.

Inevitably he was drawn to Broadway, and his real dancing career started as a Broadway gypsy in such musicals as Great Lady and The Straw Hat Revue. But in 1940 Robbins joined the corps de ballet of the recently formed Ballet Theatre. He was a brilliant character dancer, sometimes looking oddly like the young Leonide Massine, and I shall always remember him in the title role of Petrouchka (he was actually the first Petrouchka I ever saw--Michael Kidd was the second!--and he remains one of the best) and as a gum-chewing Hermes in David Lichine's Helen of Troy (1942), as well as inimitably in his own ballets Fancy Free (1944) and Interplay (1945).

He was, apart from anything else, a fine technician--that quadruple series of double tours without preparations in between in the finale of Interplay were made for Robbins himself. I saw Robbins dance only in London--with Ballet Theatre in 1946 and with New York City Ballet in 1950. To my great regret, I never saw him in either Prodigal Son or Till Eulenspiegel: Francisco Moncion danced the first in London, and Hugh Laing did the latter in Edinburgh. But I recall his wonderful partnering of Tanaquil Le Clercq in the first movement of Balanchine's Bourrde Fantasque (1949), and his fascinating dancing in two of his own ballets, Age of Anxiety (1950) and his first attempt at a Romeo and Juliet theme, The Guests (1949).

From the time Robbins joined Ballet Theatre in 1940, until 1964, when he staged his last musical, Fiddler on the Roof, he virtually alternated between Broadway and classic ballet, a giant in both fields. Fancy Free, his first ballet, was made for Ballet Theatre--and still in the current repertory after fifty-four years--but he changed dance allegiances in 1949 and joined Balanchine's New York City Ballet, first as associate artistic director, choreographer, and dancer, and later with various other titles until, during the past few years, he was named alongside Balanchine as one of the company's two founding choreographers.

It was that same Fancy Free, with its music by Leonard Bemstein and setting by Oliver Smith, about three World War II sailors on shore leave in Times Square, that changed his life. It led right at the end of that same year, 1944, to the musical On the Town, based on "an idea by Robbins," with Robbins's choreography, music by Bernstein, settings by Smith, and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The show also brought Robbins into working contact with George Abbott, who directed the musical and was to prove one of the crucial influences on his creative life. The other, of course, was Balanchine--"My two Georges," as he sometimes fondly referred to them, "Mr. A and Mr. B."

Robbins's contribution to the American musical theater was magisterial. He was not the first major classic choreographer to work on Broadway--first Balanchine and then Agnes de Mille were there long before him--but he was the first to direct as well as choreograph. And in shows such as Gypsy (1959), West Side Story (1957), and Fiddler, he invented the idea of the "concept musical." Moreover, Robbins did not just take over the director's job but, more significantly, the whole project. This was the real change--a new guy in the driver's seat. Naturally enough, his energies also went to directing in the legitimate theater, Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad..., Brecht's Mother Courage, and a play by Irene Maria Fornes, The Office, which closed in previews and seemed to have scarred Robbins' s ambitions.

He flirted briefly with Hollywood--codirected the movie of West Side Story (1961) and picked up a couple of Oscars--but it was not for him. And eventually he even tired of Broadway. People wondered why this seeming King of Broadway would abdicate. I knew why. Soon after Fiddler, more than thirty years ago, he told me he was "tired of interpreting other people in staging musicals, while when I choreograph a ballet I am myself the real creative artist, working with my collaborators on a quite different level." Although Robbins gave up the musical--Jerome Robbins' Broadway (1989) was actually a brilliant anthology of his own showbiz dance and was rapturously received--the musical never gave up on him. For years he was everyone's first choice to direct any Broadway musical, and he had a whole school of followers, notably Harold Prince, Bob Fosse (with whom he collaborated on a couple of shows, including The Pajama Game), and Michael Bennett.

Robbins devoted his final decades to New York City Ballet. Admittedly, in 1965 he did stage Stravinsky's Les Noces for his first balletic stomping ground, American Ballet Theatre. (Revived this past season by NYCB, it represents Robbins's final work in the theater.) However, after ABT's Les Noces, and two or three highly significant and artistically rewarding years working on his own, very well-funded, experimental theater project which never gave a public performance, he returned to City Ballet in 1969. This time for good.

For a period after Balanchine's death in 1983, he became, with Peter Martins, a co-ballet master in chief, but the day-to-day running of a company--as he had revealed in the sixties with his own short-lived Ballets: U.S.A.--was not really up his street. Incidentally, Ballets: U.S.A.--more popular, I think, in Europe than here--did some good work, including the creation of his extension of Interplay, which he called N.Y. Export: Op. Jazz (1950); his striking Events (1961); and Moves, (1959), that "ballet to silence about relationships." The dancers, including the likes of Glen Tetley, John Jones, Wilma Curley, and Erin Martin, were a handpicked troupe.

Robbins has left an indelible mark on both the worlds of theater and of dance. But whereas in the theater he will be remembered as a wonderful, extraordinarily dynamic director, who by his example and working methods changed the face of the Broadway musical, in dance he will be remembered as the creator of a number of true masterpieces, some likely to live as long as the art of classic ballet itself. For one thing, he was virtually unique in ballet in his rare gift for comedy--in works such as The Concert (1956) or his much earlier piece to Copland's Clarinet Concerto, The Pied Piper (1951), not even to mention that first Fancy Free, he produced ballets that were really funny. But this was all part of his humanity. He put a human face and a Yankee accent on classic choreography.

In the best of his choreography--much of it to Chopin and Bach--he invested simple but grand dance movements with a marvelous imprint of humanity, and occasionally liked to revisit dance history, such as in his Afternoon of a Faun (1953) and Antique Epigraphs (1984)--both suggesting the Ballets Russes; or his etymological Social Life in the Insect World version of Giselle, that is, The Cage (1951); or his half-ironic homage to the Bolshoi in The Four Seasons (1979). And he was always ready to push out dance's frontiers, in such ballets as his sagely mechanistic Glass Pieces (1983). In other works--such as the supreme Dances at a Gathering (1969); its lustrous Chopinesque spinoffs, In the Night (1970) and Other Dances (1976); the elegiac In Memory Of... (1985); the wonderfully moving Ives, Songs (1988)--he seems to be saying with Shakespeare: "What a piece of work is a man!" This humanism in a way reached its apogee in his strange, experimental ballet Watermill (1972), which showed a man walking slowly, with Zen passivity and concentration, through the passages of life.

As an individual Robbins could be difficult and prickly, even though he was very generous, with time, help, and money, often through his specially created Robbins Foundation, and had, when he wanted to use it, a great warmth with an obvious a gift for friendship. Undoubtedly, like Elia Kazan, he was personally damaged by the controversy regarding the friendly testimony he gave the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s, but he always considered that he had acted on his conscience. Yet there were people in the theater--such as Zero Mostel, with whom he worked on Fiddler--who never forgave his naming of names. I suspect this left a mark on Robbins, one he wore with a mixture of disdain and dignity.

He was an extremely demanding man, not always popular with his dancers, although always respected. With ballet companies--and he worked chiefly with NYCB, of course, and later with the Paris Opera Ballet--he could be a prima donna. But his demands were always met. He was a perfectionist, who sometimes, very quietly, reached perfection. No one does more. And for Robbins, perfectionism led him to a position as one of the few twentieth-century innovators of the Broadway theater--an achievement that by itself would let him rank with the likes of Peter Brook--and more important and more lasting, as one of the greatest choreographers of all time.

He was memorable as the smiling martinet Ringmaster in Circus Polka, the ballet he created for children from the School of American Ballet during City Ballet's first Stravinsky Festival in 1972, and as the master magician, Herr Drosselmeyer, which he danced for the first and last time (well, being Jerry, he sneaked in two or three "preview" performances to ensure he got it right on the night!) when Peter Martins gave his retirement performance in The Nutcracker, in 1984.

An ironically grinning, whip-snapping disciplinarian, and a gift-bringing, eccentric magician of genius--yeah, I think that's about right for Jerry. And we'll never see quite his like again,

Clive Barnes, a senior editor of Dance Magazine and the dance and theater critic of the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1958.

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