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

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1998 by 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.