Robbins Returns to Broadway

By Frank Rich

In a new revival, West Side Story still takes daring leaps

When West Side Story opened on Broadway almost 23 years ago, it was greeted as a revolutionary show. Its subject, New York street gangs, was far more adventurous than the typical fluff of musicals; its language was tough and its ending downbeat. This month, when West Side returned in a hit revival, audiences and critics were not so much shocked as charmed; the show's story, language and sociological concerns now belong to a distant, tamer era. Yet one aspect of the production looks as daring today as it did in 1957: Jerome Robbins' choreography. When the rival gangs, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, dance their way through rumbles, murders and even a near rape, one rediscovers Robbins' extraordinary contribution to the American theater. Agnes de Mille was the first to tie Broadway dances to character and plot in the 1943 Oklahoma! (now also a born-again hit in revival), but Robbins went much further. In West Side Story, he did not just integrate dance into the show, he integrated the show into dance. The story and themes are conveyed as much, if not more, through movement as they are through songs and dialogue.

The full impact of Robbins' inspiration is visible at Broadway's Minskoff Theater, because the choreographer decided to duplicate West Side's original staging himself. It is the first time he has worked on Broadway since Fiddler on the Roof in 1964. The intervening years have been well spent: as a fellow ballet master with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, he has added more than 30 works to that company's repertory. This winter, at N.Y.C.B., Robbins also revived Fancy Free, the ground-breaking ballet that first brought him fame in 1944. The story of three cavorting sailors on leave during World War II, it does for Manhattan street life of the '40s what West Side does for the '50s. Or so it should. City Ballet Classicists Peter Martins, Bart Cook and Jean-Pierre Frohlich are not yet at home in the piece's romantic flourishes of period dance idiom.

It is appropriate that Fancy Free and West Side be revived at the same time. In both works, Robbins collaborated with Composer Leonard Bernstein and Set Designer Oliver Smith. In fact, Fancy Free inspired the first Robbins-Bernstein-Smith Broadway show, On the Town. From then on, Robbins went from hit to hit. Over two decades he worked with the best stars (Zero Mostel, Barbra Streisand, Judy Holliday, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman) and the best songwriters (Bernstein, Jule Styne, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim) in classic shows such as The King and I, Peter Pan, Bells Are Ringing and Gypsy.

Almost all of Robbins' major innovations can be seen in West Side Story. In the show's very first moments, the choreographer demonstrates that Broadway dancing does not have to come only in the form of jazzy showstoppers or extended ballets but can also be stylized physical action. When the Jets are first seen hanging out in an alley, they merely shift their body posture to the opening beats of Bernstein's music; the characters' attitudes are established through gesture before anyone sings or speaks a line. Later, Robbins uses his actors' bodies to achieve effects that a film director might accomplish with editing or dissolves. When Maria, who has just emigrated from Puerto Rico to New York, tries on her first American party dress in a shop, she goes into an ecstatic twirl. Suddenly other twirling girls materialize beside her, streamers drop from the ceiling, a black drop rises, and the heroine seamlessly blends into the raucous Dance at the Gym. In an instant, Robbins has simultaneously raised the heroine's emotional pitch, advanced the plot, and changed the set without ever interrupting the continuous flow of dance.

The ensuing scene has its own tricks; Robbins telescopes the growing infatuation of the two lovers, Maria and Tony, by constantly shifting the kaleidoscopic patterns of the frenetic dancers who surround them. After that, Robbins' imagination and torrid pacing rarely flag. In a reprise of the song Tonight, five groups of characters in five different sets advance three plot lines in one brief scene. Even the show's flat-out big numbers--America; Cool; Gee, Officer Kruphe--never settle for idle, mindless razzle-dazzle. The chorus dancers all have individual, streetwise characterizations that are upheld in each finger-snapping leap and-menacing pounce.

Robbins' method of integrating movement with every other theatrical element (including sets and lighting) has influenced nearly all the hit musicals now on Broadway. Indeed, Choreographers Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line) and Patricia Birch (Grease, They're Playing Our Song), as well as Director Martin Charnin (Annie), worked as dancers in earlier productions of West Side Story. Though he does not rule out the possibility, it is unlikely that Robbins, now 61, is going to rejoin his progeny by doing a new show soon. "What interests me is a great challenge," he says, "like doing Uncle Tom 's Cabin as the Siamese might do it [The King and I or a Mack Sennett ballet [High Button Shoes] or gritty backstage burlesque [Gypsy] or Jewish shtetl life [Fiddler]. I like doing the research, looking at the theatrical magazines of those periods or going through old photographs at the New York Public Library. Let's face it, a musical version of Little Women just isn't going to grab me." What does grab Robbins, it seems, is the opportunity to create an entire society onstage through dance. West Side Story and Fiddler both contain dream ballets that tap the subconscious aspirations and nightmares of their respective ethnic enclaves. In West Side Story's Dance at the Gym and Fiddler's Wedding Dance specific social customs and rituals of courtship and marriage are rethought in balletic terms. With its gingerly folk touches and communal feeling, Robbins' ballet masterpiece Dances at a Gathering carries these Broadway dances to their abstract apotheosis; in part it describes the manners and emotional bonds that unite an imaginary world often young men and women.

Robbins prefers the greater freedom of pure ballet. He explains: "On Broadway, a choreographer must serve the show. He must deal with a given space dictated by the set, the qualities of the per formers and the songs, and the pressure of whatever else has to be rehearsed. I spend all my energy to get a lot of actors to make believe they're somebody else in front of an audience who knows they're not those people to start with. When I do a ballet, good or bad, it's all coming out of my own thoughts; there is just me, the dancers and the audience to contend with.

If the work is good, it will always stay in repertory; it won't be discarded, like most musicals, after two or three years. And if a ballet fails, you can always think about it and try it again another year. Economic considerations make that impossible on Broadway."

Certainly, Robbins does not miss the panic that comes with working on a musical when time and money are running out. "It's like those descriptions of galaxies spinning apart," he says. "Everyone is going a million miles an hour in opposite directions." His opinion is shared by his mentor, Balanchine, who once created dances for musicals (including the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet for Rodgers and Hart's 1936 On Your Toes) but has not been back to Broadway in nearly 30 years.

Recalls Robbins: "Once Mr. Balanchine and I were discussing a young choreographer at City Ballet, and I suggested that he get experience doing musicals. Balanchine laughed and said, 'No, they wouldn't have him. Broadway is tougher than we are.' "

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