This story may tell you what you need to know about Jerome Robbins. The
choreographer had his first hit in 1944, with the exuberant ballet Fancy
Free: sailors on shore leave, dames and drink, the Bronx is up and Manhattan
is down. It was an immediate success – the audience demanded 22 curtain
calls, and The New York Times’s review arrived during the first-night party,
hailing it as “10 degrees north of terrific”. The jubilant composer, Leonard
Bernstein, grabbed a cute guy from the corps and disappeared into the
bathroom. How did Robbins celebrate? Dazed but gratified, he wandered out
onto Sixth Avenue, pleased that, at last, he could afford to begin analysis.
Robbins was undoubtedly a guy with issues around sex, guilt and an unyielding
work ethic. But he was also one of the 20th century’s key choreographers,
both in ballet and on Broadway. He made dance not decorative but the central
vehicle of meaning, in shows such as Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy and, above
all, West Side Story. Robbins died 10 years ago, aged 80, and West Side
Story itself is now 50 years old. The double anniversary is marked by an
international tour of the turf-war tragedy, which hits London in July; the
Royal Ballet revives Afternoon of a Faun and the lyrical Dances at a
Gathering, and New York City Ballet performs a programme of his work at the
Coliseum in March.
When I caught the new West Side Story in Paris, Robbins’s movement remained
urgent. The derisive hips and scissoring leaps, the defensive swagger – all
still shimmer with heat and fear. The notion of updating Romeo and Juliet
first sparked when Robbins’s then lover, Montgomery Clift, was working on
Shakespeare at the Actors Studio. Robbins initially proposed a story of
tensions between Jews and Catholics, but when Bernstein and the playwright
Arthur Laurents became involved, it developed into a clash between white and
Puerto Rican street gangs, the Jets and Sharks.
Reflectingthe febrile tensions of the New York streets, West Side Story was
unknown territory for the original cast. Chita Rivera is now a panther-like
Broadway legend, but when she created Anita, the heroine’s confidante, she
was a fiery hoofer who had never been required to act. How did Robbins
galvanise the young dancers? “Through fear!” Rivera snaps, her throaty laugh
roaring down the line from New York. More precisely, it was fear allied to
method acting. “He made us all go home and make up our own stories about our
characters’ lives,” Rivera explains. “Then he would throw questions at us
and build these people up. We became excited, because we were living their
lives.”
Robbins slid the story under the skin. He kept the Jets and Sharks apart and
mutually distrustful during rehearsals, and one day slapped a news cutting
about a local slaying on the studio wall. “It had happened in a schoolyard
two blocks away,” Rivera says,still sobered. “Jerry said, ‘This is your
life.’” The cast also improvised key scenes, such as the Jets assaulting
(and all but raping) Anita. “We sat in a line of chairs and started
reading,” Rivera recalls. “Jerry said, ‘Move how you feel.’ It was really
surprising. Every day we would figure it out more.” He allowed them to
rehearse the sequence only once a day, so Rivera continued to find it raw.
“I would feel the presence of these guys around me, and it got really scary.
When they finally got me down, it was shocking.” Even in performance, she
admits, “it was very hurtful to hear those voices – especially if Chita was
feeling a little emotional. It could really get to me”.
The scene remains disturbing, and the current director, Joey McKneely, admits
he pushed his cast to achieve this sense of “hatred”. The term disconcerts
Rivera, but she concedes it. “At the time, the gang business was very much
alive,” she says. Some Broadway spectators walked out, finding the material
hit too close to home. Performances were highly charged: during the “rumble”
sequence, the guys often went too far and actually beat each other up.
Someone even broke an arm. “Real life got into the theatre,” Rivera says.
It was stylised real life, of course. Robbins twisted balletic and athletic
movement into a belligerent new idiom. As the piece’s lyricist, Stephen
Sondheim, described it to me: “What Jerry did in the show was something
between dance and stage action. It was choreographed action.” McKneely has
rethought some spoken scenes, and downplayed the period design, but the
movement is Robbins’s: “Without it, it’s not West Side Story.”
The young Robbins had resolved to be “firm and straight and even cruel to be
faithful” to dance. In practice, this involved being cruel to dancers. Russ
Tamblyn, who appeared in the 1961 film of the musical, remarked: “I don’t
think he was happy with a dancer unless their feet bled.” When Robbins
finally finished with the song Cool, the dancers burnt their battered
kneepads outside his office. Exasperated by his pernickety perfectionism,
the studio removed him from the film – Sondheim recalls the producer
lamenting that by the end of the second day of shooting, they were already
10 days behind.
Despite – or because of – his boiler-room intensity, the dancers adored
Robbins. His other collaborators, not so much. Laurents never forgave him
for naming names during the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and his friendship with
Bernstein became strained.When I spoke to Sondheim in 2005, he described the
choreographer as “not only demanding, but unpleasant and cruel. I’m not
telling tales out of school, it’s the general consensus. Immediately after
work hours, he was just wonderful company – but after 6pm”.
Robbins was a hugely conflicted man, especially around his Jewishness and
bisexuality. His appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee
in 1953 was impelled by terror of being exposed as gay, but his testimony
haunted him for ever. More than three decades later, he confessed: “I can’t
escape the terrors of that catastrophe.” Even so, for years he engineered
simultaneous relationships with a woman and a man, always scuppering his
security. It’s hard to watch West Side Story’s yearning number Somewhere
without feeling that Robbins, too, craved a still point where his knotted
psyche might rest.
McKneely first encountered the choreographer in 1988, as a young dancer in the
compilation show Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. “I had no idea who he was,”
McKneely admits. “He was just this old guy on the other side of the table.
But I found him supportive and inspiring. Everything was about the work. The
choreography never changed for an individual – the individual changed. But
what I learnt from him is so ingrained: never accept mediocrity. Maintain
your integrity.”
No other choreographer created such a substantial body of work in both ballet
and musicals. Monica Mason, now director of the Royal Ballet, considers that
whatever the genre, “he was really a man of the theatre. He was always
thinking of the effect from the front”. Mason danced for him at Covent
Garden in 1970-71, in Dances at a Gathering and In the Night. Compared to
gentlemanly British choreographers, Robbins seemed brusque and zippy, pacing
around in sneakers and T-shirt, cropped beard white against his tan. The
audition process was, Mason remembers, excruciating: weeks of company
auditions, with numbers slowly dwindling. “I so wanted to be chosen,” she
admits. “I even dreamt of it.” She eventually joined a cast of the Royal’s
finest, including Lynn Seymour, Antoinette Sibley, Anthony Dowell and Rudolf
Nureyev.
The attention-hungry Nureyev didn’t slide naturally into an ensemble, but he
had been entranced by the West Side Story movie in Paris shortly before his
defection to the West (he did Jets routines down the Champs Elysées) and
longed to work with its creator. Robbins told his diary the star was an “an
artist – an animal – & a c***”, but the cast melded
beautifully in the lyrical, folksy movement, changing partners with each
mood of the Chopin piano score, forming a community that seemed to dance as
naturally as breathing.
Mason considers Robbins the most controlling choreographer she has known,
physically manipulating the dancers and expecting to be copied exactly. “It
was a total departure for me,” she says. “He broke you down. There was one
way to do it – his way. He said to me once, ‘Monica, do you think you’re
ever going to get this?’ I said, ‘Yes, Jerry, I’m doing my best.’ ‘Yes,’ he
said. ‘That’s what worries me.’” No wonder she ran off to sob in the loo
while rehearsing In the Night. Nothing was left to chance. Disdaining
understudies, Robbins compiled a fiendishly complicated chart, with every
permutation of the roles in case of injury: “It must have taken him hours,”
Mason marvels. “He said, ‘If you don’t follow it, my spies will tell me.’”
Indeed, after an unsanctioned last-minute change when Mason was injured, he
called his lawyers. You’d imagine these parameters would stifle creativity,
but Mason believes they enhanced a sense of freedom: “You are still able to
be hugely creative within a very tight brief.”
The impression from Robbins’s biographies is of a man of constant sorrow, so
it’s a relief when McKneely declares: “I found Jerry a very joyous man. I
think he just enjoyed working and being in rehearsal.” For all his rigour,
Robbins never lost his relish for dance. “He loved being around talent,”
Rivera says. “We had the best time, and I loved making him laugh. He had a
fabulous, infectious laugh.” Somehow, it’s good to hear.
West Side Story is at Sadler’s Wells, EC1, from July 22 to Aug 31; the
Royal Ballet performs Afternoon of a Faun from Feb 28 and Dances at a
Gathering from May 17 at the ROH, WC2; New York City Ballet is performing a
Robbins programme at the Coliseum, WC2, on Mar 13 and 15, and West Side
Story Suite on Mar 19, 20 and 22
