Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...