Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. Not much is new in this off-Broadway tale of an old family company menaced by corporate raiders, but the acting is superb, especially by Mercedes Ruehl (Married...
...musical called The Straw Hat Revue opened at Manhattan's Ambassador Theater. The show, which cost $8,000 to put on Broadway, featured such future stars as Danny Kaye, Imogene Coca, Alfred Drake and a young dancer named Jerome Robbins. This week -- 50 years later and four blocks south, at the Imperial Theater -- Broadway welcomes another revue, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, with another cast of young hopefuls. But everything else about this show is bigger, riskier and very late '80s. For one thing, its co-sponsor is a Japanese liquor firm. For another, it carries an all-time-high ticket price...
These days, that's show biz. But Jerome Robbins' Broadway is no ordinary show. It is an unprecedented monument, a living museum that one of Broadway's great names has erected to himself. The master shaman, now 70, presents dances from nine of the glorious musicals he directed or choreographed between 1944 and 1964. The sailors from On the Town again saunter through wartime New York, New York. The royal courtesans of The King and I restage Uncle Tom's Cabin, Siamese-style. West Side Story's Sharks and Jets strut toward one more epochal + rumble. The shtetl Jews from...
With this new show, Robbins is both appealing to Broadway tradition and bucking it. He is a man going up against his own legend -- as the premier American-born dancemaker, whose works for the ballet and Broadway suavely merged high art with pop culture. Robbins has always been a spellbinding storyteller; the narrative clarity of each movement instantly draws viewers into the roiling emotional life of his characters. In his comic ballets, visual gags fly past like precision pies in a Keystone caper. This show proves he is back where he belongs, on a street that belongs to him: Jerome...
Clearly, more is riding on this show than a mere $8 million. For Jerome Robbins' Broadway is a sacred remnant of the musical at its mid-century peak -- a fusion of wit, precision, melody and high spirits -- that an aging generation of theater lovers miss terribly and want back. "We are in an era of high school production numbers and arias set to a backbeat," says Jule Styne, who wrote songs for five Robbins musicals. "A lot of people will see this show and realize what they've missed." Co-producer Emanuel Azenberg must hope so too. "Shows that have...