Peter Pan Flies Again

By RICHARD CORLISS

In 1939 a 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 of $55. And the cost of its opening is $8 million, a thousand times that of The Straw Hat Revue.

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 Fiddler on the Roof hold true to tradition.

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 Robbins' Broadway. He has prepared meticulously for this moment: nine months of research, 75 days of rehearsal and seven weeks of preview performances. "I wasn't just putting shows on the way they were," he says of this elephantine gestation. "I was redoing them all, putting as much energy and direction into them as I originally did." The show will need 16 months of sold-out houses to break even, and its backers are audibly apprehensive. "Robbins has an economic interest too," says co-producer Bernard Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, "but artists are very peculiar. Finally, we are all in his hands." They are also in the hands of the '80s Broadway babies, raised on body mikes, synthesizers and musicals with no dance numbers. Will they care about a showman who hasn't staged a new show in 25 years?

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 been successful lately are just not for me," he says. "Then I see the suite of dances from West Side Story, and tears are coming. I realize that my values are not so cuckoo -- this was good. You walk out of the theater reaffirming the values that had you walking into the theater 30 years ago."

Jerome Rabinowitz has enjoyed walking into theaters ever since his childhood in Weehawken, N.J. From the start, he had an insatiable aesthetic curiosity, especially for dance. His parents tried to dissuade him from the hoofer's trade. He recalls, "They sent me to every relative they could find, saying 'Don't do it.' But I wanted to do it." And as would happen so often, what Jerry wanted, Jerry got.

He 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). In 1944 he expanded his ballet Fancy Free into On the Town, which Abbott directed. Betty Comden, the show's coauthor, recalls the young Robbins: "He was wonderful looking, with his dark, dark burning eyes and his wiry, great figure -- a compact ball of energy. He still is."

For two 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. Frankly, I was amazed."

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 are the constraints of musical theater."

Robbins' return to musicals would be on his own terms: no balky collaborators, plenty of time and money. "I didn't want a new show," he says, "and I didn't want it to be the story of my life -- 'and then he - wrote.' I wanted the pieces to stand on their own. So I went to the Shuberts and said, 'I want to put these pieces together. Maybe I'll just photograph them and put them in a museum.' They saw me through that period; that was a million dollars. Then I said, 'I think there's a show.' I laid out a schedule. I told them there would be 400 costumes and 400 wigs, and God knows what all. And they just said, 'Go.' "

For 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 out the business. "Jerry had forgotten about half the jokes," Sondheim says, "and being the inventive man he is, he invented some more. Some of them are even funnier."

The new show's opening number, Ya Got Me from On the Town, called for an all-star reunion. Four of the five leads in the original -- Comden, Adolph Green, Nancy Walker and Cris Alexander -- spent a day piecing together photos, props, the sound track and their memories. "Jerry put us into certain positions," Comden says, "and we remembered the best we could, from our ancestral bodies or our unconscious. And then, of course, Jerry created more. We didn't want it to stop. Jerry stayed to keep working, and the four of us wandered into the street, clinging, clinging to whatever it was."

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 Story suite had to have a logic to it," he says. "I had to pull out of what I had created and make another piece out of it. I was very pleased with the results of that."

Robbins is a hard man to please; this is one notoriously imperious impresario. "When I work on a show," he says, "I'm a wasp. You know how a wasp buzzes around and keeps you on your toes and worries about everything. There's a sound in the air that keeps everything moving." At times the buzz becomes a sonic boom. "Jerry was still rehearsing during previews," says Victor Castelli, a City Ballet soloist who is assisting Robbins. "The kids are exhausted because they are not used to it, and Jerry will be frustrated and annoyed and will yell and scream." But those who have survived Robbins' basic training testify to its effectiveness. "The theater is not all pats on the back," says Chita Rivera, who played Anita in the original West Side Story, "because that does not get the job done. Jerry forces you to go through the pain, and then you find out that you are stronger than you were."

To Robbins, the 62-member cast of this show might be the Straw Hatters of a half-century ago, and he might be Abbott or Balanchine. "We have a wonderful company," he says. "They are devoted to the show and to each other and to the material, and I am touched and astounded by their capacity." He is already a bit sad that this long voyage into his shining past and Broadway's iffy future is completed. "I'm like a cruise director," he says. "I organize the trip and the entertainment and the luggage. Then everybody gets on the ship, and it sails off without me. After a show opens, a chasm opens before me. My relationships with 70 people almost come to a halt. I like them a lot, and I miss them tremendously."

And Broadway misses Robbins. For a decade or so after his abdication, the American musical was dominated by choreographer-directors in the Robbins mold: Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Tommy Tune. Today, though, Broadway is little more than a posh road stop for the British musical; the '80s' three signature smashes (Cats, Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera) were born in London. Jacobs tacitly acknowledges this when he proclaims Robbins "a genius, probably the genius of our time," then adds, "God pity me if Andrew Lloyd Webber hears that."

So hear this: Jerome Robbins is Broadway's perennial prince charming, and his show is a kiss of life to the Sleeping Beauty of the American musical. "I always felt this might well be the most exciting piece of theater in my lifetime," Jacobs says with unaccustomed fervor. "I certainly hope so." High hopes, yes, but Robbins has usually soared to achieve them. "He is the real Peter Pan," says Mary Martin, who 35 years ago played that role for Robbins. "He loves to fly."

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York