Rejoicing in Jerome Robbins
Estimating Jerome Robbins’ influence on the Broadway stage, and the wider field of musical theater, Dan Knechtges doesn’t hesitate to drop the “B” word.
“Jerry Robbins was to musical theater what Beethoven was to classical music,” says the artistic director of Theatre Under The Stars, which will close out its 50th season with a rare staging of Robbins’ career-spanning
1989 musical, “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”
“He was the top; there was nobody greater, or better,” Knechtges adds. “I imagine that (when) young theater artists watched what Jerry Robbins did, they probably wanted to give up because you could not get better than that.”
A corset-maker’s son raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and later New Jersey, Robbins hustled and harangued his way to show-business immortality. From the mid-1940s through the mid-’60s, many of the Broadway productions he directed and/or choreographed — a long list topped by “On the Town,” “Gypsy,” “The King and I,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler On the
Roof ” — represented the pinnacle of this particularly American art form.
“A Robbins show was a model of integration, driven especially by the idea that dancing, like words and music, could carry the story forward,” wrote Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times after his death in July 1998.
Most amazingly, Robbins did all that as a moonlighter. He also served as associate director of New York City Ballet under a fellow dance legend, George Balanchine, from 1949 until Balanchine’s passing in 1983. Afterward, he was the company’s co-artistic director until 1990.
It’s no great secret that during rehearsal hours, Robbins could be notoriously demanding. In one revealing bit of theatrical lore, he was so consumed with improving a dance that he backed himself over the edge of the stage and into the orchestra pit.
“Everyone saw what was happening, but no one said a word,” wrote The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella while reviewing Greg Lawrence’s 2001 biography “Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins” — a book that, she observes, brims with such stories.
Nevertheless, Knechtges notes, “most dancers would kill to be in a room with him because they knew they would never be better than when he worked with them. So it is this kind of tension, or push-pull, of you really are going to be forced to bare your soul.”
Pulling out all the stops
But by the mid-’80s, the memory of even such iconic musicals as “Gypsy” and “West Side Story” was fading in favor of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbusters and Broadway engagements by the likes of Rodney Dangerfield and Kenny Loggins. Robbins pieced together more than a dozen of his signature numbers, including some from long-forgotten shows such as “Miss Liberty” and “Billion Dollar Baby,” into an original production. He cast a pre“Seinfeld” Jason Alexander as an expository master of ceremonies known as The Setter; the role won Alexander a Tony.
Three decades later, Knechtges says “Robbins” is a fitting way to bring TUTS’s 50th-anniversary season to a close: by pulling out all the stops.
“What I like about it is it’s a perfect blending of many different styles and flavors,” he says. “Now we’re so big on making sure things are super-authentic, and musicals aren’t about that. Musicals are really about the melting pot — celebrating everything in one delicious stew.”
Something that does unite many routines in this otherwise disparate show but may not be immediately apparent, he adds,
is how funny they are.
To date, the only other production of “Robbins” besides its 18-month Broadway run and subsequent tour (which reached Jones Hall in June 1991) came last year at the Muny, an 11,000-seat outdoor amphitheater in St. Louis.
During “On a Sunday by the Sea,” a zany number from “High Button Shoes” inspired by the Keystone Kops’ slapstick antics, “the audience was howling with laughter at every turn,” Knechtges recalls.
“With humor there comes great humanity, and a lot of the things that happen in some of these numbers are just moments that many people can relate to because they’re so specific,” he continues. “The mamas, the papas, the sons, the daughters in ‘Fiddler’; (or) the two factions battling each other, the two rival gangs (in ‘West Side Story’) — well, just label them Democrats and Republicans, and you can see where that goes.”
42 phone calls
The logistics of “Robbins” are so steep that compared to a typical TUTS production, Knechtges estimates this one requires four or five times the usual number of costumes and sets. Securing the performance rights to the songs in the show alone required 42 phone calls, he notes.
“It was a long journey; it’s really a lot,” he admits. “It’s probably I would think the most amount of people that we’ve had (working on) an actual show,” he says. “We’ve had more people in ‘Oklahoma!’ but I think in terms of staff, in terms of resources, it’s probably the largest.”
Executing a show of this scale and complexity allows TUTS to establish a new benchmark for the company’s potential while creating a natural opportunity to look ahead to its next chapter.
“We wanted to celebrate some of the major works that were very important in this theater’s development, long before I ever got here; and celebrate classical musical theater, which is what the company was built on,” Knechtges says. “Me personally, I want to also then move into what’s next, and how can we add to this canon.”
Chris Gray is a Houston-based writer.