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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."