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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."