Jerome Robbins

Film Director

  • Born: October 11, 1918
  • Birthplace: New York, New York
  • Died: July 29, 1998
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American choreographer, director, and dancer

Robbins conceived, choreographed, and directed a host of groundbreaking works in three performance genres: modern dance, ballet, and theater. While most of his dances were created for the Broadway stage and for New York-based ballet companies, some of his most acclaimed choreography is presented in the film translations of two successful stage musicals, The King and I(1956) and West Side Story (1961).

Areas of achievement Dance, theater and entertainment, film, music

Early Life

Jerome Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, the second child and only son of Herschel “Harry” and Lena Rips Rabinowitz. The Rabinowitz Delicatessen Shop, co-owned by Harry and his brothers, provided financial stability for the family of four, who at first resided at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 97th Street in Manhattan, in the building that housed the business. In the wake of the post-World War I economic boom, the Rabinowitz brothers sold the store. Harry then moved his family to New Jersey, settling in Weehawken and venturing into a new business, the Comfort Corset Company, with Lena’s brother-in-law, Ben Goldenberg.

The financial health of this enterprise allowed for enhanced social activities for Harry and Lena, for family summer vacations, and music lessons for both Jerome and his sister Sonia. Performance was valued and encouraged in the Rabinowitz household. Sonia demonstrated early talent in dance, and the young Robbins was playing the piano and violin in concert at the age of three. Eventually, he began observing and copying the dance steps that Sonia practiced at home, and he accompanied his sister to her dance class before taking lessons on his own.

The economic crash of 1929 led to a fateful family decision. Goldenberg, fearful of bankruptcy, relinquished his share of the family’s corset company to buy property for a summer camp in the Pocono Mountains resort area in Pennsylvania. Robbins would first dance before an audience at Kittatinny, the Goldenbergs’ camp.

Upon graduation from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1935, Robbins entered New York University but stayed only one year because of poor grades and flagging business at his father’s company. He avoided immediate employment at Comfort Corset by striking a deal with his parents: To find his calling, they gave him one year with room and board and ferry fare to Manhattan.

Within the year of the pact between Robbins and his parents, he secured professional employment as a dancer and commenced his prolific career as a performer, choreographer, and director. He danced first under the aegis of Dance Center director Senya Gluck-Sandor, who encouraged Robbins to change his surname to something “less ethnic.” While assuming an assortment of dance roles and studying classical ballet during the New York dance season, Robbins spent four summers (1938-1941) at Camp Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where he had an opportunity to write, choreograph, and direct musical reviews featuring Broadway performers. This experience provided the basis for Robbins’s lasting achievements in the performing arts.

Life’s Work

While Robbins commenced his career as a dancer with the American Ballet Theater, winning praise for his performances in such works as Petroushka and Helen of Troy, it was as a concept-developer, choreographer, and director that he left his imprint on American dance. One of his early ideas, an encounter between three sailors on leave and the women they meet, came to fruition in the ballet Fancy Free. With staging by Robbins (who danced one of the sailor roles) and music by Leonard Bernstein, the work debuted in New York on April 18, 1944, to rave notices. Later that year, the Fancy Free story line was expanded for a full-length Broadway musical, On the Town. Featuring new music by Bernstein, On the Town opened on December 28 to the same enthusiasm as the ballet on which it was based. Robbins’s stage career was launched.

Robbins’s next Broadway effort, Billion Dollar Baby (1945), was not successful, but the 1940’s ended on two notes of achievement for Robbins. His choreography of the musical High Button Shoes (1947) earned him his first Tony Award (this year for Best Choreography), and in 1949 he was named associate artistic director of the New York City Ballet. This appointment led to Robbins working with legendary ballet master George Balanchine.

The decade of the 1950’s proved to be the most productive for Robbins. In addition to crafting Age of Anxiety and dancing Prodigal Son to acclaim for the New York City Ballet, he choreographed the Broadway musical Call Me Madam (1950), which starred Ethel Merman. One year later, he directed the dances for the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, based on the novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon.

On May 5, 1953, Robbins made an appearance he would rather have avoided. Aware that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was investigating his connection to the Communist Party, an affiliation dating to 1943, Robbins agreed to testify as a so-called friendly witness. His “naming of names” to avoid a subpoena would be the source of guilt for many years.

Refocusing on work, Robbins provided uncredited input on the production of Wonderful Town (1954), a musical featuring Rosalind Russell. He did receive credit for two other tuneful productions that debuted on Broadway that same year: Peter Pan, the musical retelling of the James M. Barrie play, which he both directed and choreographed, and The Pajama Game, for which he served as codirector (with George Abbott). For the film version of The King and I (1956), Robbins was hired as choreographer, the first of two opportunities he would have in his career to re-create dances originally designed for the stage.

After directing and choreographing (with Bob Fosse) the musical Bells Are Ringing (1956), starring Judy Holliday, Robbins brought what is considered his crowning achievement to the Broadway stage: West Side Story. The work, which opened on September 26, 1957, was a modernization of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in which American-born and Puerto Rican youths vying for turf in New York City stand in for the Bard’s Montagues and Capulets. With its innovative use of dance sequences to advance the plot, the play was an immense success that earned Robbins another Tony Award for choreography. Music was provided by frequent collaborator Bernstein.

In 1958, Robbins assembled the first of four Ballets: USA companies to perform at the annual Spoleto festival in Italy. He rounded out the decade choreographing Gypsy (1959). This musical, based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s show business memoir, reunited Robbins with Merman and with Stephen Sondheim, lyricist for West Side Story.

Sensing the winds of change in Broadway musical tastes, Robbins would make his final original contributions to the stage by the mid-1960’s. He began the decade as an uncredited assistant on the production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) then shifted gears to work in cinema once more. Named to codirect the film version of West Side Story with Robert Wise, Robbins had his second chance to revisit dances he fashioned for the Broadway stage. Robbins withdrew from the production early, for reasons that are still debated. However, he received full screen credit. When the film swept the 1961 Academy Awards (including Best Picture of the Year), Wise and Robbins took home Oscars for Best Director.

One more major Broadway achievement still awaited Robbins. He directed and choreographed the long-running musical Fiddler on the Roof, which opened on September 22, 1964. The tale of Tevye, the Jewish milkman seeking husbands for his daughters as the Russian Revolution looms, earned two more Tony Awards for Robbins, and it undoubtedly served as a means for the former Jerome Rabinowitz to connect with his religious heritage.

Robbins’s later life found him concentrating primarily on ballet productions. Between 1969 and 1997, he staged seventeen works for the New York City Ballet Company. In 1981, he was one of the five Kennedy Center honorees. He did return to Broadway one more time, codirecting and co-choreographing a compendium show of his works entitled Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), for which he earned his fifth Tony Award.

By the 1990’s, Robbins’s health began to falter. However, he mustered the strength to be present at the May 20, 1998, New York City Ballet premiere of Les Noces, his final work. He died on July 29, 1998, four days after suffering a massive stroke.

Significance

Robbins’s legacy to the arts is twofold. First, he was among the first to envision and reinvent dance as part of the American idiom by crafting dances with North American as opposed to continental European contexts. Second, he did much to connect the art of the dance with segments of society not traditionally associated with elegant, rhythmic movement. Robbins’s work presented sailors, street toughs, Siamese children, Semitic Russian peasants, and the like, characters that are as likely to burst into beautiful dance as are swans and steadfast tin soldiers.

Bibliography

Conrad, Christine. Jerome Robbins: That Broadway Man. London: Booth-Clibborn, 2000. Pictorial-photographic biography written by a friend and onetime companion of Robbins.

Jowitt, Deborah. Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Full-length biography including extensive coverage of Robbins’s career and insight into his personal conflicts.

Lawrence, Greg. Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001. A biography featuring extensive interviews with Robbins’s family members and former colleagues.

Long, Robert Emmet. Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors, 1940 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001. A study of Broadway theater post-1940 that uses Robbins as a starting point for discussion.

Siebert, Brian. Jerome Robbins. New York: Rosen, 2006. A well-illustrated biography aimed at young readers, grades five through eight.

Vaill, Amanda. Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. New York: Broadway Books, 2006. A biography that incorporates extensive quotations from Robbins’s personal diaries.

1941-1970: April 18, 1944: Robbins’s Fancy Free Premieres; September 26, 1957: Bernstein Joins Symphonic and Jazz Elements in West Side Story.