Jerome Robbins: Dance Training and Choreography Style Part I

Robbins, who learned from De Mille as a dancer in Oklahoma!, would go on to make musicals where the leads danced and sang and acted, and the dancing moved the plot as much as the lyrics.

Robbins's innovative approach began with Fancy Free, his 1944 ballet about three sailors on shore leave in New York City during World War II. "What Fancy Free did most impressively," writes dance critic Marcia Siegel, "was to integrate classical and colloquial dances within a context of carefully observed characters. . . . Robbins achieved it for the first time in a contemporary ballet. He gave gesture and the acting of real people the same validity on the concert stage that Fred Astaire gave to dancing in the quasi-realistic milieu of movie romances." Fancy Free was Robbins's first collaboration with the up-and-coming composer Leonard Bernstein, and it played 160 performances in its opening season. The same year, the ballet was transformed into the Broadway musical On the Town and established Robbins and Bernstein as formidable talents in American theater.

In a career that lasted six decades, Jerome Robbins choreographed for Broadway, film, and two major American ballet companies. He developed and choreographed some of the most popular American musicals--West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof--and was sent in to rescue shows on the edge of disaster such as A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Funny Girl. He collaborated with Agnes De Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and George Balanchine, and his protégés, including Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, would become stars of Broadway.

Gluck-Sandor noticed Robbins's varied talents. "He was eighteen or nineteen at the time. I needed a copy of Hamlet and borrowed his. Besides his notes, the margins were full of music he composed. He was always writing stories. He did wood carving and also drew. He had what you might call a photographic memory. Once he saw something, he could do it backwards."

Robbins was ambitious, and although he danced with the newly formed Ballet Theater and worked in several Broadway shows, he desperately wanted to choreograph. He spent his summers at Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos that was known as a springboard for emerging talent. It was run by Max Liebman, who would go on to produce the television program Your Show of Shows, and brought up entertainers such as Danny Kaye, Imogene Coca, and Carol Channing. At Taminent, Robbins was able to stage his first pieces, among them a version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town, which would go on to Broadway as part of Liebman's Straw Hat Revue in 1939. "Although he received no credit for having choreographed them," writes Long, "he did manage to have his choreographic work presented on a Broadway stage by the time he was twenty."