When I caught the new West Side Story in Paris, Robbins’s movement remained urgent. The derisive hips and scissoring leaps, the defensive swagger – all still shimmer with heat and fear. The notion of updating Romeo and Juliet first sparked when Robbins’s then lover, Montgomery Clift, was working on Shakespeare at the Actors Studio. Robbins initially proposed a story of tensions between Jews and Catholics, but when Bernstein and the playwright Arthur Laurents became involved, it developed into a clash between white and Puerto Rican street gangs, the Jets and Sharks.
Reflecting the febrile tensions of the New York streets, West Side Story was unknown territory for the original cast. Chita Rivera is now a panther-like Broadway legend, but when she created Anita, the heroine’s confidante, she was a fiery hoofer who had never been required to act. How did Robbins galvanise the young dancers? “Through fear!” Rivera snaps, her throaty laugh roaring down the line from New York. More precisely, it was fear allied to method acting. “He made us all go home and make up our own stories about our characters’ lives,” Rivera explains. “Then he would throw questions at us and build these people up. We became excited, because we were living their lives.”
Robbins slid the story under the skin. He kept the Jets and Sharks apart and mutually distrustful during rehearsals, and one day slapped a news cutting about a local slaying on the studio wall. “It had happened in a schoolyard two blocks away,” Rivera says,still sobered. “Jerry said, ‘This is your life.’” The cast also improvised key scenes, such as the Jets assaulting (and all but raping) Anita. “We sat in a line of chairs and started reading,” Rivera recalls. “Jerry said, ‘Move how you feel.’ It was really surprising. Every day we would figure it out more.” He allowed them to rehearse the sequence only once a day, so Rivera continued to find it raw. “I would feel the presence of these guys around me, and it got really scary. When they finally got me down, it was shocking.” Even in performance, she admits, “it was very hurtful to hear those voices – especially if Chita was feeling a little emotional. It could really get to me”.
The scene remains disturbing, and the current director, Joey McKneely, admits he pushed his cast to achieve this sense of “hatred”. The term disconcerts Rivera, but she concedes it. “At the time, the gang business was very much alive,” she says. Some Broadway spectators walked out, finding the material hit too close to home. Performances were highly charged: during the “rumble” sequence, the guys often went too far and actually beat each other up. Someone even broke an arm. “Real life got into the theatre,” Rivera says.
It was stylised real life, of course. Robbins twisted balletic and athletic movement into a belligerent new idiom. As the piece’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, described it to me: “What Jerry did in the show was something between dance and stage action. It was choreographed action.” McKneely has rethought some spoken scenes, and downplayed the period design, but the movement is Robbins’s: “Without it, it’s not West Side Story.”
The young Robbins had resolved to be “firm and straight and even cruel to be faithful” to dance. In practice, this involved being cruel to dancers. Russ Tamblyn, who appeared in the 1961 film of the musical, remarked: “I don’t think he was happy with a dancer unless their feet bled.” When Robbins finally finished with the song Cool, the dancers burnt their battered kneepads outside his office. Exasperated by his pernickety perfectionism, the studio removed him from the film – Sondheim recalls the producer lamenting that by the end of the second day of shooting, they were already 10 days behind.
Despite – or because of – his boiler-room intensity, the dancers adored Robbins. His other collaborators, not so much. Laurents never forgave him for naming names during the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and his friendship with Bernstein became strained.When I spoke to Sondheim in 2005, he described the choreographer as “not only demanding, but unpleasant and cruel. I’m not telling tales out of school, it’s the general consensus. Immediately after work hours, he was just wonderful company – but after 6pm”.
Robbins was a hugely conflicted man, especially around his Jewishness and bisexuality. His appearance before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1953 was impelled by terror of being exposed as gay, but his testimony haunted him for ever. More than three decades later, he confessed: “I can’t escape the terrors of that catastrophe.” Even so, for years he engineered simultaneous relationships with a woman and a man, always scuppering his security. It’s hard to watch West Side Story’s yearning number Somewhere without feeling that Robbins, too, craved a still point where his knotted psyche might rest.
It is safe to say that Jerome Robbins was a perfectinist. He wanted West Side Story to be perfect, and it was, but he went a little overboard, for others to cope with. It's interesting to see how Robbins came about creating his characters, he gave his dancers the opportunity to develop the character themselves, so that they could feel more engaged by living their lives. I think this is a really effective strategy to have in place, because it allows the dancers to focus more, and is also realistic, and there is no limit to how they can act.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in some ways, Robbins was too extreme with how he wanted the characters to act, allowing them to move how they feel, which did create conflict in rehearsals between the two different groups, yes it did put them into that state of mind, but it was very dangerous, and "scary" as Rivera said.
I think Robbins methods of how he went about creating West Side Story, were somewhat influenced from his own insecurities of being Jewish and his sexuality as well, and so he really wanted the characters in the film to reflect his own perception of his insecurities and how society handled it.