Jerome Robbins

Jerome Robbins, born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on October 11, 1918, in the Jewish Maternity Hospital on Manhattan's Lower East Side, was an American dancer, choreographer, theatre director, film director, and producer whose work spanned classical ballet, Broadway, film, and television. He died on July 29, 1998. The son of Lena and Harry Rabinowitz, he grew up with an older sister, Sonia, in an apartment at 51 East 97th Street in Manhattan before the family relocated to Weehawken, New Jersey in the early 1920s, where his father and uncle established the Comfort Corset Company in nearby Union City. The family had extensive show business connections, including vaudeville performers and theater owners. Robbins graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1935 and briefly enrolled at New York University to study chemistry before leaving after one year to pursue dance. The family legally changed their surname to Robbins in the 1940s.

His dance training was wide-ranging. In high school he studied modern dance with Alys Bentley, and later trained in ballet with Ella Daganova, Spanish dancing with Helen Veola, Asian dance with Yeichi Nimura, and dance composition with Bessie Schonberg. He joined the company of Senya Gluck Sandor, a leading figure in expressionistic modern dance, and it was Sandor who first suggested he adopt the name Robbins. His stage debut came through the Yiddish Art Theater, where he appeared in a small role in The Brothers Ashkenazi.

Robbins began appearing as a dancer at Camp Tamiment in the Poconos in 1937, a resort known for its weekly Broadway-style revues, and simultaneously started dancing in Broadway choruses. His Broadway performing career ran from 1938 to 1946 and included credits such as the play Great Lady, the musicals Stars in Your Eyes and Fancy Free, and Interplay, among other productions. In 1940 he joined Ballet Theatre, later known as American Ballet Theatre, where from 1941 through 1944 he worked as a soloist, earning recognition for roles including Hermes in Helen of Troy, the title role in Petrouchka, the Youth in Agnes de Mille's Three Virgins and a Devil, and Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet. During this period he came under the influence of choreographers Michel Fokine, Antony Tudor, and George Balanchine.

It was while at Ballet Theatre that Robbins created Fancy Free, a ballet combining classical technique with 1940s social dancing, built around a screwball-comedy plot about sailors on leave. He cited Paul Cadmus's 1934 painting The Fleet's In! as one inspiration and commissioned the score from a then relatively unknown Leonard Bernstein, also enlisting Oliver Smith as set designer. The ballet was presented at the Metropolitan Opera as part of Ballet Theatre's 1944 season. That same year, Fancy Free served as a partial inspiration for On the Town, the musical Robbins conceived and choreographed with Bernstein again providing the music, Smith designing the sets, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green writing the book and lyrics under the direction of George Abbott. Robbins insisted that the chorus reflect the racial diversity of New York City, making On the Town a landmark production in breaking the color bar on Broadway. His next musical, Billion Dollar Baby, followed in 1945, and in 1947 he received praise for his Mack Sennett ballet in High Button Shoes, earning his first Tony Award for choreography. That same year he became one of the founding members of New York City's Actors Studio, attending classes alongside Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Montgomery Clift, Herbert Berghof, Sidney Lumet, and others.

In 1948 Robbins expanded his role on Broadway by serving as co-director as well as choreographer for Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!, and the following year he collaborated with Irving Berlin on Miss Liberty. Concurrently, he continued creating ballets, including Interplay, set to a score by Morton Gould, and Facsimile, set to music by Bernstein. In 1949 he left Ballet Theatre to join the newly formed New York City Ballet as Associate Artistic Director, working alongside George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, and soon choreographed The Guests, a ballet on the theme of intolerance.

At New York City Ballet, Robbins distinguished himself as both performer and choreographer, noted for his dancing in Balanchine's The Prodigal Son, Til Eulenspiegel, and Bouree Fantasque, and for his own works including Age of Anxiety, The Cage, Afternoon of a Faun, and The Concert. He continued his Broadway work during this period, staging dances for Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam starring Ethel Merman, and for Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I, for which he created the celebrated Small House of Uncle Thomas ballet. He also performed uncredited work on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Wish You Were Here, and Wonderful Town, and choreographed and directed sketches for The Ford 50th Anniversary Show on CBS, starring Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. In 1954 he collaborated again with George Abbott on The Pajama Game.

Among the many stage productions Robbins directed and choreographed over the course of his career were Peter Pan, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof. His film work brought him two Academy Awards, including the 1961 Academy Award for Best Director, shared with Robert Wise for the film adaptation of West Side Story, and a special Academy Honorary Award recognizing his choreographic achievements on film. On Broadway, he accumulated five Tony Awards, among them the Tony Award for Best Choreography in 1965, the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 1965, and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 1989. He was also a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. A documentary about his life and work, Something to Dance About, premiered on PBS in 2009 and won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award that year.