Jerome Robbins’ Way : Dancemaster Demanded Much for Mammoth ‘Broadway’

Up on the Shubert Theatre stage, Grover Dale leads a clutch of young dancers through scenes from “West Side Story.” Over and over again, the Jets strut across the stage, snapping their fingers, leaping, snarling at the Sharks.

Rehearsals were winding down for “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” set to open Wednesday in Century City. The show won six Tonys in 1989, including one for best musical, for its re-creation of dance numbers and scenes from such shows as “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “The King and I” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Co-director Dale, who played a Jet himself in the Broadway production more than 30 years ago, has had no easy job. The show spans 20 years of Robbins’ work, sweeping in nearly a dozen musicals between “On the Town” in 1944 and “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964.

There are 500 costumes, 350 pairs of shoes and 275 wigs, and the show’s 50 performers play as many as 10 roles apiece. Dancers do the Charleston, Russian bottle dance, mambo and strip-tease. They play policemen, Roman slaves, sailors and even a gorilla.

Let’s just talk lipstick. Debbie Shapiro, whose performances in this show on Broadway won her a Tony last year, changes lipsticks as well as clothes six times during the show. She starts out in red lipstick playing cab driver Hildy in “On the Town,” switches to pink to play Rosalia in “West Side Story,” then blots the lipstick to play trumpet as stripper Mazeppa in “Gypsy.” She makes her lips full to play a bathing beauty in “High Button Shoes,” redoes them to play a “glamour puss” in “Miss Liberty,” then blots the lipstick off for a kiss as Hildy again in the show’s finale.

“You know how, when you’re kids, you pretend you’re different people?” asks Shapiro, who grew up four blocks from the Shubert. “This is the ultimate theatrical experience for a musical performer.”

Robbins, who will be 72 this month, had been sorting through assorted historical material as an archival project before deciding three years ago to try to stage this production. But, says Dale, there were two underlying fears: Would the shows stand up for today’s audiences and could they even be reconstructed?

They were reasonable concerns. Given that choreographers usually weren’t annotating, much less videotaping, dances 30 and 40 years ago, reconstruction was no easy task. Such shows as “Fiddler” and “West Side Story” had been filmed, but many of the others had left few tracks.

Most difficult of all to restage was “On a Sunday by the Sea,” a 13-minute segment in “High Button Shoes” during which assorted bathing beauties, police, robbers and a gorilla chase one another in and out of several bathhouse doors.

Hoping they’d remember a kick, a gesture, maybe a line here or there, Robbins invited members of the Broadway and national companies of the 1947 show to his Manhattan studio. More than 20 showed up from all over the country, says Dale, but there still wasn’t enough information “until a guy in the back raised his hand and said he’d written down every single move in the entire ballet. Kevin Joe Jonson (now 65 and living in Virginia) had saved those notes in the bottom drawer of his dresser for 40 years.”

After six months of reconstruction, rehearsals started. For an unheard-of 22 weeks, performers learned not just their parts but entire scripts. Newspaper clippings, posters and such in rehearsal rooms helped set the social context in which each show takes place.

Many cast members weren’t even born when “Fiddler,” Robbins’ last show, opened in 1964. “I’d never seen any one of these shows onstage, and I had to read the scripts of everything,” says 31-year-old Scott Wise, another of the show’s Tony-winning performers. “Jerome insisted on that, to make sure you knew your characters inside and out. He wouldn’t just let you go out there and (dance)--what he insisted on is the intent of the choreography.”

Consider rehearsals on “West Side Story,” for instance. Robbins even separated his Sharks and Jets in two different dance studios, says Wise, who plays Jets leader Riff, “so when we came together onstage, we were definitely two different groups. And if we weren’t intimidating enough, (the Sharks) would just laugh at us. . . . It was a great acting class.”

Robbins directed the show as well as choreographed it and, says production scenic designer Robin Wagner, “was deeply involved in every decision.” Some changes resulted because original sketches or designs simply couldn’t be found, but others came about because Robbins saw things differently today than he did 30 or 40 years ago.

Lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, who won a Tony for lighting the show, never worked with Robbins on a Broadway show “but I’ve lit his ballets since the ‘70s. I knew that his eye changed over that time, and knew he’d want things brighter than they were originally.”

Wagner brought in the original set designers as much as possible. If that wasn’t possible, he’d use original sketches, often resolving color questions with photographs from original productions and even one record jacket. He created entirely new sets for “Peter Pan” and for the finale’s spectacular backdrop of theater marquees incorporating the names of all the shows in thousands of light bulbs.

But the music and lyrics are the same wonderful stuff turned out originally by people like Leonard Bernstein, Sammy Cahn, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne. And the show’s creators worked hard to maintain the spirit of the original shows--Shubert Theatre general manager Ira Bernstein, whose press-agent father worked on several Robbins’ shows, says, for instance, that “High Button Shoes” looks exactly the same to him today as it did on Sept. 11, 1947, when he attended its world premiere in Philadelphia. “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” essentially reopens the Shubert, which has been dark most of the time since “Les Miserables” closed on July 23, 1989. Advance sales were $4.3 million, compared to $10 million before the show opened on Broadway, and Shubert Organization chairman Gerald Schoenfeld says the show will be here just 21 weeks “no matter what.” The show is already set to open March 10 in Tokyo, and following 11 weeks in Japan, heads for Miami to start a national tour.

There are fewer people in both the cast and crew, and the production cost $3 million here, as opposed to $8.7 million in New York. And although nearly half the Los Angeles cast is new to the show, they rehearsed only six weeks--instead of the more costly 22 for Broadway.

The show’s star, Tony Roberts, who had been in the Broadway production since January, refers to the new cast members as “an infusion of new blood. It juiced everybody up and made it new again for all of us.”

Dale refers to “very few” changes but says the show is eight minutes shorter here because of tightening and character development. Also gone is a dance duet that on Broadway followed Shapiro’s solo rendition of “Mr. Monotony,” an Irving Berlin song that was cut out during pre-Broadway runs of both “Miss Liberty” in 1949 and “Call Me Madam” in 1950.

There were no black actors in the Broadway show initially, and Actors’ Equity representatives had asked management to cast blacks in the show as people were replaced. General manager Leonard Soloway says when the show closed in New York, there were three blacks in the cast. There are four blacks in the Los Angeles production, Soloway says, as well as five Latinos and two of Asian descent. (“Our supposition on these is based on how people look,” Soloway explains. “We have never asked anyone their race or nationality, nor would we.”)

The total number of dancers, however, is down from 62 on Broadway to 50 here, and Schoenfeld says not a single number has fewer dancers onstage. That means incredible hustle but, says Shapiro, “everybody’s doing more, and they’re happier. There’s nothing more miserable for an actor than to sit around and do nothing.”

Waiting for his call out in the Shubert audience a few days before previews started, Broadway veteran Roberts looked up at his colleagues onstage and called the company “very awesome. There’s more talent and dedication in this group of people than I’ve ever seen.”