STAGE REVIEW : It’s a Helluva Show : Musical: ‘Jerome Robbins’ Broadway’ brings back the thrill of discovery and rediscovery of the choreographer’s classic works.

Yes, there is an inevitable thread of nostalgia that insinuates itself into the “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” that opened Wednesday at the Century City Shubert, but not because director/choreographer Robbins put it there.

Robbins, who mined his own lifetime achievement on Broadway to re-create some of his best numbers for this all-singing, all-dancing archival collage of his work, is not averse to sentimentality. He uses it liberally--in the “Somewhere” ballet from his suite of dances from “West Side Story” (1957), in the tender “I Still Get Jealous” duet from “High Button Shoes” (1947) and even in the glittering final ode to a Broadway-that-once-was in “Some Other Time” and “New York, New York” (from “On the Town,” 1944).

But nostalgia in the case of this show enters strictly through the front door--with the audience. Older patrons will tune into their own past experience, while younger ones will have the thrill of discovering a mixture of verve and classiness rarely equalled in Broadway dancing any more.

Robbins’ re-creation of 14 excerpts from shows spanning some 20 years on Broadway is much too vigorous and brash to be classed as nostalgic. The immediacy, even urgency of the dance, which originally took 22 weeks to rehearse, has the freshness of new mintings based on old blueprints--a testament to the tremendous abilities of the director/choreographer and the durability of his work.

A spectacular tribute by scenic designer Robin Wagner occurs at the end, when the stage is illuminated by all the titles of the Robbins’ Broadway canon up in lights as the sailors from “On the Town” wander down the Great White Way. But it’s the cherry on the cake, a moment topped only by the still unmatched finale of Michael Bennett’s “A Chorus Line.”

What really counts is what has gone before it: the comical inventions in Act One of the “Charleston” number from the Comden and Green/Morton Gould 1945 “Billion Dollar Baby,” one of Robbins’ earliest show biz ventures--and the fluid patchwork of dances from “West Side Story” whose artful tensions have lost only a little of their vernacular pertinence and nerve.

For all the quaintness of its presumptions, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” from “The King and I” (1951) that launches the second act is something of a dazzler for the imaginative marriage of conventions that it represents: a tale of the American South told in a dance vocabulary borrowed from Thailand. It’s all in how it’s done.

For this theatergoer the greater rewards in this choreographic compendium come in the purely comic capers such as “Charleston,” and they reach their peak in the visual acrobatics of the second act’s “On a Sunday by the Sea.” This Keystone Kop high-speed chase equivalent from “High Button Shoes,” with bathers, thieves, cops and even a gorilla darting in and out of beach cabins and narrowly missing each other, makes the flying sequences from “Peter Pan” (1954) look easy.

Perhaps because strong recent revivals have made them familiar, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick” from “Gypsy” (1959) and “Comedy Tonight” from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962) come across as the weaker links in this chain of accomplishments. The same with the well-engineered compressions of “Fiddler on the Roof” that are ego-massaging but not nearly as remarkable here as in the full context of the musical.

Lead singer Debbie Shapiro’s torchy rendition of “Mr. Monotony,” an Irving Berlin song cut in pre-Broadway tryouts from both “Miss Liberty” in 1949 and “Call Me Madam” in 1950, seems much more seasoned than it was when seen early in the New York run. Though it is now a proper standout, particularly since the pretentious pas-de-deux that accompanied it on Broadway has mercifully been dropped, it still feels more like a discrete audience concession than a part of the fabric.

This is not a singer’s show. “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” is entirely about dance and, despite a strong leader in Tony Roberts who takes us through the numbers, a stylish simplicity of design and a splendid ensemble, it has only one star: the director/choreographer.

We’ve come a certain way since “Fiddler,” Robbins’ last Broadway fling before he entered the more rarefied halls of serious dance, but what progress was afoot owed much to him and has been all but stopped in its tracks. Such columinaries or inheritors of his tradition--the Michael Bennetts, Gower Champions and Bob Fosses--are no longer with us.

Robbins reminds us at once of the tremendous playfulness and exhilaration possible in a certain kind of Broadway idiom and of how few people are left who can still deliver it. What you get in the end at “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” more than meets the eye: It re-awakens it.

At 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City, Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 16. $30-$50; (800) 233-3123.

‘JEROME ROBBINS’ BROADWAY’

An all-dancing, all-singing collage of musical numbers from the Jerome Robbins file, presented by the Shubert Organization and Suntory International Corp. Producers the Shubert Organization, Roger Berlind, Suntory International, Byron Goldman, Emanuel Azenberg. Director/choreographer Jerome Robbins. Co-director Grover Dale. Scenic designer Robin Wagner. Lighting designer Jennifer Tipton. Supervising costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi. Sound Otts Munderloh. Hair and makeup J. Roy Helland. Orchestrations Sid Ramin, William D. Brohn. Musical continuity Scott Frankel. Musical director Paul Gemignani.Conductor Carl Hermanns. Production supervisor Beverley Randolph. Cast Tony Roberts, Debbie Shapiro, Scott Wise, Jennifer Allen, Jim Borstelman, Susann Fletcher, Michael Kubala, Maria Neenan, Steve Ochoa, Linda Talcott, Nancy Ticotin, Leslie Trayer, Naoko Katakami and others.