DANCE REVIEW : A Regrettable Act : The First Half of ‘Jerome Robbins’ Broadway’ Falls Short in a Number of Ways

Have you bought tickets to see “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” at the Performing Arts Center? Well, you might give a thought to lingering over dinner and not showing up till Act II starts--about 9:40 p.m. by my watch on Tuesday.

Sure, you’ll miss the half-hour suite of dances from “West Side Story,” but you could always rent the movie (Robbins choreographed and directed the dance sequences there, too). That way you could spare yourself some bad singing (Melanie Vaughan’s vibrato-laden version of “Somewhere” is the pits) and the sinking feeling that the choreography needs the context of the rest of the musical in order to rise to the appropriate emotional pitch.

The dances, which have been somewhat rearranged and altered, stop and start awkwardly in order to shift scenes that were not originally consecutive (the action moves from the “Dance at the Gym” to “Cool,” for example). The result? The drama is chopped up into sanitized little set pieces--precisely what the actual musical refused to do.

Each part of “West Side Story” is meant to work seamlessly together: Leonard Bernstein’s unforgettable music, Arthur Laurents’ romantic book and Robbins’ innovative choreography. To hear the music for “Maria” and not hear the words (though, given the community playhouse-level of singing in this production, maybe that’s just as well) is to feel cheated of one of the small miracles that makes this musical--about lovers with allegiances to rival New York gangs--justly famous.

The casting isn’t all that wonderful, either. While ballet dancer Robert La Fosse took the role of Tony in New York, the touring company offers pleasant but non-pyrotechnical Jim Borstelmann. On opening night, wooden Annie Kelly substituted for Alexia Hess (a New York City Ballet dancer) as Maria. And Leilani Jones pushes too hard in the Chita Rivera role of Anita, instead of letting a more natural-seeming ebullience work in tandem with the clever lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

The rest of Act I is really bad news. Were the stupid pratfalls and sight gags from the opening of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (another collaboration with Sondheim) ever funny? Is it fair to expect a contemporary audience to be amused by the dimwitted 1920s cliches--jitterbugging cops, flappers and rumrunners--of “Billion Dollar Baby” (the 1945 baby of lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green and composer Morton Gould)?

Just about the only bright spots before the curtain-fall of the first act are the opening excerpts from “On the Town,” a Comden, Green and Bernstein collaboration with Robbins, about a trio of Navy men on 24-hour shore leave in Manhattan. Oliver Smith’s smart sets and the naive, kick-up-your-heels joy of the steps go a long way, even when the dancing is nothing to write home about.

So why even drop in on Act II? Because it contains a lovely sequence, which stands comfortably on its own, from “The King and I” (book and lyrics--unheard here--by Oscar Hammerstein II, silvery music by Richard Rodgers).

In “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” Jones is a royal performer in Bangkok narrating the story of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in a perfectly mannered storyteller’s voice. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel has been turned into a Thai legend, enacted in a pseudo-ethnic dance style laced with delicate wrist movements, flat palms, flexed feet and bobbing heads.

Toylike props (hand-held clouds, lightning and sun), supernatural beings, pantomimed action (three men bending over create a mountain) and Irene Sharaff’s evocative costumes create an exotic never-never land. Naoko Katakami, an apprentice with the Martha Graham Dance Company, is exquisite as Eliza, making her escape by hopping sweetly across the stage and stepping lightly on a blue scarf symbolizing a frozen river.

The real never-never land--the one in Sir J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”--is represented with the famous scene in which Peter gets a family of well-mannered English children to fly off with him. Leslie Trayer makes a sturdy Peter, and the scene still exerts its goofy magic, though once again I missed the singing--more specifically the perky voice of the late Mary Martin.

Paul Kreppel, who serves as emcee throughout the evening, performs his most welcome duties as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, music by Jerry Bock), which was another good choice to excerpt. Tevye and the villagers in Patricia Zipprodt’s shtetl costumes, stepping in a circle dance and singing the musical’s signature song, “Tradition,” paint a vivid picture. Tzeitel’s marriage ceremony, with its mixture of solemnity and fun (a row of bearded men balancing bottles on their heads as they dance with linked arms) is another self-contained peek into an exotic world.

Jennifer Allen’s nasal-voiced Tessie and the amusing way the strippers’ bumps and grinds punctuate the lyrics make “You Gotta Have a Gimmick” from “Gypsy” bearable. But the Mack Sennett-inspired routine from “High Button Shoes” goes on much too long and has more to do with traffic control than dancing.

And it seems incredible--in Jones’ tepid rendition, anyhow--that the “Mr. Monotony” number from “Miss Liberty” could have been a showstopper in 1949. My, how times change. (Speaking of which, remember the days before musicals were miked? At least the amplification at the center is not noticeably distracting.)

But the big question is, how could “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” be named the best musical in the 1989 Tony Awards? True, the cast was different back then. But it’s sad to think of this hodgepodge of musical numbers as the best anything. Go rent the “West Side Story” video, and you’ll see what I mean.