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FIFTY-THREE years ago this month, the curtain went up on Fancy Free, the first ballet by a twenty-five-year-old dancer from New York named Jerome Robbins. There had never been anything quite like it. At a time when classical dance in America was still dominated by foreign-born performers, choreographers, and impresarios, Fancy Free dealt with a contemporary American subject (three sailors on shore leave in Manhattan), featured the jazz-flavored music of a contemporary American composer (Leonard Bernstein, fresh from his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic), and made convincingly idiomatic use of the steps of American popular dance.
The premiere of Fancy Free, which received 25 curtain calls, made Robbins a star overnight. Eight months later, he and Bernstein joined forces again for On the Town, a musical, based loosely on the same ballet, which ran for 463 performances and was filmed by MGM. Within a few years, Robbins had become both the most powerful musical-comedy director on Broadway and the most famous ballet choreographer in America. In 1969, he left Broadway to become co-ballet master-in-chief of George Balanchine's New York City Ballet (NYCB), where he remains active to this day. His latest ballet was premiered in January, and a revival of West Side Story (1957, music by Bernstein) incorporating his original dances is now touring the East Coast.
Robbins's name is often linked with that of Bernstein, and indeed the two had much in common beyond the shared triumphs of their youth. Like Bernstein, Robbins was Jewish, homosexual, and involved in radical politics, going so far as to join a Communist group during World War II. (In 1953, six years after having broken with the party, he named the members of the group to the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC].) Both men moved freely between the worlds of high and popular culture; both also regularly produced "serious" works which were dismissed by many critics as shallow and pretentious. And both, despite their critics, were vastly successful with audiences of all kinds: no American artists working in the field of high culture have been better known to the public at large.
But Robbins's fame, unlike that of his flamboyant collaborator, is based solely on his work, not his life. He rehearses behind closed doors and...