west side stories

Rekindling Robbins, a Step at a Time
By JULIE BLOOM
ONCE asked about the impetus for “Fancy Free” (1944), the first ballet he choreographed, Jerome Robbins said he felt compelled to create something different. “I thought, ‘Why can’t we dance about American subjects?’ ” he said. “Why can’t we talk about the way we dance today, and how we are?”
Now, a new generation of dancers is applying Robbins’s question to some of his own work. “West Side Story,” the 1957 musical that changed the way we think about how dance can tell a story, is reopening on March 19 at the Palace Theater. The show is directed by Arthur Laurents, the author of its original book, and Joey McKneely has been charged with the difficult task of recreating Robbins’s choreography for a new American generation.
Unlike other musicals, in which the dancing is, however entertaining, most often a flashy, kick-filled break from the rest of the show, in “West Side Story” it is as essential to the story as the music and the words. “If you remove Jerome Robbins’s choreography, you lose significant plot, storytelling moments, and you lose characterization elements that are set in the dance,” Mr. McKneely said in an interview. “It’s rare that shows have dance as that kind of signature. It’s the emotional glue.”
Mr. McKneely’s task is as hard as it sounds. Like balletomanes devoted to Balanchine many Robbins disciples and fans see every step in “West Side Story” as sacred. But, as Mr. McKneely pointedly asked, “What is the original choreography?”
Sitting in the back of the Palace Theater after a recent rehearsal, he ticked through the many iterations of the show: “There’s 1957, then there’s the ’61 movie,” he said, adding, “then there’s the ’80 revival, then there’s ‘Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,’ then there’s New York City Ballet. So, O.K., all of that is ‘West Side Story’ and Jerome Robbins was around, and he did all of those versions.”
Mr. McKneely, 42, who has worked on Broadway — he made his choreographic debut in 1995 with “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” — and abroad, has a long relationship with Robbins and his work. He worked directly with the choreographer as a dancer in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” in 1989 before directing his first production of “West Side Story” at La Scala in Milan in 2000. More recently he directed a European tour of the show on its 50th anniversary in 2007 and an English production in 2008.
Still, to keep the movement as true as possible to Robbins’s original intentions, Mr. McKneely drew not only from his own experience dancing numbers like “Cool” and “Dance at the Gym,” but from the film, a video of the 1980 production and a choreographic manual for the show written by Alan Johnson, a cast member of the original production. The Jerome Robbins Trust and Foundation, which licenses Robbins’s work and safeguards its legacy, was also involved in the process to ensure that the show remains true to Robbins’s spirit.
But for all the efforts to adhere to the original choreography, this “West Side Story” has also been re-envisioned for today’s audience. Many of the lyrics are now in Spanish, and parts of the dances have changed as well to make what the creators hope is a more realistic show.
“You can’t worry about the past,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview. “Jerry was very concerned with why they dance. Why they dance in this version is not the same as why they danced in the others. The theater has changed. You have to reflect that in the dancing and it does.”
Some adjustments were slight (a fist was added to an originally balletic arm movement in the prologue) and some more significant, like those made to the second act ballet, which Mr. Laurents said could look “like a dance concert unless you pull it into the story.”
To make that dance more organic to the stage Mr. McKneely decided not to include the nightmare scene, which retells the deaths of Bernardo and Riff, and to make Maria and Tony front and center in the dance featuring the Sharks and the Jets. “They are generating the ballet,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen around them.”
Adjustments were also made to “America,” as well as to the scene in which the Jets attack Anita, played by Karen Olivo. That moment, which the cast members now refer to explicitly as a rape, has become more violent. “We don’t treat them as lovable little thugs.” Mr. Laurents said of the characters. “We treat them as what they were then and what they are now.”
“Cool,” one of the show’s most technically demanding pieces, is another place where this fresh focus is seen. “The steps are the same,” Mr. Laurents said, “but what is different is the emotional anger that is under it.”
At the second technical rehearsal in early February, Mr. McKneely worked with the dancers on “Cool.” Laptops lay scattered across makeshift tables in the theater, while Mr. Laurents watched and Mr. McKneely gathered the Jets onstage around him. The movements are so familiar: the snaps, the hunched shoulders, the fist pounding into the palm, a pirouette to the ground, and the straight jump up, one leg sideways, both arms reaching up, toward the sky: “Pow.”
Communicating the tension that simmers just underneath the surface in these movements is one of this production’s most difficult challenges. “Build, build, release,” Mr. McKneely coaxed them, demonstrating a jump in front of the cast. “Robbins would do these steps, and you could see the character emerge out of him,” he said later. “Just watching him, he would become each character. So when I teach it, I do it. I do it full out.”
Young dancers were sought to make the production seem more contemporary. More than 2,500 people from around the world were auditioned, and some primary cast members, like Ryan Steele, who plays Baby John, are as young as 18. “When you’re in your early 20s, you still have your hormones flaring, you’re still partying out at night, you’re getting in trouble,” Mr. McKneely said. “The closer you get to that age group, the more in touch in a natural real way they are to those emotions, so you believe them.”
Even with the direction to let go of past interpretations, the pressure to get Robbins right is immense, not just for the choreographer but also for the stars. “A lot of people come here with an idea of what they want to see,” Ms. Olivo said before a rehearsal. “I don’t have the short hair. I’m not in the lilac dress.”
But for all the adjustments, it’s still Robbins’s movements that remain so powerful after all these years. Ms. Olivo added: “I always tell my husband, when I do it right, when I do the choreography right, I feel like I’m flying. That’s Robbins. When you get it in your body and you do it right, or you see someone doing it right, it’s an exhilarating experience.”