Jerome Robbins on Broadway: 1944–1951

Jerome Robbins’ surpassing of de Mille as the primary and most influential choreographer of his period is acknowledged. His training with Gluck Sandor and actors from the Group Theatre exposed him to Constantin Stanislavski’s early acting methods and his creative years at Camp Tamiment honed a brand of humor that he would use throughout his Broadway career. I consider Robbins first musical, On the Town (1944), developed from his ballet Fancy Free (1944), in the context of de Mille’s Broadway success and argue that he was at first imitative of her but ultimately found his voice and surpassed her in terms of success and output. The chapter includes analysis of selected Robbins’ choreography in what I consider the first phase of his Broadway career: On the Town (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945), High Button Shoes (1947), Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! (1948), Miss Liberty (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), and The King and I (1951). I explore how Robbins developed a system for creating dance in musicals that employed the early acting techniques of Constantin Stanislavski as well as Lee Strasberg’s Method Acting. Both techniques embraced theatrical realism and informed Robbins’ creation of dances that were seamlessly embedded into musical theater librettos. His meticulous attention to the where, when, and why of his dance creations and his comic sensibility established a model for the generations of choreographers that followed him.