Jerome Robbins was one of the great directors in the history of musical theater. Even people who had good and sufficient reason to detest him as a human being admired his prowess as a director. In 1989, as one of his final contributions to his art, he supervised the creation of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, a show comprised of scenes from his many shows.
It made for quite a wonderful evening in the theater and I always wondered why it didn't have a longer run — only 633 performances in New York, plus a touring company that I saw in L.A. At the time, Las Vegas was experimenting with the importation of Broadway hits and I thought it would be an ideal show for that town. It was full of familiar material — some of it a bit sexy — and it could be cut to almost any length by dropping this or that number. Perhaps there was a large nut involved in obtaining all the rights. In his autobiography, Arthur Laurents — who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story — told of Robbins, with whom he did not get along when those shows were produced, having to come to him years later and humbly ask for permission to include scenes from them in the compilation. No doubt some of the authors took the opportunity to settle old personal issues with Robbins, but some probably demanded hefty sums.
Our clip today is a five minute sampler from Jerome Robbins' Broadway, which had a pretty good cast. If you look fast, you'll see Jason Alexander playing Pseudolus in the "Comedy Tonight" number from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and I think that's Charlotte D'Amboise as Peter Pan. I'm not sure why this little montage was assembled but I'm glad someone put it together.
