Bringing Jerome Robbins’ Broadway Home to City Ballet

NEW YORK — Warren Carlyle was leaping around, more or less in one spot. He was also singing along to the music of a number of storied musicals being showcased in the new work he was putting together for New York City Ballet, drawn from shows that Jerome Robbins had choreographed for Broadway.

“Corner! Left foot! Where are your eyes, men? Amazing! Yes!” he shouted as the dancers ran through the work as it was choreographed thus far.

Which was quite far at this winter rehearsal. As the dancers got to the end, Carlyle stopped them. “I promise I’ll choreograph the finale one day,” he said.

The new piece, “Something to Dance About,” made up of extracts from nine Robbins musicals, will have its premiere at City Ballet’s spring gala Thursday as part of the company’s “Robbins 100” celebrations. Robbins, who moved confidently between ballet and Broadway, was the creator of limpidly beautiful pure-dance ballets like “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Dances at a Gathering” — and also the choreographer of household-name musicals like “The King and I,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“Yes, Broadway dancers can do all this perfectly,” Tiler Peck, a City Ballet principal who has performed in musicals, said of the numbers from his shows. “But we are celebrating Robbins in all his aspects, and if we don’t include this part of his work, we aren’t celebrating him to the fullest.”

It was Peter Martins, then City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, who approached Carlyle about creating a work for the Robbins centennial. Robbins, who directed City Ballet with Martins from 1983 to 1989, created “West Side Story Suite” for the company in 1995 but had dismissed the idea of City Ballet’s performing a broader selection from his musicals, floated by Martins after seeing “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.” “I had said yes to him before he had finished the sentence,” Carlyle said of being asked by Martins to make a Robbins compilation. “I trained as a classical dancer, I live on 72nd Street, I go to the ballet all the time and am a huge fan of City Ballet.”

The British-born Carlyle, 46, started tap dance classes when he was 10, then moved on to ballet and jazz, and won a scholarship to the Bush Davies School of Theater Arts when he was 16. After graduating, he danced in several West End shows and began working as an assistant choreographer to notable British musical theater figures like Gillian Lynne and Arlene Phillips.

He came to the United States in 2000, to assist Susan Stroman on “The Producers,” and never left. “I was eager to choreograph, to learn,” he said, “and this was the place to learn about musical theater.”

He went on to direct and create dances for several Broadway musicals, including a revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” and “After Midnight,” for which he won a Tony Award.

Carlyle said he knew most of the Robbins musicals fairly well, but after accepting the City Ballet commission, he did more research. “'Fiddler on the Roof,’ ‘Gypsy,’ ‘West Side Story,’ ‘On the Town’ — these works are all big deals and have remained so,” Carlyle said. “But I wanted to find less-known pieces, like the ice-skating section from ‘The King and I,’ or the song ‘Mr. Monotony’ from ‘Miss Liberty.'”

The choreography for that song, Carlyle wrote in an email, was cut from that 1949 production, then from the 1950 “Call Me Madam,” where Robbins tried it again.

It was finally included in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.” Carlyle has also included parts of “Billion Dollar Baby,” “Funny Girl” and “Peter Pan.” (The 124 costumes — each performer wears an average of six — are designed by Toni-Leslie James, based on original outfits from each show.)

Carlyle said he had tried to put in as little of his own choreography as possible. “My role is to celebrate Jerome Robbins,” he said, adding that he had to create transitions between sections and choreography where some of the Robbins material has been lost.

One of the lost fragments is the Times Square ballet from “On the Town,” which Carlyle has used in the finale, in what he described as a “mashup of choreography.”

Although he initially thought the dancers would sing, as they do in “West Side Story Suite,” Carlyle said he abandoned that idea, deciding the work would be better served by one singer — Jessica Vosk, this season — who would lead the audience through the work.

His one regret, he said, was not incorporating the flying sequences from “Peter Pan.” “I desperately wanted them to fly; it’s an expression of dance that I wanted to communicate, but it needed a giant flying rig, which you can’t tour with,” he explained. “So we start with a tiny fragment of the musical, to conjure a special place, a fertile place, the place of Jerry’s imagination. We invite the audience to Neverland.”

Creating the work at City Ballet was a much freer experience than choreographing on Broadway, he said. “There you are presenting choreography every day to a producer or director. Here you are able to test drive ideas for a few days to see if they work.”

That was clear in rehearsal, as Carlyle tried out different ideas for the finale, using the song “America” from “West Side Story” and a section from “Fiddler.” “Here is a group of beautiful strong immigrant women, and some strong immigrant men,” he said, with a laugh.

Carlyle stressed that the point of the work was not to show his own choreographic prowess but to “look up” at Robbins.

“It’s like I’m putting the diamond in its setting,” he said. “I’m just making the band to hold it.”