'Something to Dance About': A Master's Life, With Missteps

"Great artists are not great saints," says one observer, talking about Jerome Robbins in an elegant, first-ever documentary about the famously hot-tempered Broadway hitmaker. True, Robbins was no great saint. He wasn't even a lousy saint. He was a man of unaccountable contradictions. But with unexpected frankness and affectionate insight, "Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About," airing tonight at 9 on Channel 26, brings us tantalizingly close to one of the great creative minds and enduring psychological mysteries of 20th-century America.

The performing arts have never seen such a multifaceted visionary as Robbins, a man who reinvented one art form -- the Broadway musical -- while simultaneously excelling in another, the elite ranks of classical ballet. With the innovative, urban-reality "West Side Story," as well as "Gypsy," "Peter Pan" and "Fiddler on the Roof," he created some of Broadway's most beloved and enduring smashes -- and made himself a very rich man besides.

But Robbins was equally productive at the high-culture New York City Ballet, his other home when he wasn't deploying phalanxes of sneakers and fishnets. There, he toiled alongside George Balanchine and produced sophisticated, sexy and stylish ballets, among them "Dances at a Gathering," "In the Night," "Glass Pieces."

It wasn't so much that he could go high or low; Robbins, who died in 1998, worked in a high-middle range in both arenas. He brought the rigor and perfectionism of ballet into commercial theater, and transferred the storytelling and showmanship of Broadway onto the concert stage. You'll see both worlds evoked in sumptuous detail in "Something to Dance About." The two-hour documentary, part of the "American Masters" series, is the work of a Robbins dream team. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Judy Kinberg, a veteran of the "Dance in America" series, directed and produced it in honor of what would have been Robbins's 90th birthday last year. Among the dozens interviewed are such luminaries as playwright Arthur Laurents, songwriter Stephen Sondheim and dancers Chita Rivera and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

There is precious footage of Robbins himself, self-effacing, confessional and thoroughly charming. Others are more blunt.

"He could be a really mean and awful man," says Sondheim, the "West Side Story" lyricist. "But the end product is worth it. . . . Some of his invention rubs off on you. You get more inventive when you work with Jerry Robbins."

But "Something to Dance About" feels incomplete on the most dramatic period of Robbins's life, when his shooting star intersected with the intellectual brutality of the McCarthy era. Why did Robbins -- the son of Jewish immigrants, the man who integrated Broadway, whose talent lay in finding brilliant new ways to tell the stories of ordinary people -- why did this man stand before the McCarthy inquisitors and rat out his colleagues?

Robbins was the child of corsetmakers, and no poet could come up with more symbolic origins for a man so tightly bound by cultural, sexual and political constraints. He wrestled with his background, changing his name from Rabinowitz. He tried to keep his homosexuality secret. And under subpoena, he came forward to denounce his youthful involvement with the Communist Party.

"Something to Dance About" leads us straightforwardly through the conventional reason for why Robbins divulged the names of eight associates to the House Un-American Activities Committee. According to colleagues, and his own writings, he was afraid of being outed. Robbins had his sights set on Hollywood, and in the documentary's view, naming names was a painful but necessary bit of self-protection.

As one historian says in the show, one can't sit in easy judgment of Robbins's actions in those paranoid times. But the fear-of-outing argument doesn't feel strong enough in view of other aspects of his life. However you want to parse that reasoning -- the result of feeling victimized, taking the easy way out -- those are hardly traits you'd otherwise apply to Robbins. His assertiveness in the rehearsal studio is legendary. "He would pull the flesh right off your bones," says dancer Helen Gallagher. "He was mean as a snake!" And at one point he walked away from the money and success of Broadway for the endless anxiety of working with Balanchine, to whom he felt he could never measure up.

Part of the tragedy of Robbins's HUAC testimony is that Hollywood success didn't happen for him after all. He was fired from the movie set of "West Side Story" before the film was finished; he was taking too long to stage the dances. Still, he screened a rough cut and gave pages of notes to the director, and in one of the documentary's most poignant passages, he is heard making anguished comments about the too-tepid "Dance at the Gym" scene. Dancer Rita Moreno acknowledges it was the one part of the movie that failed, because Robbins wasn't there to hone the drama of it.

"I do not care about the choreography," he scolds on the recording, "as long as the story is clearly told." Story was everything to Robbins, it was his genius and his gift. His own story, however, we'll never know as fully. The man put what he could into his dances, and the rest he kept locked up inside.

Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About (two hours) airs tonight at 9 on Channel 26.