After Balanchine’s death, it was Peter Martins who assumed direction of the company, and in 1987 Robbins ricocheted back to showbiz with a glitzy cavalcade of a retrospective called Jerome Robbins’ Broadway which canonised the work he had done on musicals from On the Town to Fiddler on the Roof. But there were new kids on the block, and in the light of Michael Bennett’s brilliantly hard-edged A Chorus Line Robbins’ cheerful, athletic folksiness had come to seem somewhat passé — fodder for the bridge-and-tunnel crowds rather than the cutting edge.
The onset of Parkinson’s and prostate cancer, as well as the encircling ravages of Aids, did little to dent his energy. In his last years, he made a suite of dances from West Side Story for New York City Ballet, a satisfying marriage of the two sides of his creative personality, and three months before his death in 1998, at the age of 80, he was still rehearsing a revival of his version of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. It’s not a conception that quite works — and it certainly isn’t in the class of Nijinska’s original. The Russian peasants, as Vaill observes, ‘seem like the Jets and Sharks’, and Robbins can’t resist softening the ritual ferocity and impersonality with a suggestion of romantic love. But it was on precisely that combination of hard shell and soft centre that he had made his reputation — and his life too.
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