WEST SIDE GLORY

By Martha Duffy

For at least the 10th time in 38 years, Jerome Robbins is returning to West Side Story. It was the great showman's most brilliant idea, resetting Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet among teenage street gangs in the 1950s. Slang may change and violence levels escalate, but the drama of the star-crossed city kids has never dated, nor has its appeal diminished. For the choreographer, now 76, the show has become a personal rite of renewal. Last week he renewed it once more, this time as a suite of dances for the New York City Ballet.

It is the first time West Side Story has been onstage strictly as a dance work, and the result is an exuberant show that highlights bravura male dancing -- rumble as ritual. It is also an unusual meeting of Broadway and ballet. Robbins personally led rehearsals. Watching as the ballet -- disciplined dancers grappled with an approach to movement that is at once more emphatic and more personal than what they know, he commented, "Dancers I meet keep telling me, 'That play is the reason why I'm in the theater.' It's nice."

It all began in the early '50s, when an actor friend was preparing for the part of Romeo. Finding the character too passive, he asked Robbins if he had any clues about how to bring it alive. "I tried to imagine Shakespeare's story in terms of today," says Robbins, "and that clicked in." The click came right out of the daily headlines: the term "juvenile delinquent" was a hot handle in sociospeak, and street gangs were getting the kind of attention that drive-by shootings do now.

Robbins quickly found himself some inspired collaborators: composer Leonard Bernstein and scenarist Arthur Laurents (Stephen Sondheim, in his first major musical credit, joined as librettist later). There were some stumbles: originally the pavement warriors were Jews and Catholics, but that reminded Laurents too much of Abie's Irish Rose. Puerto Ricans, who moved to New York City in great numbers after World War II, became the antagonists, squaring off against a gang of melting-pot whites.

West Side Story opened on Broadway in September 1957 to a somewhat baffled critical reception. What to make of a musical that was a tragedy, though with harshly comic moments; that told its tale largely through dance; that featured a backdrop of fire escapes instead of a stairway to paradise? Audiences had no such confusion, and the show has been running-in one place or another-practically ever since. The movie came out in 1961, and in 1989 most of the dances were gathered into Jerome Robbins' Broadway, where they were the strongest and least dated element in the show.

The notion of adapting the material for ballet performers is not new. Robbins was approached by American Ballet Theatre some 20 years ago, but because he was ballet master at the rival City Ballet, he first went to its guru, George Balanchine, for his approval. "Fine," he said, "because our boys don't fight." The idea never came to fruition, but Balanchine's remark was telling. Ballet dancers are trained to do what they are told. Their acting is mostly pantomime. Here they faced something new. "Broadway dancers are expected to take risks," says Robert LaFosse, who stars in West Side Story Suite, as he did in Jerome Robbins' Broadway. "These ballet kids may be learning to think for themselves for the first time."

To accomplish this, Robbins doubled as a history teacher, explaining about the old days when the knife, not the gun, was the weapon of choice; the importance of territorial boundaries to young people who have nothing; even differences in vocabulary. "To these kids, 'cool' means hip," he notes. "Back then it meant calm down, or 'cool it.' "

Jean-Pierre Frohlich, an assistant ballet master who has worked with Robbins often, says that to make the dancers think in terms of character, Robbins had them construct a biography for each one. The women reveled in the costumes. At rehearsal, they twirled around in the swing skirts popular in the '50s, getting the feel of cinched waists and ruffles-very different from the Ts and minis of today.

Singing is essential, even in this suite of dances. Robbins chose to go two ways, and the result is surprisingly smooth. For some numbers he uses singers in the pit. But six of the female dancers also do a rousing version of America, and principal Nikolaj Hubbe, a Danish import who plays the leader of the Jets, belts out Cool, even though he has never had a singing lesson. He says modestly, "You have less of an accent when you are singing."

The suite has a different impact than the full musical play. Partly because years of intensive training cannot be fully expunged from the dancers, partly because details of personality are lost as the action is streamlined, the conflict becomes more abstract. Officer Krupke is a police whistle. The dancers' gestures should be forceful and realistic, but some of the performers, including Jock Soto as the Shark leader, are too stylized. Occasionally what should be a fight becomes a rite.

The suite contains one passage of new choreography-for LaFosse, as Tony, to Something's Coming. It is a buoyant, flying solo. Darting in all directions, trying out the paths his life might take, LaFosse again shows he is an ideal Robbins dancer, whether on Broadway or in ballet. The other standout is Nancy Ticotin, who plays Anita, Chita Rivera's role in the original production. A Broadway gypsy diva, Ticotin gives an all-out, earthy performance.

West Side Story Suite culminates a resurgence of Robbins' creativity. From the late '80s, when he was preparing Jerome Robbins' Broadway, until 1994, little was heard from him. Then he created a suite of dances to Bach cello music for Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had persuaded him back into the studio. Said Robbins at the time: "It was a real do-or-die thing for me." Still caught up by Bach, he adapted several two- and three-part inventions for students at the School of American Ballet. Working with people "at the beginning of life" restored his energy. Now 2 & 3 Part Inventions, a work of elysian balance and serenity, is performed at N.Y.C.B.

Robbins' latest rumble is giving ballet a much needed shot in the box office. May and June are the high season for dance, especially in New York, with both big national companies, N.Y.C.B. and A.B.T., performing. But stretches of empty seats remain in both houses this year. The performances of West Side Story Suite, however, were virtually sold out well before opening night. Brave new works are in very short supply in the '90s. West Side Story Suite is new, but the material is not, nor is it strictly ballet. But it brings some boldness and vivacity to an art that needs it.