Review: An Aching Ode to Jerome Robbins’s Lost New York

I want to add that Ambassador Sanz-Briz a Spanish diplomat in 1944 saved 280 Sephardic Jews and those with Spanish relations in Budapest Hungary with passports along with safe conducts to 1698 Ashkenazi Jews . He paid for safe houses and food and medicine out of his personal funds. I attended his tribute in 2000 in a synagogue and the UN also gave him recognition. On August 21 he signed a protest along with representatives from Portugal, Switzerland and Swedent and the Holy See to Minister of Foreign Affairs in Hungary. He received Righteous amng nations from Yad Vashem.

"But Mr. Peck is hardly the only 30-something nostalgic for a time when the city could still be a muse." So New York is no longer capable of being a muse for artists? Where do you find these critics? For what it's worth, There is plenty of art being created in and around New York that I find relevant and brilliant and beautiful. And for Mr. Farago to describe one of these creations as an irritating diversion, he betrays himself as someone incapable of adequately capturing what this city has become. This is a very poor quality for an art critic to have.

Constant and unsettling change is the leitmotif of any great city. Yes, the New York of Robbins and Bernstein, of the Abstract Expressionists, of the Fifth Avenue department stores; all gone, along with cheap rents of a city losing the dynamism of its port, its light manufacturing industry and by 1975, one-sixth of its 1945 population. But not all that many years later, just about twenty, it's growing and moving into a new phase, thanks to the energy and optimism of a new population. Is the creativity and energy of Lin-Manuel's HAMILTON in any way inferior to CALL ME MADAM and WEST SIDE STORY? And look to the re-birth of Brooklyn and new energy is the Bronx. A different city, stronger than it's ever been.

"The corporate vacancy of this subway boogie-woogie looks especially absurd after dancing through Robbins’s New York — which, to me, feels as far from today’s pacified, digitally isolated city as Troy or Babylon." NYC's epitaph, perfectly stated. Having grown up in a Manhattan rife with dance and rehearsal studios, OOB theatre, cafes, et al, midtown west now looks a high-rise ghost town, while my former West Village neighborhood has become a bohemian theme park for hedge fund managers.

I enjoyed the article, but just wanted to point out that Robbins and Mostel worked together on "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" a couple of years before "Fiddler on the Roof."

I've seen many Broadway musicals and West Side Story, in my eyes, has the best dancing in Broadway and movie history. Mr. Robbins also choreographed the original Fiddler on the Roof which was right up there too. The man was a genius.

Thanks for bringing to us at home this exhibition. I plan to view it. Jerome Robbins was a mid century force in modern dance theatre, ie West side story. I saw Justin Beck's recent work in Carousel on Broadway and I agree it was fine enhancement.

Thanks to Mr. Farago for calling our attention to this exhibit. I can’t wait to make a trip in to see it. Yes, Jerome Robbins was a quintessential New Yorker, and his love of the city is on view in so many of his ballets. These clips are great, but as much as I love Baryshnikov, I couldn’t help but notice the difference between a Russian-trained dancer trying to be carefree and the real New York deal, Robbins, loose-limbed and expansive like the city itself when he danced his own work. For an excellent biography of Robbins, check out Wendy Lesser’s “Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance” (2018), a slim volume that is a good accompaniment to this exhibit.

Although I was born and grew up in Maine and still live here 67 years later, I always had, and still have to this day, a very romantic image of New York City, exactly as portrayed here by Jerome Robbins. In grade school art classes, while everyone else was drawing farms and landscapes, I was always drawing skyscrapers and tugboats. Just saying the word "Manhattan" made me feel sophisticated. New York was the mysterious, Damon Runyon Guys-and-Dolls world of Times Square, the beatnik poets and folk singers of Greenwich Village, the canyons of Wall Street, the Hudson River piers and the steam escaping from the manholes on a cold winter day. To this day, the most beautiful single image of my life, better than Yellowstone or Yosemite, was the snowy Sunday afternoon I walked south down Fifth Avenue after dark and looked across Central Park through the falling snow and the bare, windswept trees at the ghostly, illuminated buildings of Essex House and Central Park South. It took my breath away. Even for those of us who don't live there, New York will always symbolize our restless and unceasing, upward-with-the-skyscrapers yearning for the beautiful and sublime in life.

I applaud Mr. Farago for this enjoyable, very evocative review. I only wish that the NYPL would create a digital version of this exhibit, so that those of us who live elsewhere in the country and don't have the opportunity or money to visit in person could still see it.

Thank you for this tribute to Jerome Robbins. He was part of the heart and soul of the post-war wave that defined culture in the second half of the 20th century. The "inadequate personalities" of the 1940s-- and there were quite a few-- became the deities of civilization a queer half-century later. And, thank you, Jason Farago, for your breath of fresh moral indignation in your coda.

Sigh. A rent of $165 a month for a floor-through. But then, compared with my parents' rent in 1947, when they married, and even long afterwards, it was a princely sum. Robbins must have been doing well, for all his complaining. The photos show a New York City I knew. They are not the only things lately that make me realize that time is short . . . .

Wonderful to see this. He actually looks happy!

"Some never forgave him for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee..." When I first read that sentence, I thought, He was an artist, not a fighter; expecting him to stand up to bullies is unfair. But is it? Sometimes you choose the fight, and other times the fight chooses you. It wasn't up to Robbins to defeat McCarthy, and delivering that punk's comeuppance would've been too much to hope for. But I wish Robbins had put up a better fight. The U.S. is in a mess now, in part because many decent people in so-called Red States are allowing the MAGA hat wearers to operate without pushback.