When Jerome Robbins died on July 29, 1998, at
the age of seventy-nine, the world lost not one choreographer,
but two. One of these choreographers was a genius.

This was the Jerome Robbins who
choreographed thirteen Broadway shows—leg-
end among
them On the Town, The King and I, Peter Pan,
Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof. This was the
Robbins who conceived, directed, and choreographed
West Side Story, the musical and film phenomenon
that had every baby-boomer boy in America
attempting that chesty Jets leap, that T (for
testosterone) in the air. And this was the Robbins of Fancy
Free, a ballet whose character—
down-to-earth, free of
classical pretensions is captured forever in its title.

In fact, Fancy Free was Robbins’s birth cry, his
c’est moi. Though he studied widely–modern
dance, ethnic, and ballet in the 1930s—and had worked
with the Yiddish Art Theater, it was in this comic ballet
about three sailors on leave that he burst upon the
scene complete, with a choreographic voice so clear
and confident, so cut-to-the-chase concise that you’d
never guess it was a first anything. Writing of Fancy
Free’s 1944 premiere at American Ballet Theatre,
the critic Edwin Denby said of the smash hit, “Its sentiment
of how people live in this country is completely
intelligent and completely realistic.” More importantly,
“The whole number is as sound as a superb vaudeville
turn; in ballet terminology it is perfect