The question Jerome Robbins used to bug his writers with all the time in rehearsal is the most basic one of all: What is this show about? And the place he wanted it answered was in the opening. On A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1963), audiences were thrown off by the period setting—the togas and the Latin—so he ordered up a curtain-raiser simply announcing that it’s meant to be funny—”Comedy Tonight”:
No Royal curse, no Trojan horse
And the gags that hadn’t worked the night before suddenly worked.
Gypsy (1959) opens at Uncle Jocko’s Kiddie Show in Seattle and a chaotic stageful of garishly costumed moppets lumbering through sad routines, until from the back of the auditorium a rasping voice yells, “Sing out, Louise!,” and Mama Rose comes barging down the aisle, effectively disrupting the opening of her own show. That’s a brilliant way of setting up time, place, and principal character all in a few bars. By contrast, for West Side Story (1957), Robbins opens with a wordless orchestral “Prologue,” as the Sharks and Jets dance their mutual hostility. It lays out the show’s symphonic and choreographic ambitions. If you’d started with song or dialogue and then introduced choreographed gang warfare forty minutes in, it’d seem silly and camp. But putting it up front lets you know this is the language of the drama.
Robbins never answered his nagging rehearsal question better than in his Broadway swansong, Fiddler on
