No other creative figure of the latter twentieth century was as contradictory as Jerome Robbins, and few were as controversial.  He was a master of the Broadway musical, transforming its possibilities with such works as West Side Story, Gypsy, and Peter Pan, and was one of the greatest ballet choreographers this country has ever produced.

Thirteen/WNET’s AMERICAN MASTERS profiles this complex mid-century artist in Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, premiering February 18, 2009 on PBS (check local listings). Directed and produced by six-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Judy Kinberg and written by best-selling Robbins biographer Amanda Vaill, the two-hour film is narrated by Ron Rifkin (Brothers & Sisters), who performed the roles of both Robbins and his father in a workshop production of the director/choreographer’s theatrical autobiography, The Poppa Piece.  This first and only documentary on Robbins features excerpts from his personal journals, archival performance footage, and never-before-seen rehearsal recordings, as well as interviews with Robbins himself and over forty witnesses – among them Mikhail Baryshnikov; Jacques d’Amboise; Suzanne Farrell; Arthur Laurents; Peter Martins; Frank Rich; Chita Rivera; Stephen Sondheim; and Robbins’ Fiddler collaborators Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein.

“Robbins’ remarkable body of work forever redefined dance and musical theater for a contemporary audience,” says Susan Lacy, Creator and Executive Producer of WNET’s AMERICAN MASTERS, a five-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series.  “The revival of West Side Story on Broadway this winter just validates his lasting importance, his lasting impression. We are thrilled to air this film in tribute to Robbin’ genius, celebrating the 90th anniversary of his birth.”

“Night and Day,” “I Get A Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Begin the Beguine,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” — some of the cleverest, funniest, and most romantic songs ever written came from the pen of Cole Porter. He was unmatched as a tunesmith, and his Broadway musicals — from “Kiss Me Kate” and “Anything Goes” to “Silk Stockings” and “Can Can” — set the standards of style and wit to which today’s composers and lyricists aspire.

Born in Peru, Indiana in 1891, Porter studied music from an early age, and began composing as a teenager. After high school he attended Yale University, where he was voted “most entertaining man.” Though he went on to law school at Harvard University, his interest remained in music. From Harvard he continued to write, and a number of his pieces were used in Broadway musicals.

In 1916, his first full score was performed. The musical, “See America First”, was a flop and closed after only fifteen performances. He soon began to travel around Europe and got an apartment in Paris. This was the beginning of his life long affection for the city, which he would return to in songs such as “You Don’t Know Paree” and “I Love Paris.” During his time abroad Porter contributed to many musicals including “Hitchy-Koo” and the “Greenwich Village Follies”. It wasn’t, however, until his song “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love” appeared in the 1928 musical Paris, that he had his first big hit.

A contemporary of George Gershwin, Richard Rogers and Jerome Kern, Porter broke from the simple sentimentality that dominated Tin Pan Alley. His urbane wit and musical complexity won him the affection of the nation. Songs such as “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “I Get A Kick Out of You,” and “Too Darn Hot,” became instant hits and have remained classics. While his name was associated with many of these upbeat show toons, a more melancholy side could be seen in such wonderful songs as “Miss Otis Regrets” and “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.”

Despite a horseback riding accident in 1937 that crippled him for life, Porter produced much of his best work in the 1940s and 50s. He wrote hundreds of songs for dozens of Broadway shows, movie musicals, and television specials. His most successful musical, “Kiss Me Kate”, opened in 1948 and ran for over a thousand performances. A recluse in his later years, Porter died in California in 1964. Today his legacy lives on in productions of his musicals and in recordings of artists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne.

Connected Artists:

Martha Graham

Greenwich Village

Related Web sites:

Official Site

The Great Sophisticate

Cole Porter Reference Guide

Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity. O’Neill’s disdain for the commercial realities of the theater world he was born into led him to produce works of importance and integrity.

Born in a hotel on Broadway in 1888, Eugene O’Neill was the son of Ella Quinlan and the actor James O’Neill. Eugene spent the first seven years of his life touring with his father’s theater company. These years introduced O’Neill to the world of theater and the difficulties of maintaining artistic integrity. His father, once a well-known Shakespearean, had taken a role in a lesser play for its sizable salary.

O’Neill spent the next seven years receiving a strict Catholic education before attending a private secular school in Connecticut. Though a bright student, he was already caught up in a world of alcohol and prostitutes by the time he entered college. He eventually dropped out before finishing his first year at Princeton University. Though he would later enroll in a short class in playwriting at Harvard, this was the end of his formal education. After leaving Princeton, O’Neill moved to New York, where he spent most of his time drinking and carousing with his older brother.

In 1910 he fell in love with and married the first of three wives, Kathleen Jenkins. Soon after, however, O’Neill left his wife for the adventures of traveling. In Honduras he contracted Malaria, and returned to find Kathleen pregnant with his child. Without seeing the boy (Eugene O’Neill, Jr.), O’Neill shipped out again, this time for Buenos Aires, and later for England. In 1912, Kathleen filed for divorce and soon after, plagued by illness, O’Neill returned to his parents’ home. It was there among the turmoil of a despondent father and a morphine-addicted mother that he decided to become a playwright.

O’Neill spent the next five years working primarily on one-act plays. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and with her had two children, Shane and Oona. He continued to publish and produce his one-acts, but it was not until his play “Beyond the Horizon” (1920), that American audiences responded to his genius. The play won the first of three Pulitzer Prizes for O’Neill. Many saw in this early work a first step toward a more serious American theater. O’Neill’s poetic dialogue and insightful views into the lives of the characters held his work apart from the less sober playwriting of the day.

Following the success of “Beyond the Horizon”, O’Neill went into an incredibly productive period, writing many of his greatest plays. “The Emperor Jones” (1920) and “The Hairy Ape” (1922) follow the lives of two men through personal struggles and their search for identity. Received well, these two established O’Neill as a master of the craft. The times, however, were fraught with turmoil—seeing the death of O’Neill’s father, mother, and brother, as well as the break-up of his marriage.

Despite (or because) of these tragedies, he went on to create a number of penetrating and insightful views into family life and struggle. With plays such as “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) and “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931), O’Neill uses the moral and physical entanglements similar to Greek drama to express the complexities of family life. Throughout much of the 1930s and 1940s, O’Neill continued in this vein working on a cycle of plays (nine) which would deal with lives of a New England family. Concerned that they might be altered after his death, O’Neill eventually destroyed the manuscripts, accidentally leaving behind only one, “A Touch of the Poet.”

O’Neill’s final years were spent estranged from much of the literary community and his family. Though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936, most of his later works were not produced until after his death. His failing health did not prevent him, however, from writing two of the greatest works the American stage has ever seen. Both “The Iceman Cometh”, a story of personal desperation in the lives a handful of barflys, and “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” a view into the difficult family life of his early years, were profound insights into many of the darker questions of human existence. Produced posthumously, these were to be his two greatest achievements. By the time of his death in 1953, O’Neill was considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

Neil Simon is the world’s most successful playwright. He has had dozens of plays and nearly as many major motion pictures produced. He has been showered with more Academy and Tony nominations than any other writer, and is the only playwright to have four Broadway productions running simultaneously. His plays have been produced in dozens of languages, and have been blockbuster hits from Beijing to Moscow. His true success, however, is in his unique way of exposing something real in the American spirit.

Born in the Bronx on July 4, 1927, Marvin Neil Simon grew up in Manhattan and for a short time attended NYU and the University of Denver. His most significant writing job came in the early 1950s when he joined the staff of YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS, a landmark live television comedy series. Sid Caesar’s hilariously cutting-edge program had some of the best comic minds in television working for it, including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Carl Reiner. “I knew,” said Simon, “when I walked INTO YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS, that this was the most talented group of writers that up until that time had ever been assembled together.” By the 1960s, Simon had begun to concentrate on writing plays for Broadway. His first hit came in 1961 with “Come Blow Your Horn,” and was soon after followed by the very successful comic romance “Barefoot in the Park.”

Simon’s brother, Danny, who also worked on YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS, played a major role in his writing. Eight and a half years older, Danny brought Simon into the business and had shown him the ropes. In fact, it was Danny who provided the inspiration for one of Simon’s most enduring hits. After his divorce, Danny moved in with another divorced man, and this situation became the set-up for “The Odd Couple” (1966). Though Danny had begun writing the story himself, he reached a block and eventually handed it off to Simon who soon made it a smash on Broadway. Starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, the 1968 film version was equally successful and prompted a popular television series.

By 1973, Simon was a major voice in contemporary comedy. But, that year he entered a low period in his life, when his wife of twenty years, died. Some time later, he met the actress Marsha Mason, and they were married. His 1977 play, Chapter Two, dramatizes the grief of a newly remarried man trying to start over after his wife has died. Chapter Two was considered one of his finest works and he followed it with a musical, They’re Playing Our Song.

Throughout his four-decade career, Simon has drawn extensively on his own life and experience for materials for his plays. Many of his works take place in the working-class New York neighborhoods he knew so well as a child. One of Simon’s great achievements has been the insightful representation of the social atmosphere of those times in New York. With his autobiographical trilogy, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983), “Biloxi Blues” (1985), and “Broadway Bound” (1986), Simon created a touching portrait of an individual, his family, and the world around them. With these plays, Simon found his greatest critical acclaim, and for his 1991 follow-up, “Lost in Yonkers,” Simon was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Neil Simon has for almost forty years invigorated the stage with touching stories and zany characters, but possibly his greatest contribution has been the ability to create humor from the lives and troubles of everyday people. Of Simon, actor Jack Lemmon said, “Neil has the ability to write characters — even the leading characters that we’re supposed to root for — that are absolutely flawed. They have foibles. They have faults. But, they are human beings. They are not all bad or all good; they are people we know.”

Considered the father of the screwball comedy, Preston Sturges was recognized as one of the great early writers in Hollywood. Sturges was born in 1898 in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Mary Desti, was an Irish immigrant with dreams of stardom. When Preston was still an infant, she left his father and later pursued a career as a singer. In Paris, she became close friends with Isadora Duncan and traveled with Duncan’s dance company, leaving Preston in the care of others. These early years would have a profound effect on Sturges, who grew up to be the most popular satirist of the high society of his day.

At age 16, Sturges began managing the American branch of a cosmetics company his mother had started in Paris. While there, he invented the first kiss-proof lipstick, and while his passion for invention would never subside, he joined the U.S. Army to fight during World War I. After the war he returned to New York, where he married his first wife, Estelle. In 1927, she divorced him and he went to Chicago where his adoptive father, Solomon Sturges, lived. Spurred on by the satiric writings of a girlfriend, Sturges first began to write. While in Chicago he wrote two plays for Broadway. Though the first was only mildly received, the second, “STRICTLY DISHONORABLE”, was a hit.

He met and married Eleanor Hutton. The marriage was rocky, however, and within a short time it was annulled. He wrote his last play, “CHILD OF MANHATTAN” in 1932. Broke and broken-hearted, he decided to try Hollywood. Writing for the stage had prepared him well to create the witty dialogue that the movie industry needed. His was a new sort of comedy, one that replaced physical slapstick with cunning conversations.

After working on an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “THE INVISIBLE MAN”, Sturges began to write a script of his own. “THE POWER AND THE GLORY”, written without any advance, brought Sturges the handsome sum of $17,500. Along with his payment came a percentage of the profits. Though common practice now, Sturges was one of the first writers to receive such an offer and it came with a great deal of attention and contention. Throughout the 30s, Sturges continued to write hit films including, “The Good Fairy” (1935), “DIAMOND JIM” (1935), and “IF I WERE KING” (1938). By the late 30s, he had become one of Hollywood’s most prolific and best paid writers.

Sturges, however, had been consistently dissatisfied with director’s interpretations of his work, and in 1939 convinced his employers, Paramount Pictures, to let him direct his own script. For the opportunity to direct, Sturges sold “THE GREAT MCGINTY”, his newest script, for $1. The film earned him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (the first time this award had been handed out). Sturges followed this by writing and directing a handful of other big hits including “CHRISTMAS IN JULY” (1940) and “THE LADY EVE” (1941). The success of these films set the precedent for other writers to become directors.

As Sturges’s career began to fade, however, he began drinking more heavily. His third wife left him in 1946 and took their son with her to Europe. In 1951, he married for the fourth and last time and produced two more sons. The restaurant he had opened years earlier shut down. After a flop and an unsuccessful partnership with Howard Hughes, Sturges slowly faded from the Hollywood scene.

Sturges spent the final years of his life in Europe and New York, writing and directing whenever he could find work. In New York, he lived at the Algonquin Hotel. There, he began work on his autobiography, “THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO MY DEATH.” He was only half-finished when he died of a heart attack at 60. Though his tenure in Hollywood was short and tempestuous, his legacy remains strong. Sturges will long be remembered for the complexity and sophistication he brought to some of the most inspired comedies ever made.