Black & Blue Ballet

Troops at camps around Manhattan will shortly have a taste of the ballet. They may very likely enjoy it, for they will see nothing dainty or esthetical in Fancy Free, the surprise hit of Manhattan's booming ballet season. It is as lusty a piece of knockabout vaudeville as could be found in the hey-heyday of B. F. Keith.

Ballets that aim to be folksy stuff often manage to be coy, condescending, phony. But Fancy Free is as genuinely native as a buck-&-wing on a xylophone. Three bored sailors tank up and pursue three slick chicks. Some of the action is more like expert pantomime than dancing. The pantomime is often nearly as funny as that of the late great Joe Jackson, the Tramp Bicyclist. The dancing is superb --acrobatic, "specialty," rumba, softshoe, adagio, eccentric, jitterbugging, knee-drops, slapstick, and a violent, half-hidden free-for-all on the floor behind the bar. Fancy Free's success has its 25-year-old choreographer in a state of amaze. Sharp-faced pint-sized Jerome Robbins a dancer with the Ballet Theatre since 1940, is featured in his own ballet together with Janet Reed. Born Jerome Rabinowitz, Robbins grew up in Weehawken, N.J., was in & out of little dance groups for six years without getting anywhere. He started plotting Fancy Free last June, got the New York Philharmonic's 25-year-old assistant conductor Leonard Bernstein to do the music. Now Hollywood and Broadway will not let Robbins alone. Says he, the son of a corset manufacturer: "Who am I? Just a guy from Weehawken, and all of a sudden--boom!"

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