DANCE: JEROME ROBBINS: WEST SIDE GLORY

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For at least the 10th time in 38 years, Jerome Robbins is returning to West Side Story. It was the great showman's most brilliant idea, resetting Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet among teenage street gangs in the 1950s. Slang may change and violence levels escalate, but the drama of the star-crossed city kids has never dated, nor has its appeal diminished. For the choreographer, now 76, the show has become a personal rite of renewal. Last week he renewed it once more, this time as a suite of dances for the New York City Ballet.

It is the first time West Side Story has been onstage strictly as a dance work, and the result is an exuberant show that highlights bravura male dancing -- rumble as ritual. It is also an unusual meeting of Broadway and ballet. Robbins personally led rehearsals. Watching as the ballet -- disciplined dancers grappled with an approach to movement that is at once more emphatic and more personal than what they know, he commented, "Dancers I meet keep telling me, 'That play is the reason why I'm in the theater.' It's nice."

It all began in the early '50s, when an actor friend was preparing for the part of Romeo. Finding the character too passive, he asked Robbins if he had any clues about how to bring it alive. "I tried to imagine Shakespeare's story in terms of today," says Robbins, "and that clicked in." The click came right out of the daily headlines: the term "juvenile delinquent" was a hot handle in sociospeak, and street gangs were getting the kind of attention that drive-by shootings do now.

Robbins quickly found himself some inspired collaborators: composer Leonard Bernstein and scenarist Arthur Laurents (Stephen Sondheim, in his first major musical credit, joined as librettist later). There were some stumbles: originally the pavement warriors were Jews and Catholics, but that reminded Laurents too much of Abie's Irish Rose. Puerto Ricans, who moved to New York City in great numbers after World War II, became the antagonists, squaring off against a gang of melting-pot whites.

West Side Story opened on Broadway in September 1957 to a somewhat baffled critical reception. What to make of a musical that was a tragedy, though with harshly comic moments; that told its tale largely through dance; that featured a backdrop of fire escapes instead of a stairway to paradise? Audiences had no such confusion, and the show has been running-in one place or another-practically ever since. The movie came out in 1961, and in 1989 most of the dances were gathered into Jerome Robbins' Broadway, where they were the strongest and least dated element in the show.

The notion of adapting the material for ballet performers is not new. Robbins was approached by American Ballet Theatre some 20 years ago, but because he was ballet master at the rival City Ballet, he first went to its guru, George Balanchine, for his approval. "Fine," he said, "because our boys don't fight." The idea never came to fruition, but Balanchine's remark was telling. Ballet dancers are trained to do what they are told. Their acting is mostly pantomime. Here they faced something new. "Broadway dancers are expected to take risks," says Robert LaFosse, who stars in West Side Story Suite, as he did in Jerome Robbins' Broadway. "These ballet kids may be learning to think for themselves for the first time."