A rehearsal pianist is vamping the same eight bars for the ninth time, the floor is taped in colours nobody outside the room can read, and Jerome Robbins is standing very still at the front deciding something. Born in New York in 1918. He wanted dancers in character in the wings, not just onstage — you came off, you kept being whoever you were, you didn't drop it to find your water bottle. People who worked for him say it was exhausting. I believe them.
Cut to the screen: the gang in the playground, the bottle dance, sailors on leave with nineteen hours to spend. I've run West Side Story more times than I can count and from the fourth row you can still see it in the bodies at the back of the frame, the ones nobody's looking at, still in it. That's the thing the discipline bought. He died in 1998, and the work's still doing its job in rooms with taped floors.
He walked out of that Oscar night in 1962 with two — the directing one shared with Robert Wise, and an honorary one for the choreography. Taped floors to a double handful in one evening.
Tevye was a Yiddish bookseller's staple long before any taped floor — Sholem Aleichem wrote those stories over about twenty years from the 1890s, a milkman talking at you, arguing with God in the middle of a sentence. I have two copies; one was loved.