Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins

About this book

From the author of the acclaimed Everybody Was So Young the definitive and major biography of the great choreographer and Broadway legend Jerome Robbins To some Jerome Robbins was a demanding perfectionist a driven taskmaster a theatrical visionary; to others he was a loyal friend a supportive mentor a generous and entertaining companion and colleague. Born Jerome Rabinowitz in New York City in 1918 Jerome Robbins repudiated his Jewish roots along with his name only to reclaim them with his triumphant staging of Fiddler on the Roof. A self-proclaimed homosexual he had romances or relationships with both men and women some famouslike Montgomery Clift and Natalie Woodsome less so. A resolutely unpolitical man he was forced to testify before Congress at the height of anti-Communist hysteria. A consummate entertainer he could be paralyzed by shyness; nearly infallible professionally he was conflicted vulnerable and torn by self-doubt. Guarded and adamantly private he was an inveterate and painfully honest journal writer who confided his innermost thoughts and aspirations to a remarkable series of diaries and memoirs. With ballets like Dances at a Gathering Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert he humanized neoclassical dance; with musicals like On the Town Gypsy and West Side Story he changed the face of theater in America. In the pages of this definitive biography Amanda Vaill takes full measure of the complicated contradictory genius who was Jerome Robbins. She re-creates his childhood as the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants; his apprenticeship as a dancer and Broadway chorus gypsy; his explosion into prominence at the age of twenty-five with the ballet Fancy Free and its Broadway incarnation On the Town; and his years of creative dominance in both theater and dance. She brings to life his colleagues and friendsfrom Leonard Bernstein and George Balanchine to Robert Wilson and Robert Gravesand his loves and lovers. And she tells the full story behind some of Robbinss most difficult episodes such as his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his firing from the film version of West Side Story. Drawing on thousands of pages of documents from Robbinss personal and professional papers to which she was granted unfettered access as well as on other archives and hundreds of interviews Somewhere is a riveting narrative of a life lived onstage offstage and backstage. It is also an accomplished work of criticism and social history that chronicles one mans phenomenal career and places it squarely in the cultural ferment of a time when New York City was truly a helluva town.