Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance

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About Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance

Product Description A portrait of the twentieth-century ballet and Broadway choreographer discusses his beginnings as a Broadway chorus boy, his early work in the 1940s with the Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet, and his achievements in such productions as West Side Story. 25,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly Jerome Robbins's story is as distinctively American as his choreography. Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Robbins (1918–1998) became a Broadway chorus boy in 1938 before joining Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet, ultimately dancing lead roles. Robbins also became one of the 20th century's most highly regarded choreographers, including for the 1957 Broadway hit West Side Story. Other Broadway successes include On the Town, The King and I and Peter Pan, and significant ballets such as Fancy Free, The Cage and Dances at a Gathering. With precision, lucidity and insight, Village Voice dance critic Jowitt ( Time and the Dancing Image) chronicles Robbins's extensive career, as well as his struggles with bisexuality, ambivalence about his Jewish heritage, and his decision to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s. Given unrestricted access to Robbins's personal and professional papers, Jowitt adds a new vulnerability and humanity to the legend: Robbins was infamous for his perfectionism, insecurity and temper. "I... still have terrible pangs of terror when I feel my career, work, veneer of accomplishments would be taken away," wrote the man who worked alongside Bernstein and Balanchine, "that I panicked & crumbled & returned to that primitive state of terror—the facade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and everyone would finally see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz." Both critically sophisticated and compulsively readable, this is a must for theater and dance devotees. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Director and choreographer Robbins was a complicated man--social and solitary, inspired and neurotic, brilliant and cruel. A giant in the worlds of theater and dance, he worked on many of the most successful Broadway shows of the 1950s and '60s, including The Pajama Game, The King and I, gypsy, and West Side Story, the last of which he conceived, nurtured, directed, and choreographed. While he won himself a place at the top of the American theater, he regularly created dances for American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet. The emotional cost to him was enormous. Stories abound of his terrifying tantrums and monstrous tongue-lashings. In recounting his life and work, longtime Village Voice dance critic Jowitt neither praises Robbins nor buries him. Instead, in a well-researched, well-written biography, she spreads Robbins' life before us: his relatively late start as a dancer, his rapid rise, his follies and foibles and moments of triumph. She doesn't sugarcoat her subject. Robbins named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, after all, thereby helping to destroy the careers of people who had helped him earlier. Yet she doesn't demonize him. Jack Helbig Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Deborah Jowitt is a Master Teacher in the Dance Department of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she has been since 1975. From The Washington Post While Jerome Robbins, who is best known for his conception, direction and choreography of "West Side Story," was widely and bitterly disliked, Deborah Jowitt gives only the slightest indication in this new full-length biography that he was not universally loved. There is nothing in this book that could possibly be said to do any fresh damage to Robbins's reputation or to the memory of his artistic achievements. He was undoubtedly one of the great American choreographers, even on the basis of his ba