Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins - Paperback

by Amanda Vaill (Author)

The "fantastically interesting" (NPR's All Things Considered) biography of the legendary, intensely ambitious choreographer and director who changed Broadway with his productions of Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, and Gypsy--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pride and Pleasure

"Superlative . . . a vivid account of a theatrical wizard."--Vogue

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. 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. As a choreographer and director of ballets like Dances at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, and The Concert, he humanized neoclassical dance; with groundbreaking musicals like Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, and Gypsy, he changed the face of theater in America and exemplified the flowering of American art in the mid-twentieth century.

His personal and professional lives were equally provocative: a self-proclaimed homosexual, Robbins had relationships with both men and women, and at the height of anti-Communist hysteria, he was forced to testify before Congress. Somewhere places Jerome Robbins squarely in the cultural ferment of his time and native city.

Drawing on thousands of pages of documents to which Amanda Vaill 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 man's phenomenal career at a time when New York City was truly "a helluva town."

Front Jacket

Jerome Robbins (born Jerome Rabinowitz in 1918) was one of the most important figures in American dance and musical theater in the twentieth century. He was the Co-Artistic Director with George Balanchine of the fledgling New York City Ballet in 1948, bringing Broadway vernacular energy to complement Balanchine's austere classicism and choreographing such classic ballets as "Facsimile, "Dance at a Gathering, and "Afternoon of a Faun. His ballet to a score by Leonard Bernstein, "Fancy Free, electrified the dance world and would transmogrify into the immortal musical "On the Town. On Broadway, he choreographed "The King and I, "The Pajama Game, "Bells Are Ringing, and "Peter Pan, and choreographed and directed "West Side Story--probably his most enduring achievement. In his private life he was an ambivalent, semi-closeted homosexual and his cooperation with the McCarthy committee during the witch-hunts of the 1950s estranged him from many of his closest friends. He was an artistic giant whose life embodied many of the tensions and contradictions of the American century. He exemplified, in his life no less than his work, the flowering of American in the mid-twentieth century -in particular the emergence of New York as the capital of world culture.
"Somewhere by Amanda Vaill is the first and only book with access to the Robbins papers, a voluminous collection of letters, diaries, notebooks, memos, and production notes that form an unrivaled archive of a singular man's life and a singular moment in our cultural history. Supremely accomplished and entertaining, it not only chronicles Robbins's phenomenal career and plumbs his complex private life but will place him squarely in thecultural ferment of his time and his native city. It explains the tangle of contradictions that made him such an infuriating, fascinating, oddly vulnerable human being and such a protean creative figure, and offers a densely populated narrative that will draw readers in and along. "Somewhere is a major biography of a true entertainment legend.

Author Biography

Amanda Vaill is the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pride and Pleasure, Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in biography, and Somewhere, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. A publisher and editor for more than twenty years, she has written on arts and culture for New York, Esquire, Ballet Review, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and other publications. She lives in New York City.