Jerome Robbins, by Himself: Selections from His Letters, Journals, Drawings, Photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir

Description

The gigantic choreographer, writer of memorable ballets, Grasp of Broadway musicals, mythical display physician and director, now discovered in his personal phrases–the nearest we can get to a memoir/autobiography–from his voluminous letters, journals, notes, diaries, by no means earlier than printed. Edited, and with statement through Amanda Vaill, writer of Robbins’s biography, Somewhere, 2006 (“I will be able to’t consider a greater e-book approximately Robbins ever being written”–Terry Teachout, leader drama critic, The Wall Boulevard Journal).

He used to be well-known for reinventing the Broadway musical, making a vernacular American ballet, pushing the artwork form to new obstacles the place it had by no means long gone earlier than, integrating dance seamlessly with personality, Tale and tune, and as Affiliate Inventive Director, Ballet Grasp, and Co-Inventive Director, with George Balanchine, shaping the New York Town Ballet with bold and brio for greater than 5 many years thru his steadily startling choreography in ballet’s classical idiom. He used to be referred to as the king of Broadway, probably the most sought-after director-choreographer and display physician who gave form to On the Town (1944), Call Me Madam (1950), The King and I (1951), Wonderful The city (1953), Peter Pan (1954), The Pajama Game (1954), Silk Stockings (1955), West Facet Tale (1957), Gypsy (1959), A Humorous Factor Came about at the Technique to the Forum (1962), Funny Woman (1964), Fiddler at the Roof (1964), and plenty of different vintage musicals, successful 4 Tony Awards, Oscars, and an Emmy. He stunned and betrayed the ones he beloved and labored with through naming names to the Area Un-American Actions Committee. (“I betrayed my manhood, my Jewishness, my folks, my sister,” he wrote in a diary. “I will be able to’t undo it.”)
    Now, Amanda Vaill, Jerome Robbins biographer and authority, drawing at the huge and carefully held Robbins documents, has placed in combination a collection of his writings, giving us a way of his abnormal vary as a philosopher and artist, in addition to a shocking and revealing glimpse into the thoughts and middle of this towering cultural large.
    Interspersed right through, his correspondence with George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Robert Graves, Lincoln Kirstein, Arthur Laurents, Tanaquil Le Clercq (the fourth of Balanchine’s 4 other halves, with whom Robbins used to be additionally in love), Laurence Olivier, Stephen Sondheim, et al.