Customer Reviews

Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins

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Jerome Robbins was an extremely complex and difficult man -- and a genius. His choreography was more highly rated than Balanchine's in France, for instance. In this very well written book the reader is able to go inside the worlds of ballet and musical theater through endless but never boring details. "West Side Story" is Robbins's most famous work; he won two Oscars for the movie, but had been fired from the production! Marvelous insights into the personalities and talents of a generation of theatrical wizards in New York, particularly in the '50s. You don't have to be a ballet fan to enjoy this book.

Despite, or because of, its inclusion of hundreds of interviews, much of Greg Lawrence's biography amounts to uncorroborated hearsay. Given the backbiting and jealous atmosphere of the theatre world, a more rigorous biographer would have carefully weighed and vetted the reliability of the sources. Lawrence apparently was not given access to Robbins' own papers and therefore the man himself is decidedly absent from these pages, as has been pointed out by reviews in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewehere. It's gossipy and full of facts and opinions, but curiously empty.

Another customer reviewer here compares Lawrence's book with Christine Conrad's compendium of photographs and Robbins quotes (Jerome Robbins,That Broadway Man, That Ballet Man), to Lawrence's benefit. Seems to me you get a stronger sense of Robbins the man AND the artist from Conrad's book, even though it doesn't pretend to be a biography.

I've read that two other full-scale biographies are in the works whose authors have been allowed to see Robbins's archives; hopefully they will provide a deeper and more balanced view of the man. If anyone still cares.

This book is an extraordinary oral history covering more than fifty years of American cultural history, with Jerome Robbins at center stage. A vivid portrait of the artist is created by the voices of family, friends, and colleagues. Both loved and hated, Robbins emerges in these pages as an ingenious, tormented bundle of contradictions -- a classic Jekyl-Hyde bipolar personality. Dance With Demons is packed with marvelous anecdotes about all of Robbins' Broadway shows and ballets, as well as the "demons" of his life off-stage (his conflicts over his bisexuality and Jewish heritage, etc). A must-read for anyone interested in theater and dance.

Greg Lawrence is less an author than a complier of an oral history of the life of Jerome Robbins in Dance With Demons. This is by no means a true biography but it does fill a certain need until that volume is written. It gives almost everybody Jerome Robbins met in his life a chance to speak, sometimes briefly and sometimes at length, about working with or knowing him. No aspect of his life is left untouched. This book is almost less about Jerome Robbins as a person than it is about the ways in which he touched people. All the nastiness is there but also all the good things people had to say about him. There is nothing defintive about this book but it makes for a fascinating read and is a testament to power of this difficult genius.

When I reviewed Christine Conrad's book on Jerome Robbins ("Jerome Robbins: That Broadway Man, That Ballet Man") I wrote that the book on Robbins had yet to appear. Well, that book is here.

Greg Lawrence's fascinating DANCE WITH DEMONS is so painstakingly researched and so fair-minded, so interestingly written that it speeds along as if it were a novel, that it will, I believe, in years to come, be regarded as a very important document of life in the Theatre and the Ballet from the 1930's to the 1990's.

None of Robbins' "psychological problems" are glossed over and none of his matchless successes as a classical choreographer and as a director and choreographer of Broadway mega-hits is given short shrift.

Any reader with an interest in life in the New York City Ballet, under George Balanchine and then under Peter Martins, or in the Golden Age of Broadway's Musical Comedies, can afford to miss this book. Years and years of research obviously went into its writing. Just a very few examples of people quoted at length about Robbins, the artist, are his collaborators on WEST SIDE STORY (Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince), his collaborator and boss on THE KING AND I (Oscar Hammerstein,2), his dancers on Broadway (Yuriko, Robert La Fosse, Charlotte D'Amboise, Grover Dale, et al) and his dancers in the ballet world (Peter Martins, Suzanne Farrell, Bart Cook, Violette Verdy, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev, et al). We also get to read what the critics said about the various works when they premiered.

What makes the book terrific reading is that time and time again, through the years, we read of no one who has anything negative to say about Robbins, the artist. And yet, over and over we read of peers being crushed, other artists being "named" in the HUAC hearings, friends and lovers being used and abused.
Demons, indeed.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Jerome Robbins accomplished more in his lifetime than many other Broadway icons.He wrote, choreographed, danced ,and directed many musicals and ballets. He was at times very nasty and demanding of the cast he worked with. He also had lots of friend. This book chronicles his childhood through to his death. The author spends time detailing both the ballet part of Robbins life and the Broadway part. Unless you are a dancer, the Broadway life is much more interesting. There are loads of interesting facts in this book. For instance ,Mary Martin was considered for the lead in Funny Girl !!! Jerome Robbins life was fascinating. His story is easy to read and really holds your interest. Advice, skim the ballet sections.

I basically enjoyed the book, but I wish it had been about a hundred pages shorter. I would have preferred a book that really focused on the Broadway career. I have very little interest in ballet and a lot of the book was about ballet. It assumes the dancers mentioned are household words, but aside from Villella, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell and a couple of others, I had no idea who these people were and what they said was not particularly interesting. This is an ambitious book and I admire its ambition, but Robbins was a part of many worlds and in order to do all these worlds justice the whole is diluted. It could have been several books - one dealing with his early life and Jewish heritage, another dealing with his sexual nature, another with his Broadway career, another with his career in dance, and yet another dealing with his early flirtation with and later repudiation of Communism. This book tries to cover all the bases and ends up being exhausting. As I said the ballet part didn't really interest me and it took up most of the last half of the book. As a result I found the last hundred pages really tough going. But I did learn a lot that interested me, like how Robbins wanted John Latouche and Arthur Laurents to write the lyrics and book for ON THE TOWN. Bernstein wanted Comden and Green. ...

Very little to do with dance, this book is mostly personalities and scandal. The not-very-subtle subtext is Robbins' homosexuality, and its relation to the HUAC affair. Strictly for celebrity hounds.

greg you are a misfit just like me. However I love all your work. Not much else to do in New Port Richey, Florida but read and I enjoy reading your books. You are thought of and remembered fondly even after all these years