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Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins |
Author: Greg Lawrence
Published: 2003-11 |
List price: $33.00
Our price: $33.00
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As of: January 07th, 2009 03:11:51 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A Musical Legend
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.
 Exhausting
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. ...
Interesting Oral History
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.
 Tedious and vulgar
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.
Thorough, gossipy, undefinitive -- maybe unnecessary
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.
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