Jerome Robbins

August 20, 2018
This brief but carefully researched biography (part of the Jewish Lives series) builds a persuasive case for the importance of Jerome Robbins’s career as a choreographer who explored “the overlapping terrain between ballet and modern dance.” Lesser, founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, uses original sources, including Robbins’s journals, to create a portrait of the tortured, angry, guilt-ridden perfectionist, whom composer Stephen Sondheim described as “the only genius I ever met.” Although it touches on Robbins’s personal life, the book focuses most intently on his choreography, from the famous dance scenes in such Broadway shows as Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story to such ballets as The Cage and The Goldberg Variations. About the scene in Fiddler in which Jews and Cossacks encounter one another, she writes, “Here is cultural opposition presented theatrically... here is fear, a rare emotion in dance, made palpable through aggressively choreographed movement.” Stories of Robbins’s famously difficult personality are contrasted with examinations of his productive working relationships with colleagues like composer Leonard Bernstein and mentor George Balanchine. The results is an evenhanded portrait of an important choreographer.

August 1, 2018
A compact and incisive portrait of the great dancer and choreographer.In 2015, after Lesser (You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn, 2017, etc.) saw one of Robbins' (1918-1998) final works, The Goldberg Variations, she sat "in a state of stunned amazement." She welcomed the offer to write a biography for the publisher's Jewish Lives series because she sees him as a "genius worth championing." The author begins with Robbins as perhaps "the most hated man on Broadway." Actors and dancers famously feared his "vicious outbursts" and "cruel perfectionism." Others loved him deeply. He was always "high-strung and tormented," according to one of his rehearsal pianists, and conflicted about his skills, homosexuality, and Jewish roots. Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz--he changed his name at the urging of a ballet teacher--to a "rarely affectionate" father and "forceful" mother, he possessed perfect pitch and an excellent sense of rhythm. He could "move naturally and expressively." A stint at Camp Tamiment in the Catskills confirmed his first love, choreography. Throughout, Lesser focuses on Robbins as a "narrative artist," perhaps one of the century's "most powerful exemplars." George Balanchine cast him in a musical in 1938, and Robbins soon began working with Leonard Bernstein. In 1951, he joined up with Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II on The King and I and developed a new style of dance, a "fusion between Eastern and Western modes." A low point in his career came in 1953, when he named names for the House Un-American Activities Committee, something he later deeply regretted. The hits kept coming: Peter Pan, an "amazing achievement," Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof, and, with now close friend Bernstein, West Side Story, where he worked with a young Stephen Sondheim, who called Robbins the "only genius I've ever met." As Lesser concludes, his "influence lives on even where his name may not."A breezy and inviting biography from a self-described "zealot."

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September 15, 2018
This year, as the music world celebrates the Leonard Bernstein centennial, the dance world marks the centennial of master choreographer, dancer, and theater director Jerome Robbins. In the latest title in Yale's Jewish Lives series, Lesser (The Life of Louis Kahn?, 2017) tells the story of Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz through his major dance works. Among them are perennial ballet favorites like Fancy Free, Afternoon of a Faun, and Dances at a Gathering as well as such iconic Broadway musicals as The King and I, West Side Story, and Fiddler on the Roof. Not as exhaustive as Deborah Jowitt's Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (2004), this slim volume nonetheless drills down to the essential core of a complicated man?Robbins was plagued with perfectionism, self-doubt, and more than one identity crisis?and consummate artist. In a skillful blend of personal biography and professional profile, Lesser reminds us of Robbins' place in twentieth-century dance and theater and fosters a new appreciation for his legacy. A fine addition to dance and performing-arts collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)