Dance With Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Oral History
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Exhausting
Review: 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. ...

Rating:
Summary: Tedious and vulgar
Review: 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.