The Making of a Gypsy -- Fancy Free -- New York, New York -- Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? -- Betrayals, Triumphs and Fairy Dust -- Switchblades, Strippers and Insane Love -- Fiddler and the Sacred Vision -- Balanchine's Shadow -- Demons and Angels -- A Twilight of Legacies.
"Dance with Demons is the first full biography of the celebrated choreographer/director of Broadway, ballet, and Hollywood - a man of towering achievement and extraordinary personal nightmares. For decades, he was one of the most commanding creative forces in America. His work on such shows as On the Town, The King and I, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, Peter Pan, and Jerome Robbins' Broadway earned him five Tony Awards and two Academy Awards. His brilliance with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet established him as one of the century's great choreographers. But when Jerome Robbins, né Rabinowitz, died at the age of seventy-nine in 1998, he was a haunted man. All of his life, he had struggled with demons: his bisexuality, his ambivalence about his Judaism, his ofter bitter relationship with his parents, his betrayals of other during the McCarthy hearings, and a free of failure that drove him to perfectionism bordering on the sadistic (during one rehearsal, Robbins berated hs cast, backed up - and fell off the stage. Reveals a cat member: "Nobody said, 'Watch it!' Nope. Off he went"). Late in his life, Robbins tried to put together an autobiographical theatre piece that would deal with some of his past, but he had abandon it. Said one of his actors, "He would have had to go to a deeper place, a darker place, where he might not have wanted people to see." Dance with Demons is the story that Robbins was unable to tell. Based on years of research and interviews with hubris of Robbin's family, friends, and colleagues, it gives the full measure of both the artist and the man. Filled with stories and voices, it is a fascinating portrait of light and dark - like its subject, a work rich in complexity." -- Book Jacket
0399146520 9780399146527
00047065
Robbins, Jerome 1918-1998
Choreographers--United States --Biography. Dance--History --United States --20th century