Somewhere - by Amanda Vaill (Paperback)

About the Book

Jerome Robbins was one of the most important figures in American dance and musical theater in the 20th century. "Somewhere" is the first book with access to the Robbins papers, a voluminous collection that forms an unrivaled archive of a singular man's life and a singular moment in our cultural history.

Book Synopsis

The "fantastically interesting" (NPR's All Things Considered) biography of the legendary, intensely ambitious choreographer and director who changed Broadway with his productions of Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, and Gypsy--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pride and Pleasure

"Superlative . . . a vivid account of a theatrical wizard."--Vogue

To some, Jerome Robbins was a demanding perfectionist, a driven taskmaster, a theatrical visionary; to others, he was a loyal friend, a supportive mentor, a generous and entertaining companion and colleague. Guarded and adamantly private, he was an inveterate and painfully honest journal writer who confided his innermost thoughts and aspirations to a remarkable series of diaries and memoirs. As a choreographer and director of ballets like Dances at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, and The Concert, he humanized neoclassical dance; with groundbreaking musicals like Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, and Gypsy, he changed the face of theater in America and exemplified the flowering of American art in the mid-twentieth century.

His personal and professional lives were equally provocative: a self-proclaimed homosexual, Robbins had relationships with both men and women, and at the height of anti-Communist hysteria, he was forced to testify before Congress. Somewhere places Jerome Robbins squarely in the cultural ferment of his time and native city.

Drawing on thousands of pages of documents to which Amanda Vaill was granted unfettered access, as well as on other archives and hundreds of interviews, Somewhere is a riveting narrative of a life lived onstage, offstage, and backstage. It is also an accomplished work of criticism and social history that chronicles one man's phenomenal career at a time when New York City was truly "a helluva town."

Review Quotes

"A fantastically interesting book about much, much more than dance, because Robbins was about more than dance."--NPR's "All Things Considered"

"[A] great subject for a biography. Robbins's contradictions, mysteries, achievements, failures, and vision add up to a life worth visiting and revisiting. . . . Vaill proves a seductive storyteller, a penetrating psychologist, a compelling analyst of Robbins's choreography."--Chicago Tribune Book World

"Posthumously, up in heaven where he surely is, Robbins should be proud to have inspired such [a] fine testament to his diverse art and complex life."--The New York Times Book Review

"Jerome Robbins is the great subject of American theatrical biography--self-contradictory, self-hating, arrogant and terrified and gifted almost beyond compare--and Amanda Vaill has done him justice. I can't think of a better full-length portrait of an American choreographer or director, and I can't imagine a better book about Robbins ever being written."--Terry Teachout, drama critic, The Wall Street Journal

"Other books about Robbins give you the facts about the innumerable theater and ballet projects that make him a central figure in the history of twentieth-century theatrical dance. But Vaill has a gift for storytelling, for context, that transforms the production credits and backstage anecdotes into tightly focused dramatic episodes in the life of a man always fiercely self-protective."--Los Angeles Times

"Superlative . . . a vivid account of a theatrical wizard."--Vogue

"A critically sophisticated biography that's as compulsively readable as a novel. . . . The book is essential reading for lovers of theater and dance. [Vaill] writes with both passion and compassion."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Witty, stylishly written . . . Vaill discusses [Robbins's] complicated libidinal life with great sensitivity. More important, she has a commanding view of his work both in the theater and the more abstract world of the ballet. [And] her account of his final years is deeply moving."--New York Daily News

"A dramatic, incremental revelation of the kind we expect in novels of a high order. . . . An exquisitely polished performance."--New York Sun

"Massive and magnetic . . . Spills nearly every bean about the choreographer's private life that he had always tried so hard to hoard. Vaill has created a page-turner."--The Washington Post Book World

"Discerning, empathetic, and accessible."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

Amanda Vaill is the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pride and Pleasure, Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in biography, and Somewhere, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. A publisher and editor for more than twenty years, she has written on arts and culture for New York, Esquire, Ballet Review, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and other publications. She lives in New York City.