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Jerome Robbins
His Life, His Theater, His Dance
by Deborah Jowitt
This authoritative biography explores the life, works, and creative processes of the complex genius who redefined the role of dance in musical theater and is also considered America's greatest native-born ballet choreographer.
Simon & Schuster, 640 pages
08/11/2004
$40.00
ISBN: 0684869853
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
Entertainment & Media
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Jack Helbig
In recounting his life and work, longtime Village Voice dance critic Jowitt neither praises Robbins nor buries him. Instead, in a well-researched, well-written biography, she spreads Robbins' life before us [Aug. 2004, p. 1888]
Christian Science Monitor Karen Campbell
This is a vivid flesh-and-blood portrait. Jowitt has written an indispensible guide to understanding and appreciating the man generally considered America's finest native-born choreographer.
Kirkus Reviews
For buffs, scholars, actors, dancers, choreographers, and directors: a vital picture of ballet and Broadway in a golden age.
Publishers Weekly
Both critically sophisticated and compulsively readable, this is a must for theater and dance devotees
San Francisco Chronicle Robert Hurwitt
The great, endlessly intriguing glory of Jowitt's exhaustively researched and beautifully written new biography is its clarity in describing and critiquing Robbins' long and remarkably varied career.
Library Journal Carolyn M. Mulac
This is neither gossipy tell-all nor gushing tribute: Jowitt takes the full measure of the man and his art in a gracefully written work of careful scholarship and genuine appreciation. [Aug. 2004, p. 83]
Los Angeles Times Janice Ross
Jowitt is in many ways his equivalent as a dance critic, a master of vernacular expository prose, rendering the texture, sensation and pleasures of watching moving bodies. This fluency doesn't appear often enough in the book, but when it does, there is poetry in the match of writer and subject.
Chicago Sun-Times Hedy Weiss
Though her writing is a bit earthbound at the start -- as if she were just figuring out how to balance so much information while also bringing a young artist to life -- it gains steam as it progresses.
Village Voice Phyllis Fong
Jowitt is best in detailing the body of work that would establish Robbins as America's greatest native-born choreographer of the 20th century, writing often with the critic's revelatory phrase
Washington Post Rick Whitaker
There's no virtue in a biographer shielding her subject from criticism or scandal, just as there's no shame in being imperfect.
Entertainment Weekly Scott Brown
Even committed terpsichoreans may find her book a dry, dutiful trudge through the life of America's most electrifying and infuriating 20th-century choreographer. She drones too often in analysis of Jerome Robbins' aesthetic and treads too delicately in the tabloid rough of his life.
The New York Times Book Review Nicholas Fox Weber
Jowitt... depends too much on other critical voices and too little on her own authority. Her exhaustive text is often more a scrapbook than a probing narrative; she would have done better to go deeper beneath the surface of Robbins's professional metamorphosis and complex personal relationships than to quote other critics endlessly.
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