Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins

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.”