On 18th April 1944, the curtain rose at New York's Metropolitan Opera House to reveal a Manhattan streetscape, an empty bar and then three sailers scooted in, upstage left, dressed in shoregoing whites, to four sharp raps on a snare drum. American theatre was changed forever. One of the 'sailors' was a young dancer named Jerome Robbins who had created the evening's belter, Fancy Free to a jazzy score by his friend Leonard Bernstein. On Broadway, Robbins virtually invented the concept musical in which music, action and dancing are woven into a seamless whole: On the Town, The King and I, Pyjama Game, Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy and most famous of all, West Side Story. This is the first full-scale biography of a complex and remarkably inventive man: 'Things that at first seem ordinary, he made it seem that you had never seen them before'.
- ISBN10 0316859281
- ISBN13 9780316859288
- Publish Date 31 December 2006
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 18 December 2004
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Little, Brown & Company
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 384
- Language English