Historian Amnon Kabatchnik's BLOODY BROADWAY Released

Legendary drama professor, esteemed historian, celebrated director, and multiple award-winning writer Amnon Kabatchnik has penned a new in his award-winning reference series. Kabatchnik's latest, Bloody Broadway: Plays of Menace, Murder, and Mystery, Volume I (BearManor Media) is now available wherever fine books are sold in hardcover and trade paper editions.

In his latest work, Amnon Kabatchnik focuses on the entity known as Broadway, which began with the stage contributions of the American actor-director-playwright William Gillette. Gillette's major success was Sherlock Holmes, a compilation of half-a-dozen short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle crafted into a cohesive plot line. In Bloody Broadway, Kabatchnik examines the period from 1900-1930, including when a number of prolific melodramatists-such as Hal Reid, Clyde Fitch, Owen Davis, George M. Cohan, Elmer Rice, and John Willard--whipped up various four-act plays featuring plays populated by flamboyant villains, brawny heroes, and damsels in distress. Moreover, Kabatchnik includes details on how acts of crime, albeit in a more subtle approach by providing psychological insights, began to emerge in the works of notable playwrights, such as August Strindberg, Maxim Gorky, Bertolt Brecht. Kabatchnik also details how works from England came to Broadway, including plays of betrayal, violence, and detection by W. Somerset Maugham, J. B. Priestley, and Daphne Du Maurier, followed by the French Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Jean Genet, the Hungarian Laszlo Fodor, the German Ernst Toller, the Spanish Garcia Lorca, and the Italian Ugo Betti. Also, Kabatchnik examines those writers mixing their ink with blood, including American novelists Damon Runyon, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, and William Faulkner, as well as the Nobel Prize winners Eugene O'Neil, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway.

In all, Bloody Broadway examines 79 plays which are presented chronologically. Each entry includes a plot synopsis, production data, opinions by critics and scholars, as well as biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors.

Kabatchnik has earned high critical acclaim for his previous works, which won honors in the Benjamin Franklin Awards, the ForeWord Book of the Year Awards, and the Independent Book Publishers Award. Among the praise for Kabatchnik's previous works: