Biographies, show books, musical scores, history, and must-read theatre books.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has become the most successful composer in the world's history, earning respect with musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. The author surveys the panorama of this giant of the musical theater, telling the story of his life and works by focusing on each of his musicals. 150 color and b&w photos.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most famous—and most controversial—composer of musical theater alive today. Hundreds of millions of people have seen his musicals, which include Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Starlight Express, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and Sunset Boulevard. Even more know his songs. Lloyd Webber’s many awards include seven Tonys and three Grammys—but he has nonetheless been the subject of greater critical vitriol than any...
In Andrew Lloyd Webber Michael Walsh offers a detailed biography of the composer of Evita and Cats. He chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind, the film version of Evita, his third marriage, and the financial upheaval at The Really Useful Company, Lloyd Webber's production group. Walsh attempts to hack through the mass of Fleet Street sensationalism and get at what is really happening in the life of this talented, troubled man. The book off...
The sons of a religious fanatic, the Shubert brothers from Syracuse—Sam, Lee, and J. J.—"seemed unlikely casting for the most ruthless titans in the history of American theatre," notes biographer Foster Hirsch. But since the turn of the century, the Shuberts and their heirs have exercised an unequaled power over Broadway and the road. Not until now has there been a complete account of their lives and the evolution of their business. During their heyday from 1905 to the crash of 1929, the Sh...
Jerome Robbins (born Jerome Rabinowitz in 1918) was one of the most important figures in American dance and musical theater in the twentieth century. He was the Co-Artistic Director with George Balanchine of the fledgling New York City Ballet in 1948, bringing Broadway vernacular energy to complement Balanchine's austere classicism and choreographing such classic ballets as Facsimile, Dance at a Gathering, and Afternoon of a Faun. His ballet to a score by Leonard Bernstein, Fancy Free, electrif...
Here is a lavish tribute and a candid look at the career of the much-acclaimed, much-loved Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim. Includes candid interviews with his colleagues and stars, telling of his trials, false starts and heartbreaks as well as his successes. 150 photos.
One of the most gifted, celebrated, scrutinized, and criticized musicians in the second half of the twentieth century, Leonard Bernstein made his legendary conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic in 1943, at age 25. A year later, he became a sensation on Broadway with the premiere of On the Town. Throughout the 1950s, his Broadway fame only grew with Wonderful Town, Candide, and West Side Story. And in 1958, the Philharmonic appointed him the first American Music Director of a major sympho...
Richard Rodgers is known to most people as just Rodgers as in Rodgers and Hammerstein and Rodgers and Hart. Inspired by the words of his legendary lyricist partners, Rodgers scored the music for many of Broadway's biggest musical hits--Carousel, The Sound of Music, The Boys from Syracuse, Oklahoma!--to name just a few. What this biography makes clear is that it was a far from simple man who composed the simple, infectious melodies that have kept generations of musical theatergoers humming long a...
Winner of an Oscar for Cabaret, a Tony for Pippin’, and an Emmy for Liza with a ‘Z’—all in one year, 1972—Bob Fosse (1927–1987) was one of America’s greatest choreographers and directors. Born in Chicago, young Fosse began his career tap-dancing as part of the Riff Brothers in sleazy strip joints, where he encountered the erotic style that later became his signature. Best known for his Broadway hits (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Sweet Charity, and Chicago), he was also a success...
Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) forged a remarkable, multifaceted career as a librettist, lyricist, playwright, director, and producer. He wrote Carmen Jones, Carousel, Show Boat, and, with longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Hugh Fordin enjoyed complete access to the Hammerstein archives and conducted numerous interviews with family and colleagues like Rodgers, Berlin, Robbins, and Sondheim. The result is the definitive bio...
The year 2000 marks the hundredth birthday of theater and opera composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950). In celebration of this occasion, 100 Years of Kurt Weill features recently rediscovered and previously untranslated dramatic works by Weill and critical essays and articles reflecting on his legacy and influence. Reviews and reports on centenary productions from around the world are included along with panel discussions by directors and musicians on Weill’s cultural identity. 100 Years of Kurt We...
Famed lyricist Dorothy Fields penned the words to more than four hundred songs, among them mega-hits such as "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, " and "The Way You Look Tonight." In Pick Yourself Up, Charlotte Greenspan offers the most complete treatment of Fields's life and work to date, tracing her rise to prominence in a male-dominated world. Born in 1904 into a show business family--her father, Lou Fields, was a famed stage comedian turned Broadway produce...
Before Ziegfeld launched his Follies, before the Shubert brothers built their empire, Lew Fields' productions were the toast of Broadway. For the "smart set" in the luxury box seats and the shopkeepers and clerks in the gallery, an evening at Weber & Fields' Music Hall was the hottest ticket in town, a chance to see the biggest stars of the era - Lillian Russell, Fay Templeton, David Warfield, DeWolf Hopper, and the "Dutch" knockabout comedy team of Weber & Fields. From the Bowery to Broadway of...
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, the witty librettist of the classic Gilbert and Sullivan operetta partnership, was, says Jane Stedman, "an iconoclast who, paradoxically, was not a revolutionary." He was still a Victorian gentleman, after all. Stedman makes clear however that his poking of fun at the pomposity and hypocrisy of Victorian Britain laid the groundwork for the social criticism of serious dramatists like George Bernard Shaw. Copiously researched , with access to the D'Oyly Carte family p...
Saul Chaplin worked on more than sixty films as a songwriter, vocal arranger, pianist, musical director, or producer. He received Academy Award nominations for Kiss Me Kate, High Society, An American in Paris, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and West Side Story and won Academy Awards for the last three. He was also the associate producer on The Sound of Music, the most popular movie musical ever filmed. In this fascinating autobiography he takes us inside the music departments of Hollywood's ...
Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (1918-86) and composer Frederick Loewe (1901-88) wrote some of the most successful musical shows on Broadway and in motion-picture history: Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Gigi, and Paint Your Wagon. They worked with stars such as Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Richard Burton, Audrey Hepburn, Louis Jourdan, and Robert Goulet. Lerner was raised on Park Avenue, attended Choate and Harvard, lost sight in one eye from a boxing injury, and was legendary for his eight marriage...
Theatrical producer André Charlot brought Parisian revue to Great Britain in 1912 and dominated his field for 25 years. He greatly influenced American musical theater with Charlot’s London Revue in New York in 1924. He created the kind of intimate revue the world came to identify as British, and was known for discovering and nurturing some of the greatest personalities in the century’s theater, including Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Buchanan, and Noel Coward. This biography, res...
McClinton (theater arts, Kent State U.) provides an account of the artistic and administrative contributions of theater director and playwright Vinnette Carroll (b. 1922) to the Black Theatre Movement and the emergence of Black gospel musical theater in America. He presents a biographical profile of her youth (through 1957); discussion of her early years learning acting and directing; her work and philosophy as a director and collaborator; the development of the song-play genre; the Urban Arts C...
A colorful, historically accurate biography of William B. Gill, a famous musical-comedy playwright and comedy performer of the late-19th-century who is now mostly forgotten, but who changed the course of American musical theater. Gill began his career as a comedic actor in the coalfields of Australia, then performed in India and England, before finally coming to the U.S. Achieving fame as one of the most popular playwrights of his days, Gill's works appeared for years on Broadway and in the repe...
This inaugural volume in the Forgotten Stars of the Musical Theatre series sets Lydia Thompson, queen of burlesque, under the spotlight. The series will attempt to resurrect theatre performers and writers who were famous in their era, yet who have since inexplicably faded from popular memory. Outlandish tales of Lydia's touring burlesque company, the "British Blondes," and such lurid episodes as her horsewhipping of a Chicago editor, a romance with a Russian Grand Duke and a lesbian attacker hav...
Alice May is the archetype of the Gilbert and Sullivan prima donna. She ran away with her music teacher as a girl and landed in Australia, becoming that country's leading comic opera singer. As the head of her own company she toured Australia and New Zealand, eventually making her way to Britain via India, where she entered into successful partnerships and productions. Before she drank down the last of her last days in St. Louis--minus the music teacher--she had traveled oceans and brought down ...
Harry B. Smith was the most prolific writer of librettos for the American musical theatre in history, with nearly half of his 300 works actually opening in New York City. In addition, Smith was instrumental in adapting and popularizing foreign musicals in America, significantly influencing writing and composing styles of American shows. He worked with every major composer in America between 1880 and 1920, and consequently this examination of his work and process is highly instructive of the hist...
David Braham (1838-1905) was the musical director for the famous vaudeville team of Harrigan and Hart, writing music for many of their comic songs, including "The Mulligan Guards,'Sallie Waters,'Paddie Duffy's Cart," and many more. His long career as a theatrical composer in New York helped establish a new style of Broadway musical. He came from a family well-entrenched in the music and theater worlds, and his story touches upon nearly all aspects of the history of American musical theater and b...
Gower Champion's career spanned the years during which American musical theatre was transformed from a crude popular entertainment into a sophisticated art form. As the director and choreographer of Hello, Dolly!, 42nd Street, and other Broadway musicals, he was central to that transformation. This book is the first extensive treatment of his life and contribution to dance and American musical theatre. The volume draws on the holdings of various special collections, is informed by careful analys...
Vividly recreating the unique pleasure of experiencing a song-and-dance show, Broadway Babies spotlights the men and women who made a difference in the development of American musical comedy. Mordden's account features such show people as Florenz Ziegfeld, Harold Prince, Bert Lahr, Gwen Verdon, Angela Lansbury, Victor Herbert, Liza Minnelli, and Stephen Sondheim, and such musicals as Sally, Oh Kay!, Anything Goes, Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Follies, Chicago, and countless others. While theatrical h...
Back in print in a handsome, elegant paperback. "An outstanding, accurate and joyful exploration of the work of the great songwriters for Hollywood's great musicals! . . . I love this book", Michael Feinstein. This unique book that is a perfect gift and an asset to every film and music library. 162 photos. Filmography, bibliography, index, discography.
Leslie Stuart (1864-1928) was a British songwriter best remembered as the composer of the hit show, Florodora. He began writing popular songs as a teenager, first for blackface and vaudeville performers, and eventually for more "legitimate" shows and revues. Florodora (1899), written in collaboration with London's most fashionable librettist, Owen Hall, was a musical-comedy sensation. Its combination of the traditional slow love ballads and waltzes with more rhythmic and long-lined numbers made...
The long-running partnership of Betty Comden and Adolph Green is certainly the most remarkable example of tenacious teamwork in the annals of the musical stage. As librettists, lyricists, and performers, they have been working together for nearly six decades and are still going strong. The New York Musicals of Comden and Green brings together three of their greatest Broadway triumphs: On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953), with music by Leonard Bernstein, and Bells are Ringing (1956), wi...
Sir Cameron Mackintosh ... is the most successful producer in the entire history of the stage musical, on Broadway, on London's West End, and in other theater capitals. He has been responsible for an amazing succession of hits, including Cats, Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon. This book is the first ever to tell the story of the man behind so many of the triumphs of the contemporary musical stage. The authors, who have known Mackintosh since his earliest days in the thea...
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is well known as the composer of the earliest operas still performed today. His Orfeo, Il retorno d’Ulisse in patria, and L’incoronazione di Poppea are internationally popular nearly four centuries after their creation. These seminal works represent only a part of Monteverdi’s music for the stage, however. He also wrote numerous works that, while not operas, are no less theatrical in their fusion of music, drama, and dance. This impressive book is the first t...
With thirteen Broadway musicals to his credit, Stephen Sondheim's career in the musical theater has outdistanced those of most of his contemporaries. Each of his shows has presented new challenges to audiences, and each has cast fresh perspectives on the nature and potential of the American musical, as well as probing deeply, often painfully, into the nature of our culture. Sondheim's Broadway Musicals is the first book to take an in-depth look at Sondheim's work. Stephen Banfield examines eac...
Here is the first major survey of Broadway musical theatre stars, telling the life stories of 40 stage luminaries from Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and Gwen Verdon, to Nathan Lane, Patti Lupone, and Audra McDonald. Author Robert Viagas describes each star's most important stage roles as well as the triumphant, tragic, inspiring, and cautionary tales of how they achieved - and maintained - their status as top Broadway stars.
This volume collects, for the first time, twenty-eight biographies of the greatest songwriters and lyricists of Broadway musicals. It goes below the surface to see what made them tick and to uncover the secrets of their success - as well as the personal foibles that sometimes led to their downfall. Longtime theatre-lover and stage veteran Herbert Keyser takes us on a personal journey through the music that made these great artists so much a part of our history and our lives. Keyser has assembled...
This book follows the career of the producer/director of such shows as "Pyjama Game", "Damn Yankees", "Fiddler of the Roof" and "West Side Story" and who has collaborated in many productions of Stephen Sondheim's works.
Romulus Linney: Maverick of the American Theater provides the first book-length examination of the life and career of the critically acclaimed playwright. Relentlessly challenging in his choice of dramatic subjects Linney has earned seven lifetime achievements for his playwriting. Based on extensive interviews and a close examination of Linney's personal files, Fleming crafts an in-depth, incisive look at how Linney's life has informed his plays. The extensive research led Linney to conclude: Fl...
Eric Bentley's graceful look at George Bernard Shaw was first published over 50 years ago, and time has only strengthened the conviction of his ideas and arguments about Shaw. When it arrived in the late 1940's, this book was hailed by the great poet William Carlos Williams as "the best treatise on contemporary manners I think I have ever read. I was fascinated and rewarded in the depths of my soul." Even Shaw himself described the book as "the best critical description of my public activities ...
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE (born 21 March 1925) is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.
Restoration London's leading actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton has not been the subject of a biography since 1891. He worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre's responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Pope and Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to chan...
Daphne du Maurier's celebrated biography of her father, Gerald du Maurier, last of the great actor-managers. Sir Gerald du Maurier was the preeminent actor-manager of his day, knighted in 1922 for his services to the theater. Published within six months of her father's death, Daphne du Maurier's frank portrait was considered shocking by many of his admirers—but it was a huge success, winning her critical acclaim and launching her career. Here, du Maurier captures the spirit and charm of the c...
The playwrights covered in this study have among them won most of the available awards and experienced considerable success in the theater. They have not, however, found their way so easily into the academic canon. Christopher Bigsby examines, in some detail, the developing careers of some of America's most fascinating and original dramatic talent: John Guare, Tina Howe, Tony Kushner, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson. In a...
Neil LaBute is one of the most exciting new talents in theatre and film to have emerged in the 1990s. Influenced and inspired by such writers as David Mamet, Edward Bond and Harold Pinter, he is equally at home writing for the screen as for the stage, and the list of films he has written and directed includes The Wicker Man (2006), Possession (2002) and In the Company of Men (1998). As a playwright, screenwriter, director, and author of short stories, he has staked out a distinctive, and distur...
Bertolt Brecht's work journals trace his years of exile (the period from 1934 to 1955) in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and America, as well as his return, via Switzerland, to East Berlin. These journals include his perceptive and at times polemical critiques of other writers and intellectuals, but the accounts of his own writing practice provide the greatest insights into the creation of his dramatic work as well as the development of his politics and theories about epic theatre. There are memora...
Offers new essays that address issues raised in Wilson's "The Ground on Which I Stand" speech. Essays and interviews range from examinations of the presence of Wilson's politics in his plays to the limitations of these politics on contemporary interpretations of Black aesthetics. Also included is Sybil Roberts' A Liberating Prayer: A Lovesong for Mumia, that, for several seasons, has played to sold out houses, but had not been published prior to the hardcover edition of this book. With an updat...
A scandal-loving biographer's dream, Marlon Brando has led a tumultuous life, complete with unhappy childhood, an active and varied sex life, troubled children of his own (son Christian is now in prison for killing daughter Cheyenne's lover), and a long history of eccentric behavior on and off the set. Surprisingly, Brando hasn't caught Kitty Kelley's eye, but journalist Manso (Mailer: His Life and Times, LJ 4/15/85) corrects that oversight with this massive tome. Based on seven years' research...
With dueling Merman biographies being released just prior to her birth centennial in 2008 (see review above of Caryl Flinn's Brass Diva), Kellow's slimmer tome is the livelier of the two with new interviews with friends, family and co-workers bringing vibrant life and clarity to even familiar anecdotes. Kellow (The Bennetts: An Acting Family) is less interested in digging for psychological insights and bluntly paints a more temperamental portrait of the Broadway belter, but readers will be swep...
Daughter of Lena Horne, Buckley here tells a vital story, made even more appealing by her gracefully understated writing and objective viewpoint. Spanning the history of six generations of an American family, the book is based on voluminous papers kept by the Hornes since the mid-19th century. The author sheds light on an area of black society unrecognized for the most part. After the Civil War, the "old Hornes" settled in Brooklyn as part of a minority elite, an upper-middle class with enclave...
Author Lemmon's parents divorced when he was three, and each remarried, so his memories of his famous father tend to center around specific activities they shared rather than daily life. When Chris was 11, the two went to Alaska for the first of many annual wilderness outings. Piano playing was another enthusiasm; Jack had picked it up by ear and urged Chris into lessons, which he loved so much that for a while he considered turning pro. Their third mutual passion was golf. Neither (especially ...
Chandler, author of several life histories of deceased actors and directors, now focuses her signature biographical style on the life of Katharine Hepburn. Chandler’s biographies are culled from conversations she conducted with subjects and their confidantes, though she publishes the results of the interviews decades after all involved have died. Despite Hepburn’s reputation for reticence, here she opens up in surprising and frank detail, recalling her earliest childhood memories, including...
A tribute to the acclaimed British actress.
Parish, author of many books including Katharine Hepburn: The Untold Story and Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flaps), here traces the life and career of mirthmaker Mel Brooks from the Borscht Belt to Broadway. Born Melvin Kaminsky, he grew up as a Brooklyn classroom clown, honing his stage skills in the Catskills before arriving in WWII France as an army combat engineer. The bombastic Brooks clawed his way into early television as a writer for Sid Caesar: "I was aggressive. I was a terr...
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