Present at the Creation, Leaping in the Dark, and Going Against the Grain

Present at the Creation, Leaping in the Dark, and Going Against the Grain PDF Author: Stuart Ostrow
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557836465
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
(Applause Books). "The best way I know to resuscitate the theatre is to produce dangerous new works." Stuart Ostrow. Producer Stuart Ostrow's manifesto of how intelligent life might be restored to the theatre is also a unique personal memoir of the producer-creator relationship and an evaluation of the essentials that can make a show fly, or remain earthbound. As a solo producer, Ostrow's many productions include M. Butterfly , which won the Tony Award for Best Play; Pippin ; and 1776 , which received both the New York and London Drama Critics Awards as well as the Tony Award for Best Musical. He produced the original Broadway production of the critically acclaimed La Bete , which won the Olivier Award in London for Best Comedy. Ostrow was brought in to fix the original production of Chicago , collaborated with Anthony Hopkins on a London production of M. Butterfly , that was not meant to be, and even had his own play, Stages , directed on Broadway by the avant-garde theatrical pioneer Richard Foreman. He riffs about the heroes and heels he's met along the way and that great cast includes Frank Loesser, Meredith Willson, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, David Geffen, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Henry Hwang, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and many more.

Present at the Creation, Leaping in the Dark, and Going Against the Grain

Present at the Creation, Leaping in the Dark, and Going Against the Grain PDF Author: Stuart Ostrow
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557836465
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
(Applause Books). "The best way I know to resuscitate the theatre is to produce dangerous new works." Stuart Ostrow. Producer Stuart Ostrow's manifesto of how intelligent life might be restored to the theatre is also a unique personal memoir of the producer-creator relationship and an evaluation of the essentials that can make a show fly, or remain earthbound. As a solo producer, Ostrow's many productions include M. Butterfly , which won the Tony Award for Best Play; Pippin ; and 1776 , which received both the New York and London Drama Critics Awards as well as the Tony Award for Best Musical. He produced the original Broadway production of the critically acclaimed La Bete , which won the Olivier Award in London for Best Comedy. Ostrow was brought in to fix the original production of Chicago , collaborated with Anthony Hopkins on a London production of M. Butterfly , that was not meant to be, and even had his own play, Stages , directed on Broadway by the avant-garde theatrical pioneer Richard Foreman. He riffs about the heroes and heels he's met along the way and that great cast includes Frank Loesser, Meredith Willson, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, David Geffen, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Henry Hwang, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and many more.

Razzle Dazzle

Razzle Dazzle PDF Author: Michael Riedel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451672179
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
"A revered and provocative theater observer presents a grand history of the producers, directors, actors, and critics battling for creative and financial control of Broadway"--Front jacket flap.

Broadway Musical MVPs: 1960-2010

Broadway Musical MVPs: 1960-2010 PDF Author: Peter Filichia
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1557839379
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
B&W photos throughout

Defying Gravity

Defying Gravity PDF Author: Carol de Giere
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1540043711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
Stephen Schwartz is among the rare American composer-lyricists whose Broadway musicals have inspired passionate followings, resulting in blockbuster hits like Wicked, Godspell, and Pippin. In the revised and updated second edition of Defying Gravity, biographer Carol de Giere reveals how Schwartz’s beloved musicals came to life, adding four new chapters that shed light on the continuing Wicked phenomenon and exciting projects that include stage adaptations of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Alan Menken and The Prince of Egypt. A popular feature of the first edition remains intact for the second: the story of Schwartz’s commercially unsuccessful shows, how he coped, and how he gave himself another chance. The new edition also features an acclaimed series of “Creativity Notes” with insights about the creative process. Wicked enthusiasts are treated to a revealing, in-depth account of the show’s evolution that takes readers from developmental workshops, to the pre-Broadway tryout in San Francisco, through the arguments over changes for Broadway, and finally to productions around the world. Movie musical fans know that Disney’s pairing of Stephen Schwartz (for lyrics) with composer Alan Menken (for music) led to award-winning movie musicals “Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Enchanted. Menken’s revelatory “Foreword” that introduces the second edition of Defying Gravity explores their “wonderful chemistry” and creative challenges. The abundance of behind-the-scenes stories in this Stephen Schwartz biography came by way of the author’s unprecedented access to this legendary songwriter for interviews. She also drew from conversations with his family members, friends, and colleagues (librettists, composers, directors, producers, and actors) to render a rich portrait of this complex and gifted artist. She rounds out the book with photographs, Schwartz’s handwritten notes, and highlighted quotations. Performers and others involved in productions of Godspell, Pippin, Children of Eden, Working, Rags, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, will discover the intentions of the shows’ creators. Singers, writers, fans, and anyone interested in the development of stage and film musicals will enjoy multiple insights from this backstage journey, from Godspell to Wicked, and beyond.

Broadway [2 volumes]

Broadway [2 volumes] PDF Author: Thomas A. Greenfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313342652
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 838

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive and insightful reference available on Broadway theater as an American cultural phenomenon and an illuminator of American life. Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture is the first major reference work to explore just how much the "Great White Way" illuminates our national character. In two volumes spanning the era from the mid-19th century to the present, it offers nearly 200 entries on a variety of topics, including spotlights on 30 landmark productions—from Shuffle Along to Oklahoma! to Oh Calcutta! to The Producers—that not only changed American theater but American culture as well. In addition, Broadway offers thirty extended thematic essays gauging the powerful impact of theater on American life, with entries on race relations, women in society, sexuality, film, media, technology, tourism, and off-Broadway and noncommercial theater. There are also 110 profile entries on key persons and institutions—from the famous to the infamous to the all but forgotten—whose unique careers and contributions impacted Broadway and its place in the American landscape.

Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols PDF Author: Mark Harris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399562265
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
One of The Hollywood Reporter’s 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time • A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of People's top 10 books of 2021 • An instant New York Times bestseller • Named a best book of the year by NPR and Time A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges—some of the worst largely unknown until now—by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four consecutive hit plays, won back-to-back Tonys, ushered in a new era of Hollywood moviemaking with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and followed it with The Graduate, which won him an Oscar and became the third-highest-grossing movie ever. At thirty-five, he lived in a three-story Central Park West penthouse, drove a Rolls-Royce, collected Arabian horses, and counted Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Avedon as friends. Where he arrived is even more astonishing given where he had begun: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he was sent along with his younger brother to America on a ship in 1939. The young immigrant boy caught very few breaks. He was bullied and ostracized--an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless--and his father died when he was just twelve, leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed. The gulf between these two sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the center of more than one cultural universe--the acute powers of observation that first made him famous; the nourishment he drew from his creative partnerships, most enduringly with May; his unquenchable drive; his hunger for security and status; and the depressions and self-medications that brought him to terrible lows. It would take decades for him to come to grips with his demons. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to New York to Chicago to Hollywood, Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Among the 250 people Harris interviewed: Elaine May, Meryl Streep, Stephen Sondheim, Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Lorne Michaels, and Gloria Steinem. Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the biographer's art.

The Memory of ’76

The Memory of ’76 PDF Author: Michael D. Hattem
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300277350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The surprising history of how Americans have fought over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution for nearly two and a half centuries Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. In this sweeping take on American history, Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation’s history; how African Americans, women, and other oppressed groups have shaped the popular memory of the Revolution; and how much of our contemporary memory of the Revolution is a product of the Cold War. By exploring the Revolution’s unique role in American history as a national origin myth, Hattem shows how the meaning of the Revolution has never been fixed, how remembering the nation’s founding has often done far more to divide Americans than to unite them, and how revising the past is an important and long‑standing American political tradition.

Falling Up

Falling Up PDF Author: Thomas Holliday
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815610033
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Actors know about "falling up": a split-second ignition from the wings, propelling entrance as a new character, an unwilled ascent to a different mode of being, an in-body experience that overlays preparation, opportunity, choice, or chance. Falling Up, the first and only full-length Floyd study, is a metaphor for humanity’s uncanny ability to rise from seeming disaster into rebirth. Floyd’s consistent succession of soars, stumbles, slides, or wrenches sings of triumph over odds. A modern Renaissance man, Floyd is our greatest living opera composer and librettist, a trained concert pianist, a master stage director, and a teacher. In Falling Up, Holliday offers an intimate account of the life that shaped the words and music. Combining insights from hundreds of interviews with Floyd, his family, and many of the last half-century’s greatest singers, conductors, and opera administrators, Falling Up traces Floyd’s Southern roots and the struggles and sacrifices that accompanied his rise to operatic stardom. With more than forty photographs, the detailed evolution of Floyd’s fourteen operas, and in-depth analysis of his nonoperatic works, Falling Up is essential reading for opera fans and professionals alike, a book that moves, informs, and entertains.

The Great Parade

The Great Parade PDF Author: Peter Filichia
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466867124
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
It was the Broadway season when Barbra Streisand demanded "Don't Rain on My Parade" and Carol Channing heard the waiters at the Harmonia Gardens say "Hello, Dolly!". From June 1, 1963 through the final day of May 31, 1964, theatergoers were offered 68 different productions: 24 new plays, 15 new comedies, 14 new musicals, 5 revivals of plays, 3 revues, 3 plays in Yiddish, 2 in French, 1 double-bill and even 1 puppet show. Peter Filichia's The Great Parade will look at what a Broadway season looked like a half-century ago analyzing the hits, the flops, the trends, the surprises, the disappointments, the stars and even how the assassination of JFK and the arrival of the Beatles affected Broadway. The Great Parade is a chronicle of a Broadway season unprecedented in the star power onstage: Barbara Streisand, Carol Channing, Claudette Colbert. Colleen Dewhurst, Hal Holbrook, Mary Martin, Christopher Plummer, Robert Preston, Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Jr., Carol Burnett, Tallulah Bankhead, Alec Guinness, Kirk Douglas, Albert Finney, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Richard Burton, Mary Martin, Beatrice Lillie, Hermione Gingold, Robert Redford and many more. Neil Simon and Stephen Sondheim burst on to the Broadway stage with Barefoot in the Park and Anyone Can Whistle. The '63-'64 season was one of Broadway's greatest and in The Great Parade, Peter Filichia gives us another classic.

The Big Parade

The Big Parade PDF Author: Dominic McHugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197554733
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Though Meredith Willson is best remembered for The Music Man, there is a great deal more to his career as a composer and lyricist. In The Big Parade, author Dominic McHugh uses newly uncovered letters, manuscripts, and production files to reveal Willson's unusual combination of experiences in his pre-Broadway career that led him to compose The Music Man.