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Life Upon The Wicked Stage
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Book Synopsis Life Upon the Wicked Stage by : Jacqueline Boles
Download or read book Life Upon the Wicked Stage written by Jacqueline Boles and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Show business is a multimillion dollar business, and its celebrities and sports figures are the most famous people on earth. Yet, most entertainers are neither rich nor famous. In Life upon the Wicked Stage, author Jacqueline Boles provides an academic portrait of live performers and offers insight into their unique world. Based on the biographies and autobiographies of one hundred and seventeen American show people, Life upon the Wicked Stage delves into the lives of entertainers musicians, singers, dancers, comics, and variety artists. This sociological study first shares the history of show business from its beginnings to present-day, where the public's fascination with entertainers and celebrities is avid. Then, Boles analyzes the entertainers and their family backgrounds, investigates their reasons for choosing entertainment, and explores their career patterns. This study also shows the affects that show business has on family and relationships, and it discusses the costs and rewards of life as a performer. Life upon the Wicked Stage illustrates that live entertainment has changed dramatically over the last one hundred and fift y years while remaining remarkably unchanged. Boles communicates that the show must go on.
Download or read book Supporting Player written by Richard Seff and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Seff has spent 60 years in the theatrical jungle as actor, playwright, librettist, agent, investor and now memoirist. He first acted professionally in 1946 and his last engagement onstage was in 2006. He took a 22 year leave of absence from the stage after a long run on Broadway in support of Claude Rains and on tour with Edward G. Robinson in the prize winning Darkness At Noon. During those 22 years he represented artists in the musical theatre. He left the talent agency in 1974 at the height of his career to return to the stage. In the 30 years that have followed, he's appeared in some 25 plays, for one of which (Angels Fall) he won the Carbonell Award for Best Supporting Actor In A Play'. He's been in 7 feature films and over 50 television series, soap operas, TV films and mini-series. He is the author of Paris Is Out! which brightened Broadway in 1970 for 104 performances. The musical Shine! for which he wrote the book, won a National Music Theatre Network Award in 2001 and has been published by Samuel French, Inc. and recorded by Original Cast Records. Hit the dressing rooms with him and discover what goes on backstage, in the wings, and behind closed doors. Learn about theatre investing in the Golden Age, when one could buy a piece of a show in the intermission on opening night. He's got tales to tell! Join him on this fun filled odyssey through the decades in shows starring Alan Alda, Ethel Merman, Chita Rivera, Dick Van Dyke, William Hurt, Christopher Reeve, Richard Thomas, Judd Hirsch, Jason Robards, in others directed by Hal Prince and written by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Come on along and listen to well, you know what. He's Got Tales to Tell! "Richard Seff's career in the theatre represents active participation as agent, producing associate, librettist, and, ultimately, as a skilled actor In fact, he was responsible for recommending me to, among others, John Kander and James and William Goldman, to take over the direction of A Family Affair in Philadelphia on its way to Broadway It turns out he's a fine writer as well, and this chronicle of an unusual and varied life in the theatre makes excellent and valuable reading." Hal Prince "Oh, what a journey we've had. I thank Richard Seff for helping mold the life that I am still enjoying today. To live it again, through his own words, fills my heart." Chita Rivera "He is a clever old sausage. Far more interesting to see written from his perspective than from a grander vantage point. Far more revealing and very redolent of the profession and its various joys, tribulations, and humiliations. Well done!" Emma Thompson "A very interesting look at our business from an angle most people never are aware of, including those who are most visibly involved." Alan Alda "For years Richard Seff has been one of the wittiest raconteurs on the Rialto, but a pleasure known only to the cognoscenti. Now he has gone public with a biographical reminiscence brimming with anecdota, insight and intelligence. Bravo!" Stefan Kanfer author of Ball of Fire
Book Synopsis The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II by : Oscar Hammerstein II
Download or read book The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II written by Oscar Hammerstein II and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From every “beautiful mornin’” to “some enchanted evening,” the songs of Oscar Hammerstein II are part of our daily lives, his words part of our national fabric. Born into a theatrical dynasty headed by his grandfather and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein II breathed new life into the moribund art form of operetta by writing lyrics and libretti for such classics as Rose-Marie (music by Rudolf Friml), The Desert Song (Sigmund Romberg), The New Moon (Romberg) and Song of the Flame (George Gershwin). Hammerstein and Jerome Kern wrote eight musicals together, including Sweet Adeline, Music in the Air, and their masterpiece, Show Boat. The vibrant Carmen Jones was Hammerstein’s all-black adaptation of the tragic opera by Georges Bizet. In 1943, Hammerstein, pioneer in the field of operetta, joined forces with Richard Rodgers, who had for the previous twenty-five years taken great strides in the field of musical comedy with his longtime writing partner, Lorenz Hart. The first Rodgers and Hammerstein work, Oklahoma!, merged the two styles into a completely new genre—the musical play—and simultaneously launched the most successful partnership in American musical theater. Over the next seventeen years, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote eight more Broadway musicals: Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific, The King and I, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music. They also wrote a movie musical (State Fair) and one for television (Cinderella). Collectively their works have earned dozens of awards, including Pulitzers, Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys. Throughout his career, Hammerstein created works of lyrical beauty and universal feeling, and he continually strove—sometimes against fashion—to seek out the good and beautiful in the world. “I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices,” he once said. “But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly . . . I just couldn’t write anything without hope in it.” All of his lyrics are here—850, more than a quarter published for the first time—in this sixth book in the indispensable Complete Lyrics series that has also brought us the lyrics of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser. From the young scribe’s earliest attempts to the old master’s final lyric—“Edelweiss”—we can see, read, and, yes, sing the words of a theatrical and lyrical genius.
Book Synopsis The Beatles - All These Years by : Mark Lewisohn
Download or read book The Beatles - All These Years written by Mark Lewisohn and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 960 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the Beatles story as it really was. Throw away what you think you know and start afresh.
Book Synopsis Life Upon the Wicked Stage by : Grace Cavalieri
Download or read book Life Upon the Wicked Stage written by Grace Cavalieri and published by Scarith. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book chronicles a career in writing poetry, broadcasting, publishing, teaching, and writing for theater. The book notes important events that have made life so colorful and enjoyable, including anecdotes about the Poets Laureate of the U.S. I've interviewed for radio. Memory is not chronological and so neither are the chapters in this memoir, I wish each chapter would be read like a discrete essay, for chronology is not the book's purpose. I cross back and forth across time to capture the past as it comes to me. -Grace Cavalieri.
Book Synopsis Before the Parade Passes By by : John Anthony Gilvey
Download or read book Before the Parade Passes By written by John Anthony Gilvey and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Golden Age of the Broadway musical, few director-choreographers could infuse a new musical with dance and movement in quite the way Gower Champion could. From his earliest Broadway success with Bye Bye Birdie to his triumphant and bittersweet valedictory, 42nd Street, musicals directed by Champion filled the proscenium with life. At their best, they touched the heart and stirred the soul with a skillful blend of elegance and American showmanship. He began his career as one-half of "America's Youngest Dance Team" with Jeanne Tyler and later teamed with his wife, dance partner, and longtime collaborator, Marge Champion. This romantic ballroom duo danced across America in the smartest clubs and onto the television screen, performing story dances that captivated the country. They ultimately took their talent to Hollywood, where they starred in the 1951 remake of Show Boat, Lovely to Look At, and other films. But Broadway always called to Champion, and in 1959 he was tapped to direct Bye Bye Birdie. The rest is history. In shows like Birdie, Carnival, Hello, Dolly!, I Do! I Do!, Sugar, and 42nd Street, luminaries such as Chita Rivera, Dick Van Dyke, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, Robert Preston, Tony Roberts, Robert Morse, Tammy Grimes, and Jerry Orbach brought Champion's creative vision to life. Working with composers and writers like Jerry Herman, Michael Stewart, Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, and Bob Merrill, he streamlined the musical making it flow effortlessly with song and dance from start to finish. John Gilvey has spoken with many of the people who worked with Champion, and in Before the Parade Passes By he tells the life story of this most American of Broadway musical director-choreographers from his early days dancing with Marge to his final days spent meticulously honing the visual magic of 42nd Street. Before the Parade Passes By is the life story of one man who personified the glory of the Broadway musical right up until the moment of his untimely death. When the curtain fell to thunderous applause on the opening night of 42nd Street, August 25, 1980, legendary impresario David Merrick came forward, silenced the audience, and announced that Champion had died that morning. As eminent theatre critic Ethan Mordden has firmly put it, "the Golden Age was over." Though the Golden Age of the Broadway musical is over, John Gilvey brings it to life again by telling the story of Gower Champion, one of its most passionate and creative legends.
Book Synopsis After Pluralism by : Courtney Bender
Download or read book After Pluralism written by Courtney Bender and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume treat pluralism as a concept that is historically and ideologically produced or, put another way, as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique considers how religious difference is framed as a problem that only pluralism can solve. Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, the essays in After Pluralism explore pluralism as a "term of art" that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sites--Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories--and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. Throughout, they question assumptions underlying pluralism's discourse and its influence on the legal decisions that shape modern religious practice. Contributors do more than deconstruct this theory; they tackle what comes next. Having established the genealogy and effects of pluralism, they generate new questions for engaging the collective worlds and multiple registers in which religion operates.
Book Synopsis The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe Book by : Shelley Costa Bloomfield
Download or read book The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe Book written by Shelley Costa Bloomfield and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-08-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genius and orphan son of itinerant actors, Poe led a tragic life and suffered greatly—as much at his own hands as those of Fate. Yet tragedy never stopped him from writing: poems, short stories, literary journalism, and even creating a new genre, the detective story—a contribution so great that the most prestigious writing award for crime fiction, given annually by the Mystery Writers of America, bears his name. The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe is a fascinating guide to the tormented genius, with critical insight into: His difficult childhood His 13-year-old bride The truth about his drug use The enduring mystery of his death Poe led a life as epic as one of his poems. In The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, you’ll learn all the deepest secrets that haunted this tortured writer, influenced his writing, and ultimately drove him to an early death.
Book Synopsis Performing Psychology by : Lois Holzman
Download or read book Performing Psychology written by Lois Holzman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than an academic critique, Performing Psychology offers a new methodology for understanding human life. Arguing that both psychological activity and its study are essentially performance, Neuman and his colleagues expose the myths of mainstream psychology and the limitations of its postmodern challengers.
Book Synopsis Life Upon the Wicked Stage by : Pamela Cockerill
Download or read book Life Upon the Wicked Stage written by Pamela Cockerill and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-26 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Life Upon the Wicked Stage' is the life story of Joan Booth, who was born into an ordinary Lancashire family in 1930 and went on to perform in musical theatre and cabaret in the 1950's.Among the stars Joan worked with were Harry H Corbett, Matt Munro, Bob Monkhouse, John Normington, Jimmy Clitheroe and the married New Zealand tenor Leslie Andrews, with whom she had a long lasting and passionate affair. Other 'names' she had brief encounters with were Eric Morley of Mecca and Miss World fame; Rupert de Leon (ex-husband of film star Margaret Lockwood); and Guy Reed, the millionaire Yorkshire racehorse breeder.Joan's memoirs are peppered with fascinating and funny anecdotes of backstage life and accounts of the propositions that female artistes routinely had to deal with in the course of earning a living on and off stage in the fifties.Joan's initial stage success came in the popular operetta Lilac Time, based on the life of `Schubert. Successive chapters tell of her experiences as a principal boy in pantomimes; as an entertainer in Pontins holiday camps (where her short shorts attracted the displeasure of Len Pontins wife); as a permanently footsore dance instructor in London; and as a singer of an unlikely mix of operatic arias and comedy songs in working men's clubs.Joan also recounts her three seasons entertaining in Jersey's top hotels, where she first introduced her howling pet poodle, Lenny, into her act. Subsequently she describes experiences in both sophisticated and tawdry Northern nightclubs; how she survived a disenchanting encounter with Ivy Benson and her All Girl Band, and her final triumphant singing performance in a top Harrogate hotel, where she was a last minute cabaret substitute for a tired and emotional Fred Emney.The book's first volume finishes in 1963 with Joan finally accepting the proposal of her long time suitor, the doggedly determined Irish cocktail barman Frank Campbell, and looking forward to a more conventional life as a wife and pub landlady.
Book Synopsis Theatrical Liberalism by : Andrea Most
Download or read book Theatrical Liberalism written by Andrea Most and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Makes new sense of aspects of popular culture we have all grown up with and thought we knew only too well. Most bridges religious studies and theater, political theory and American studies, high criticism and middlebrow performance. Her book will help us see better how Jews and their Jewishness did not merely ‘enter’ American popular culture, but did so much to invent it.”—Jonathan Boyarin Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, University of North Carolina For centuries, Jews were one of the few European cultures without any official public theatrical tradition. Yet in the modern era, Jews were among the most important creators of popular theater and film–especially in America. Why? In Theatrical Liberalism, Andrea Most illustrates how American Jews used the theatre and other media to navigate their encounters with modern culture, politics, religion, and identity, negotiating a position for themselves within and alongside Protestant American liberalism by reimagining key aspects of traditional Judaism as theatrical. Discussing works as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, The Jazz Singer, and Death of a Salesman—among many others—Most situates American popular culture in the multiple religious traditions that informed the worldviews of its practitioners. Offering a comprehensive history of the role of Judaism in the creation of American entertainment, Theatrical Liberalism re-examines the distinction between the secular and the religious in both Jewish and American contexts, providing a new way of understanding Jewish liberalism and its place in a pluralist society. With extensive scholarship and compelling evidence, Theatrical Liberalism shows how the Jewish worldview that permeates American culture has reached far beyond the Jews who created it.
Download or read book Show Boat written by Todd Decker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical tells the full story of the making and remaking of the most important musical in Broadway history. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and including much new information from early draft scripts and scores, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers up to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, as are five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show, winning appreciative audiences for over seven decades. Unlike most Broadway musicals, Show Boat put black and white performers side by side. This book is the first to take Show Boat's innovative interracial cast as the defining feature of the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage -- revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy -- Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical. This tremendous longevity allowed Show Boat to enter a creative dialogue with the full span of Broadway history. Show Boat's voyage through the twentieth century offers a vantage point on more than just the Broadway musical. It tells a complex tale of interracial encounter performed in popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound transformations.
Download or read book Supporting Player written by Richard Seff and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Seff has spent 60 years in the theatrical jungle as actor, playwright, librettist, agent, investor and now memoirist. He first acted professionally in 1946 and his last engagement onstage was in 2006. He took a 22 year leave of absence from the stage after a long run on Broadway in support of Claude Rains and on tour with Edward G. Robinson in the prize winning Darkness At Noon. During those 22 years he represented artists in the musical theatre. He left the talent agency in 1974 at the height of his career to return to the stage. In the 30 years that have followed, he's appeared in some 25 plays, for one of which (Angels Fall) he won the Carbonell Award for 'Best Supporting Actor In A Play'. He's been in 7 feature films and over 50 television series, soap operas, TV films and mini-series. He is the author of Paris Is Out! which brightened Broadway in 1970 for 104 performances. The musical Shine! for which he wrote the book, won a National Music Theatre Network Award in 2001 and has been published by Samuel French, Inc. and recorded by Original Cast Records. Hit the dressing rooms with him and discover what goes on backstage, in the wings, and behind closed doors. Learn about theatre investing in the Golden Age, when one could buy a piece of a show in the intermission on opening night. He's got tales to tell! Join him on this fun filled odyssey through the decades in shows starring Alan Alda, Ethel Merman, Chita Rivera, Dick Van Dyke, William Hurt, Christopher Reeve, Richard Thomas, Judd Hirsch, Jason Robards, in others directed by Hal Prince and written by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Come on along and listen to -- well, you know what. He's Got Tales to Tell! "Richard Seff's career in the theatre represents active participation as agent, producing associate, librettist, and, ultimately, as a skilled actor ... In fact, he was responsible for recommending me to, among others, John Kander and James and William Goldman, to take over the direction of A Family Affair in Philadelphia on its way to Broadway ... It turns out he's a fine writer as well, and this chronicle of an unusual and varied life in the theatre makes excellent and valuable reading." -- Hal Prince "Oh, what a journey we've had. I thank Richard Seff for helping mold the life that I am still enjoying today. To live it again, through his own words, fills my heart." -- Chita Rivera "He is a clever old sausage. Far more interesting to see written from his perspective than from a grander vantage point. Far more revealing and very redolent of the profession and its various joys, tribulations, and humiliations. Well done!" -- Emma Thompson "A very interesting look at our business from an angle most people never are aware of, including those who are most visibly involved." -- Alan Alda "For years Richard Seff has been one of the wittiest raconteurs on the Rialto, but a pleasure known only to the cognoscenti. Now he has gone public with a biographical reminiscence brimming with anecdota, insight and intelligence. Bravo!" -- Stefan Kanfer author of Ball of Fire
Book Synopsis Close-up on Sunset Boulevard by : Sam Staggs
Download or read book Close-up on Sunset Boulevard written by Sam Staggs and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-02-04 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relates the story of how Sunset Boulevard became a screen classic, revealing the secrets and scandals involving the big names associated with the movie and documenting the impact of this film on society.
Book Synopsis Vygotsky at Work and Play by : Lois Holzman
Download or read book Vygotsky at Work and Play written by Lois Holzman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vygotsky at Work and Play is an intimate portrayal of the Vygotskian-inspired approach to human development known as ‘social therapeutics’ and ‘the psychology of becoming’. Holzman provides an accessible, practical-philosophical portrayal of a unique performance-based methodology of development and learning that draws upon a fresh reading of Vygotsky. This expanded edition includes new content dealing with how Lev Vygotsky’s work can be applied to profound social issues of our times, including worsening police/community relations, authoritarianism in schools, the medical-model approach to social/emotional life, and the erosion of play in Western cultures. Holzman also weaves together Vygotsky’s discoveries with qualitative case studies from organizations that practice the approach in psychotherapy offices, classrooms, outside-of-school programs, corporate workplaces and virtual learning environments. The new edition of Vygotsky at Work and Play poses a practical-critical challenge to more traditional conceptions and methods of psychology and education, introducing performance as a new ontology and the author’s own activist research performance as a new way to do psychology. It is an essential read for researchers and professionals in educational and developmental psychology, psychotherapy, cultural historical activity, social science, performance studies and education.
Book Synopsis Russia at Play by : Louise McReynolds
Download or read book Russia at Play written by Louise McReynolds and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An athlete becomes a movie star; a waiter rises to manage a chain of nightclubs; a movie scenarist takes to writing restaurant reviews. Intrepid women hunt bears, drive in automobile races, and fly, first in balloons and then in airplanes. Sensational crimes jump from city streets onto the screen almost before the pistols have had a chance to cool. Paris in the Twenties? Fitzgerald's New York? Early Hollywood? No, tsarist Russia in the last decades before the Revolution. In Russia at Play, Louise McReynolds recreates a vibrant, rapidly changing culture in rich detail. Her account encompasses the "legitimate" stage, vaudeville, nightclubs, restaurants, sports, tourism, and the silent movie industry. McReynolds reveals a pluralist and dynamic society, and shows how the new icons of mass culture affected the subsequent gendering of identities. The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late tsarist period spawned dramatic social changes—an urban middle class and a voracious consumer culture demanded new forms of entertainment. The result was the rapid incursion of commercial values into the arts and the athletic field and unprecedented degrees of social interaction in the new nightclubs, vaudeville houses, and cheap movie houses. Traditional rules of social conduct shifted to greater self-fulfillment and self-expression, values associated with the individualism and consumerism of liberal capitalism. Leisure-time activities, McReynolds finds, allowed Russians who partook of them to recreate themselves, to develop a modern identity that allowed for different senses of the self depending on the circumstances. The society that spawned these impulses would disappear in Russia for decades under the combined blows of revolution, civil war, and collectivization, but questions of personal identity are again high on the agenda as Russia makes the transition from a collectivist society to one in which the dominant ethos remains undefined.
Book Synopsis Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire by : Philip C. Kolin
Download or read book Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire written by Philip C. Kolin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-27 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A continuous history of the play, Streetcar named desire in production from 1947 to 1998, with emphasis on the Broadway premiere.
