Isenberg’s readable, straightforward history—less a critical analysis than Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders (2013), which...
Half a century of sunrises and sunsets have passed since Fiddler on the Roof opened. It’s still playing to full houses somewhere, and theater journalist Isenberg (Conversations with Frank Gehry, 2009, etc.) expounds happily on why it remains such a satisfactory hit for all audiences.
Who would expect a big Broadway musical about poor shtetl Jews to become such a big hit? Yet Fiddler, based on stories set in Czarist Russia by the popular Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, broke box office records. As Isenberg writes, many talented professionals contributed to its success. Playwright Joseph Stein kept writing and revising the book. Where producer Harold Prince found investors isn’t revealed, but the author notes how the show got its name, which reminded theatergoers that there would be music. Lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock wrote dozens of tunes and lyrics, but less than a third made it to opening night. The author also examines the casting process: For the lead role of Tevye, would they cast Rod Steiger? Walter Matthau? The star, of course, was a mad comic genius, the egocentric Zero Mostel, who loathed the difficult directorial genius, equally egocentric Jerome Robbins. The director didn’t like being Jewish and had to research appropriate customs. Despite indifferent opening reviews, Fiddler was an evergreen blockbuster, tugging on heartstrings across the world over thousands of road shows, community theaters and high schools. The popular 1971 film, under the guidance of Norman Jewison (not Jewish), starring Israeli actor Chaim Topol, with Isaac Stern fiddling, carried Fiddler’s reputation still further. For many of a certain age, the musical’s score is ingrained, part of the DNA.
Isenberg’s readable, straightforward history—less a critical analysis than Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders (2013), which covers the same territory—is, with just an expedient hint of schmaltz, a loving tribute to a cultural phenomenon.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-59142-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
