An indispensable supplement to our understanding of a musical theater giant.
Short, shrewd biography of the legendary composer/lyricist.
Much has been written about Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), most prominently Meryle Secrest’s more-or-less-authorized 1998 biography. It’s characteristic of Okrent’s ability to go beyond the usual that he found there a revealing, previously unremarked comment by Judy Prince, wife of Sondheim’s longtime director/producer Hal, and herself one of the composer’s closest friends. After hearing songs from Sweeney Todd, his blood-soaked masterpiece about a vengeance-driven barber, she exclaimed, “It’s the story of your life!” A thirst for revenge is one of several dark personality traits that Okrent (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, 2010) discerns in a portrait refreshingly unlike the generally worshipful treatment accorded the man who revolutionized the American musical. Not that Okrent isn’t a “Sondhead,” as he affectionately terms Cult of Sondheim members, and his coverage of such storied productions as Company, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, and Assassins is cogent. What stands out, however, are his thoughtful exegeses of Sondheim’s work as it expressed lifelong personal conflicts. Okrent identifies two paradigmatic songs: “Someone in a Tree” from Pacific Overtures “is the effort of a young boy trying to connect,” while “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park With George “is the effort of a mature artist trying to create” who bemoans that others don’t understand why this is more important than any human connection. The subtitle is apt: A perfectionist to the point of cruelty to collaborators, Sondheim dedicated his life to the agonies of creation and was profoundly uncomfortable with intimacy. In his final decades, when his creative abilities faltered but he was happily in love with a man 50 years his junior, his longtime librettist James Lapine saw “the reservoir of anger inside of him dissipate.” But for five decades, in more than a dozen shows that expanded the horizons of musical theater, work was Sondheim’s salvation. “The difference between Sweeney and me,” he told an interviewer, “is that I turned it into art.”
An indispensable supplement to our understanding of a musical theater giant.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780300270211
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.
The Oscar-winning actor and producer opens up about filmmaking, sex, drugs, and escaping his father’s shadow.
Despite its casual, just-shooting-the-breeze title, Douglas’ memoir is detailed and precision-engineered to entertain; as a filmmaker who won his first Oscar as a producer (for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), he knows a successful story needs clarity and conflict to work. The son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, he was well-acquainted with celebrity at an early age; witnessing his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his youth acting out. (He paid for college by selling weed by the suitcase-load.) After years of stalls and failures, he broke through on TV with the ’70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco. But small-screen work (along with his nepo-baby status) made breaking into big-screen roles harder until 1984’s Romancing the Stone made him a star and 1987’s Wall Street earned him a second Oscar. Douglas is candid about his industry struggles—like endless budget fights and betraying his father, who was promised the lead in Cuckoo’s Nest—and his reputation as a lothario. (Though married, he had an on-set affair with Kathleen Turner during Stone.) He’s also open about his alcohol and cocaine abuse, leading to a rehab stint, echoed in his son Cameron’s own struggles with addiction and recovery. He’s comfortable discussing controversies—the LGBTQ+ community’s protests of 1992’s Basic Instinct, his proto-MAGA character in 1993’s Falling Down—and plainly keeps an enemies list. But this story arc leaves him triumphant, with a loving wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his family, his health (after a cancer scare), and a late-career Emmy for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013).
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781538782224
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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