Berger delivers the inside scoop with ample melodrama and star-crossed folly.
A dishy take on the successful yet calamity-prone Broadway production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
As a script collaborator on the unprecedented project, Emmy Award–winning TV writer Berger looks back on the six tumultuous years he spent on the increasingly tangled and mismanaged Spider-Man theatrical “undertaking,” a production plagued with technical snafus, poor critical reception and countless script overhauls. Though meticulously documented, from the show’s origins in 2005 to its nerve-wracking press previews and strained opening-night curtain call, some details seem glossed over in favor of anecdotal notes on the author’s regrettably disintegrated relationship with Julie Taymor, the show’s headstrong director. “Even now, I still carry the dream with me every day—to make up with her,” writes Berger. This sentiment hovers over the narrative, even as the author launches into an avalanche of mishaps along Spider-Man’s serpentine path to the stage. At the core of the dysfunction, he writes, was a general lack of confluence among the production team, which included Irish producer Tony Adams, “puckish” lead producer Michael Cohl, and U2’s Bono and the Edge, musical collaborators who seemed mismatched for the project. Berger’s version of events spotlights Marvel Entertainment’s continual disapproval of the material’s treatment and the undermining and swift firing of Taymor, an event Berger himself contributed to with the formulation of “Plan X,” an alternate, lighter script version written without Taymor’s knowledge. A threatened lawsuit simmered and came to pass when book-writing royalties were withheld from Taymor. The author found little consolation in the eventual resolution of Taymor’s litigation, and his tone at the onset and conclusion of the book still seems to yearn for reconciliation as the show continues to cash in.
Berger delivers the inside scoop with ample melodrama and star-crossed folly.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8456-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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