An enjoyable peek behind the curtain for those with an interest in theater but little actual experience with its production....
The staging of Broadway’s The Producers as seen through the confident and vivacious eyes of a chorus member who eventually got to understudy Matthew Broderick as well.
Denman uses a diary format to take readers almost day by day through the musical’s creation. Though Mel Brooks wrote the score and script, many figured the stage version of The Producers would be hard-pressed to compete with fond memories of his movie. They were wrong: the show turned out to be a great hit, not least because of the work of actors such as Denman. He proves a humble enough guide, and frequently irresistible too. His delivery is breathless (“I fancied myself quite the young song-and-dance man. Still do. In Crazy for You, Harry was brilliant. I instantly became an admirer”), and he keeps the narrative frolicsome. Yet Denman also manages to squire the proceedings from auditions and callbacks through all the fortuitous stuff that goes into the making of a successful production (the little touches the actors add to the original material, for example) to the tech rehearsals, the press event, the producer's run-through, the invited dress, the first preview, and opening night. And that’s just for the Chicago opening, after which it’s time to iron out all the glitches, make last-minute changes, and repeat the whole process for make-it-or-break-it New York. Denman works wonders with atmosphere: there is a lovely moment when he speaks of the pleasure of an empty theater with only a ghost light on the stage and a stagehand or two lurking about. Next thing you know, there he is, the Tonys hardly handed out, auditioning for Oklahoma. Denman's show is always on; no wonder it’s hard to take your eyes off him.
An enjoyable peek behind the curtain for those with an interest in theater but little actual experience with its production. (20 b&w photos)Pub Date: April 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-87830-154-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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