A Broadway tell-all that deserves to become a classic of music theater lore.
A legendary figure of American musical theater narrates her life and her career in startlingly frank terms.
Rodgers moved in theater circles nearly her entire life (1931-2014). Her remembrances are lively, witty, honest, and "dishy" regarding a host of boldfaced names, both those she loved and those she hated. New York Times chief theater critic Green's annotations fill out the history and offer helpful fact-checks. Daughter of composer Richard Rodgers and mother of composer Adam Guettel, Mary, also a composer, surrounded herself with talent. As an adolescent girl, she played word games with lifelong friend Stephen Sondheim; as a teenager, she dated Hal Prince. She served as an assistant for 14 years for the New York Philharmonic’s Young People's Concerts program, and always she found Leonard Bernstein "fascinating." Carol Burnett found her breakthrough role in Rodgers' Once Upon a Mattress, while Judy Holliday bombed in Hot Spot. Rodgers was also the author of classic children's books, including Freaky Friday, and became a leading "philanthropeuse" of New York society, including seven years as chairman of the board of the Julliard School. She takes us inside the "romance"-like nature of collaborating on a musical. The "erotic part of songwriting," she writes, is "the way you mate words with music." She also writes movingly and with "knee-jerk transparency” about parental neglect ("I doubt either of my parents really even wanted to have children"), adultery, rampant alcoholism, and other dark sides of her artistic circles. Her first marriage was a mistake, though "everyone should marry a gay man at least once." Rodgers also endured an abortion and the death of a child. Some of her anecdotes seem like more family lore than lived history—e.g., at Mary's birth, her mother told the nurse, "Take her away and bring her back when she looks younger”—but most of her stories are revelatory and often hilarious. "I broke a lot of rules," she admits, "but they weren't mine."
A Broadway tell-all that deserves to become a classic of music theater lore.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-29862-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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