A captivating gift to theater lovers.
The riotous revival of Broadway.
A New York Post theater columnist and co-host of PBS’s Theater Talk, Riedel brings enthusiasm and authority to this rich, lively debut history of New York theater in the 1970s and ’80s. During Broadway’s golden age, in the 1950s and ’60s, theater audiences averaged 7 million per year. But by the early 1970s, attendance dropped to half: white flight had sent 800,000 New Yorkers to the suburbs; Times Square had become unsavory, a “twenty-four-hour carnival of sex, drugs, and crime”; and in 1969, the stock market crashed. “Money that could have been risked for a flutter on a Broadway show vanished,” writes the author. But three men were determined to save the industry: Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernie Jacobs, who wrested control of the Shubert empire’s 17 theaters from hard-drinking Larry Shubert; and Jimmy Nederlander, who began a theater-buying spree that positioned him as the Shubert Organization’s archrival. “The Great Duel” began, with A Chorus Line opening in a Shubert theater in 1975 and Nederlander bringing Annie to the stage in 1977. Drawing on newspaper articles, reviews, interviews, and memoirs, Riedel vividly portrays the egotistical players in a feud so intense that producers had to take sides. Among them was David Merrick, whose hits included Gypsy, Irma La Douce, and Hello, Dolly! “I have the soul of an alley cat,” he said himself. But the misanthropic Merrick was not the only difficult personality: Jerome Robbins “was a tyrant, notorious for his tantrums”; and choreographer Michael Bennett self-medicated “with pot, Quaaludes, and cocaine.” After meeting with Schoenfeld and Jacobs about their groundbreaking new musical, Cats, Andrew Lloyd Weber and Cameron Mackintosh were dumfounded: “These are the people who run Broadway?...They’re all mad.” Riedel masterfully builds suspense as he chronicles productions from idea to stage to reviews to Tony Awards.
A captivating gift to theater lovers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7216-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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