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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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