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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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