Download or read book Gypsy written by Jule Styne and published by Theatre Communications Grou. This book was released on 1994 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest musicals of all time, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Gypsy is based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, a famous burlesque stripper. The musical focuses on her overbearing mother, Rose, the quintessential stage mother, as she pushes Gypsy (then known as Louise) and her sister June into life on the vaudeville circuit, forever trying to break into the big time. The musical contains many songs that have become popular standards, including 'Everything's Coming up Roses' and 'Let Me Entertain You'. Gypsy was premiered on Broadway in May 1959 at The Broadway Theatre (transferring to the Imperial Theatre), directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, with Ethel Merman starring as Rose.
Download or read book Sweet Bird of Youth written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1975 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The very title of Sweet Bird of Youth is one of ironic pity. The two chief characters--a raddled has-been actress from Hollywood, seeking to forget her present in drugs and sex, and her still handsome masseur-gigolo, who has brought her to his hometown in the South, believing that through her money and faded glamor his gaudy illusions may yet come true--are the reverse side of the American dream of youth. Yet as they work out their fate amid violence and horror, there is nevertheless a note of compassion for the damned.
Download or read book Gypsy written by Gypsy Rose Lee and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir became a New York Times bestseller in 1957, inspiring the 1959 hit musical, two movies, and three revivals. Now a fourth, directed by Arthur Laurents and starring Patti LuPone, is lighting up New York, winning top Broadway theatre awards, including three 2008 Tony Awards, as well as raves from critics and audiences: “No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more exciting production.” —Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal “Watch out, New York! This GYPSY is a wallop-packing show of raw power.” —Ben Brantley, The New York Times “Not your ordinary theater experience. This is the best production of the best damn musical ever.” —Liz Smith, Syndicated Columnist The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters were celebrities, and Walter Winchell was king. Gypsy’s story features outrageous characters—among them Broadway’s funny girl, Fanny Brice, who schooled Gypsy in how to be a star; gangster Waxy Gordon, who fixed her teeth; and her indomitable mother, Rose, who lived by her own version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others … before they do you.”
Download or read book The Secret Life of the American Musical written by Jack Viertel and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller: “Both revelatory and entertaining . . . Along the way, Viertel provides some fascinating Broadway history.” —The New York Times Book Review Americans invented musicals—and have a longstanding love affair with them. But what, exactly, is a musical? In this book, longtime theatrical producer and writer Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he shows us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward. Beginning with an overture and concluding with a curtain call, with stops in between for “I Want” songs, “conditional” love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales, Viertel shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically. The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel like you’re there in the rehearsal room, the front row, and the offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit. “A valuable addition to the theater lover’s bookshelf. . . . fans will appreciate the dips into memoir and Viertel’s takes on original cast albums.” —Publishers Weekly “Even seasoned hands will come away with a clearer understanding of why some shows work while others flop.” —Commentary “A showstopper . . . infectiously entertaining.” —John Lahr, author of Notes on a Cowardly Lion “Thoroughly interesting.” —The A.V. Club “The best general-audience analysis of musical theater I have read in many years.” —The Charlotte Observer “Delightful . . . a little bit history, a little bit memoir, a little bit criticism and, for any theater fan, a whole lot of fun.” —The Dallas Morning News
Download or read book Mama Rose s Turn written by Carolyn Quinn and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hers is the show business saga you think you already know--but you ain't seen nothin' yet. Rose Thompson Hovick, mother of June Havoc and Gypsy Rose Lee, went down in theatrical history as "The Stage Mother from Hell" after her immortalization on Broadway in Gypsy: A Musical Fable. Yet the musical was 75 percent fictionalized by playwright Arthur Laurents and condensed for the stage. Rose's full story is even more striking. Born fearless on the North Dakota prairie in 1891, Rose Thompson had a kind father and a gallivanting mother who sold lacy finery to prostitutes. She became an unhappy teenage bride whose marriage yielded two entrancing daughters, Louise and June. When June was discovered to be a child prodigy in ballet, capable of dancing en pointe by the age of three, Rose, without benefit of any theatrical training, set out to create onstage opportunities for her magical baby girl--and succeeded. Rose followed her own star and created two more in dramatic and colorful style: "Baby June" became a child headliner in vaudeville, and Louise grew up to be the well-known burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. The rest of Mama Rose's remarkable story included love affairs with both men and women, the operation of a "lesbian pick-up joint" where she sold homemade bathtub gin, wild attempts to extort money from Gypsy and June, two stints as a chicken farmer, and three allegations of cold-blooded murder--all of which was deemed unfit for the script of Gypsy. Here, at last, is the rollicking, wild saga that never made it to the stage.
Download or read book Fade Out Fade in written by Jule Styne and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Come Back Come Back Wherever You are written by Arthur Laurents and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First produced by the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on October 9, 2009.
Download or read book Working on a Song written by Anaïs Mitchell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Working On A Song is one of the best books about lyric writing for the theater I've read."—Lin-Manuel Miranda Anaïs Mitchell named to TIME's List of the 100 Most Influential People in the World of 2020 An illuminating book of lyrics and stories from Hadestown—the winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical—from its author, songwriter Anaïs Mitchell with a foreword by Steve Earle On Broadway, this fresh take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has become a modern classic. Heralded as “The best new musical of the season,” by The Wall Street Journal, and “Sumptuous. Gorgeous. As good as it gets,” by The New York Times, the show was a breakout hit, with its poignant social commentary, and spellbinding music and lyrics. In this book, Anaïs Mitchell takes readers inside her more than decade’s-long process of building the musical from the ground up—detailing her inspiration, breaking down the lyrics, and opening up the process of creation that gave birth to Hadestown. Fans and newcomers alike will love this deeply thoughtful, revealing look at how the songs from “the underground” evolved, and became the songs we sing again and again.
Download or read book The New York Times Book of Broadway written by Ben Brantley and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-11-14 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume, essential for anyone who loves Broadway, includes a full introduction by Ben Brantley, chief theater critic of The Times, his selection of 25 of the influential Broadway plays that defined the twentieth century, and his choice of 100 other, memorable plays - right up through plays currently running on Broadway.".
Download or read book Six The Musical Vocal Selections written by and published by Hal Leonard. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Vocal Selections). Six has received rave reviews around the world for its modern take on the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII and it's finally opening on Broadway! From Tudor queens to pop princesses, the six wives take the mic to remix five hundred years of historical heartbreak into an exuberant celebration of 21st century girl power! Songs include: All You Wanna Do * Don't Lose Ur Head * Ex-Wives * Get Down * Haus of Holbein * Heart of Stone * I Don't Need Your Love * No Way * Six.
Download or read book Gypsy written by Rachel Shteir and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the firstand the onlystripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high cultureshe boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stageinspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose. Gypsy is the first book about Gypsy Rose Lees life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life. Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winning Striptease, gives us Gypsys story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. Gypsy tells how she did it, and why.
Download or read book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight written by Mark Steyn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The glorious tradition of the Broadway musical from Irving Berlin to Jerome Kern and Rodgers and Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim. And then . . . Cats and Les Miz. Mark Steyn's Broadway Babies Say Goodnight is a sharp-eyed view of the whole span of Broadway musical history, seven decades of brilliant achievements the best of which are among the finest works American artists have made. Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Gypsy, and more. In an energetic blend of musical history, analysis, and backstage chat, Mark Steyn shows us the genius behind the 'simple' musical, and asks hard questions about the British invasion of Broadway and the future of the form. In this delicious book he gives us geniuses and monsters, hits and atomic bombs, and the wonderful stories that prove show business is a business which -- as the song goes --there's no business like.
Download or read book The Realistic Joneses written by Will Eno and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] tender, funny, terrific new play. . . . Mr. Eno's voice, which teases out the poetry in the pedestrian and finds glinting humor in the static that infuses our faltering efforts to communicate, is as distinctive as any American playwright's today."—The New York Times "Weird and wonderful . . . Eno's familiar sudden-shifting between profound and playful verbiage is delightfully disarming and sometimes awfully funny."—Variety “Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as The Realistic Joneses… do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really…. Mr. Eno’s voice may be the most singular of his generation, but it’s humane, literate and slyly hilarious…. For all the sadness woven into its fabric, The Realistic Joneses brought me a pleasurable rush virtually unmatched by anything I’ve seen this season.” – The New York Times “As usual, Eno’s dialogue is a marvel of compression and tonal control, trivial chitchat flipping into cosmic profundity with striking ease…. There’s much to savor: the dry but meaningful banter, the joy of humans sharing time and space, battling the darkness with a joke or silence. Life in Enoland isn’t what you’d call realistic—it’s more real than that.” – Time Out New York “[An] elliptical, funny, dark and strangely moving new play…. Eno is a writer with heart and compassion.” – Chicago Tribune “Eno's first-ever commercial foray ups the creative ante in a Broadway climate that can be resistant to new voices…. [A] very fine play where laughter exists a heartbeat, or heartbreak, away from tears.” – The Telegraph Meet Bob and Jennifer and their new neighbors John and Pony, two suburban couples who have more in common than their identical last names. Boasting the playwright's quintessential existential quirkiness, this new comedy finds poetry in the banal while humorously exploring our ever-floundering efforts at communication. Listed as one of New York Times's Best Plays of 2012, The Realistic Joneses received its Broadway premiere in spring 2014, starring Toni Collete, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts and Marisa Tomei, and opening to rave reviews. Will Eno is the author of Thom Pain (based on nothing), which ran for a year Off-Broadway and was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Other works include Middletown, The Flu Season, Tragedy: a tragedy, Intermission, and Gnit, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. His many awards include the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award, the Horton Foote Prize, and the first-ever Marian Seldes/Garson Kanin Fellowship by the Theater Hall of Fame.
Download or read book Nice Fish written by Louis Jenkins and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, 1995 "To imagine what it means to be another human being is an act of love. These are poems written by a great lover of the world. Everything in it that stands alone, unobserved, and luminous. Solitary people with their solitary destinies...If there's a native, archetypical American solitude, Louis Jenkins has given us its flavor."--Charles Simic,The Boston Review
Download or read book On the Twentieth Century written by Cy Coleman and published by Drama Publishers. This book was released on 1981 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Be the Best Swing on Broadway written by Jennie Ford and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are thousands of performing arts schools grooming students for Broadway. Broadway is revered as the pinnacle of every performer's career. It's the “Olympics” of our sport that we have trained and worked so hard for. Would you be confident if you received a Broadway contract that said you were going to be a swing, a dance captain or an understudy? Hopefully you would reply, “yes”...after all, you have a college degree in the arts right? Half of the Broadway swings this season made their Broadway debut! These are fundamental jobs in every Broadway musical, so why aren't graduates prepared to do these jobs? The problem is that there is “book knowledge” from school and “learned knowledge” from being on the job. This book series is here to bridge the gap between the two. Students are taught how to pick songs for the roles they are right for, how to perform them, how to study scripts, how to audition and how to show the best of themselves. They study the history of theatre and graduate with confidence that they can nail that audition and land a job. What happens when a talented performer actually books a job? What skill-set do they have to prepare them for the responsibilities that come along with performing under a union contract? It's a rude awakening for some performers to find out that about 85% of Broadway performers are not principal performers. Even those principals are not always principals! The career choices are endless on Broadway and the idea is to prepare yourself for all opportunities. “Be the best on Broadway” is a how-to-series that will demystify and teach those who really want a career on Broadway, no matter how much schooling you may (or may not) have. Each book is written by a Broadway professional with first-hand experience and is regarded as an expert. Each writer is respected by their peers for the work they contribute on a daily basis on Broadway. The series breaks down the different job particulars in depth and provides tangible Broadway show examples. The goal is to combine valuable insight and resources into one book series to strengthen the chance of success for those who have the Broadway dream! “Be The Best on Broadway” series is intended to be the newest “gold standard” of this industry. It will become one of those “must have” book series similar to “Audition” by Michael Shurtleff, “Meisner on Acting” by Sanford Meisner”, and “Respect for Acting” by Uta Hagen. This particular book will prove to be invaluable to swings as well as any performer who wants to learn through this special “lens” ...the eye of a swing! This book looks at Broadway through the unique perspective of a swing. It will help you understand the chorus better and you will gain an appreciation for the old Broadway adage “the show must go on”. Swings are the very reason that the show can go on and you will soon see why. It is a job function on Broadway that is not widely written about or taught in schools. Until now, it's been every actor fending for themselves when offered a swing contract. I have been there! It took me many years of being a Broadway swing to figure out what works and what doesn't. I wish I had someone or some book to give me guidance at the beginning of my career. Think of this book as a “book of secrets” to give you the chance to be an outstanding swing. There is nothing more rewarding than being recognized by your peers for doing your job well. There is a high percentage of performers on Broadway that, at one time or another, have been asked to be a swing. The tips in this book will make you stand out as a swing. It also deals with relationship skills needed for a career on Broadway. “Talent” doesn't give you opportunities, relationships do! The goal is not to just do it well, but to become “the best” at it! The ultimate goal is to have it be the only book you will ever need to be the best swing on Broadway.
