A Wonderful Guy: Conversations with the Great Men of Musical Theater, Eddie Shapiro’s follow up to his wildly popular Nothing Like a Dame, will be released on Thursday, April 1, 2021 and is published by Oxford Press. A Wonderful Guy will be available in hardcover and digital formats with pre-orders now being accepted on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
In A Wonderful Guy, Shapiro sits down for intimate, career-encompassing conversations with 19 of Broadway’s most prolific and fascinating leading men. Full of detailed stories and reflections, the talks dig deep into each actor’s career; together, these chapters tell the story of what it means to be a leading man on Broadway over the past fifty years.
Shapiro said, “In Nothing Like a Dame, I talked to the greatest living female stars of the American Musical Theater, weaving a tapestry of 60 years-worth of Broadway’s oral history. But, of course, the women only tell part of that story. For every Evita, there’s a Che. Mrs. Lovett is no one without Sweeny Todd. Bess only exists if Porgy’s there, too. The list of iconic male musical theater characters embodied by indelible performers is not only robust, it’s made of legends.
Only Joel Grey can talk about creating an iconic role on Broadway, then starring in the film version, then bringing it back to Broadway. Only Michael Cerveris can detail the experience of creating iconic roles as diverse as the eponymous Tommy, and Bruce in Fun Home. Only John Cullum has appeared on Broadway in each of the last seven decades. And Brian Stokes Mitchell knows better than anyone what it feels like to be a star of today at a time when stars who work exclusively in theater are all but extinct. Their stories are unique and needed to be captured.”
Spanning three generations of luminaries from icons of the stage like Joel Grey (Cabaret) and Ben Vereen (Pippin) to the newest crop of leading men like Raúl Esparza (Company) and Christian Borle (Something Rotten) along with a host of others, A Wonderful Guy brings more fly-on-the-wall opportunities for fans to savor, students to study, and even the unindoctrinated to understand the life of the performing artist.
In addition to Grey, Vereen, Esparza, and Borle, A Wonderful Guy features interviews with John Cullum (On the Twentieth Century, Shenandoah), Len Cariou (Sweeney Todd), Michael Rupert (Falsettos, Sweet Charity), Terrence Mann (Les Misérables), Howard McGillin (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Brian Stokes Mitchell (Kiss Me, Kate), Marc Kudisch (The Girl From the North Country), Michael Cerveris (Fun Home, Assassins), Norm Lewis (The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess), Will Chase (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), Christopher Sieber (Spamalot), Norbert Leo Butz (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), Gavin Creel (Hello, Dolly!), Cheyenne Jackson (Finian’s Rainbow), andJonathan Groff (Hamilton).
