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Book Review: BROADWAY GOES TO WAR: AMERICAN THEATER DURING WORLD WAR II (Robert L. McLaughlin & Sally E. Perry)
THIS MEANS WAR, ER, ENTERTAINMENT “War, war, war! This war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this Spring! I get so bored I could scream!” That of course is Scarlett O’Hara talking about the Civil War, but the sentiment resonated with a great many Americans in 1939. As Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally…
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10 MUST-WATCH MOVIES BASED ON CLASSIC LITERATURE
10 Must-Watch Movies Based on Classic Literature A book or a movie? Both literature and cinematography have their unique language of expression. Classic books often serve as a source of inspiration for directors and screenwriters. They may film exact adaptations or offer the audience to look at the story from a new angle, experimenting with…
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Book Review: DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD: LIFE LESSONS FROM THE SIX EX-WIVES OF HENRY VIII (Harriet Marsden)
SPEAKING OF HEAD… At first, I didn’t want to read this, the cover’s pink for fucksake! But my girlfriend Cherisse bugged the crap out of me until I did. She’s always making me watch PBS and go to Ethiopian restaurants and stuff like that. We have a deal – Saturdays we do her shit, Sundays…
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Book Review: A WONDERFUL GUY: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE GREAT MEN OF MUSICAL THEATRE (Eddie Shapiro)
IN THE GUYS OF THEATER To misquote Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that most actors love to talk about themselves. Eddie Shapiro has taken full advantage of this fact and the result is a refreshingly honest account of what it means to be a musical theatre performer. A Wonderful Guy is a…
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Book Review: VITAGRAPH: AMERICA’S FIRST GREAT MOTION PICTURE STUDIO (Andrew A. Erish)
VITAL VITAGRAPH This is the story of two motion picture pioneers, but their names are not Griffith, Chaplin, or any of the usual suspects found in the history books. J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith were prime movers in the film world of their time, but are forgotten today, mainly because others who came…
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Book Review: PATRICIA NEAL: AN UNQUIET LIFE (Stephen Miller Shearer; updated)
NEAL IN GRATITUDE As biographies of Hollywood’s Golden Age continue to roll off the assembly line, their subjects seem to fall into two categories: victims and survivors. Of the two we like the victims best – eternally beautiful, forever young, a twentieth century communion of saints presided over by the trinity of Judy Garland, Marilyn…
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Book: A WONDERFUL GUY: CONVERSATIONS WITH THE GREAT MEN OF MUSICAL THEATER (Edited by Eddie Shapiro)
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…
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Book Review: MEAN. . . MOODY. . . MAGNIFICENT! JANE RUSSELL AND THE MARKETING OF A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND (Christina Rice)
HARDLY AN AVERAGE JANE The Hollywood Golden Age biography market is glutted with studies of Crawford, Davis, Dietrich, Hepburn, Hepburn, Monroe, Taylor and their peers. Is there anything left to say about these fabled creatures? The answer in most cases is a resounding “No!” Consequently, many writers are now exploring less well-trodden paths, and it’s…
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Book Review: JAYNE MANSFIELD: THE GIRL COULDN’T HELP IT (Eve Golden)
A BUST OF PERSONALITY “Ladies and Gentlemen, here they are, Jayne Mansfield.” Talk-show host Jack Paar allegedly paid his writer Dick Cavett $5,000 for that line and it pretty much says it all. He was of course referring to Ms. Mansfield’s celebrated twin assets, but as Eve Golden reveals in this ferociously readable biography, there…
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Film: HAVEN’T READ, BUT WILL SEE THAT
THE BEST FILM ADAPTATIONS OF THE CLASSICS Most of the time, when you ask someone how a movie was that’s based on a book that they’ve read before, you’ll hear them say that the book was better. This is the case in most of today’s movie adaptations, where a long and brilliantly written novel is…
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Book Review: A CHRONOLOGY OF FILM: A CULTURAL TIMELINE AFROM THE MAGIC LANTERN TO NETFLIX (Ian Haydn Smith)
THE HISTORY OF CINEMA IS A HISTORY OF US In A Chronology of Film, Ian Haydn Smith takes on the history of Cinema (and incidentally the history of the world) from the late nineteenth century to the present. As befits the recounting of a primarily visual medium, the book is a visual treat with a…
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Theater: ANOTHER DAY’S BEGUN – EXLORING THORNTON WILDER’S “OUR TOWN” (Pasadena Playhouse)
A celebration of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play and Howard Sherman’s new book On March 11, 2021 at 6:30pm PT, Pasadena Playhouse presents the live streaming of Another Day’s Begun: Exploring Our Town on PlayhouseLive. Available on demand beginning March 12, this special event celebrates Our Town, the quintessential American play, with performances from previous cast members…
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Book Review: EUBIE BLAKE — RAGS, RHYTHM AND RACE (Richard Carlin & Ken Bloom)
RACE TO THE TOP James Hubert Blake was born in the nineteenth century and lived into his late nineties (He falsely claimed to have reached 100, but that’s show biz.) The eleventh child of parents born in slavery, he lived through two world wars, the depression, the civil rights movement and received the Medal of…
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Book Review: HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX AND OTHER PLAYS (Adrienne Kennedy)
NEW VOLUME OF KENNEDY PLAYS ARRIVES TODAY He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays by Adrienne Kennedy is now available. The titular play, which received its world premiere at Theatre for a New Audience in New York in the winter of 2018, is joined in this volume by Etta and Ella on…
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Book Review: SHOWBIZ (Dress Circle Publishing)
MOUNTING OLYMPUS Think of it as Twilight for the theater geek or Smash in literary form. You may love to hate it or hate to love it, but Ruby Preston’s new novel Showbiz is an undeniable page-turner: a fabulously fun, fictional glimpse into the drama of mounting a Broadway musical today. Scarlett Savoy is an…
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