biography theater

Hardcover. NY, Stein and Day , 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, blue dust jacket, 311 pages with index. Color frontis, b&w illustrations. "In Grimaldi's lifetime (1779-1837) he won fame and affection for his pantomines;" Dickens reordered the memoirs into a straight narrative of Grimaldi's life." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor, MI, Ardis, 1st English, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 565 pages. B/w illustrations throughout. Gilt title on spine. Decorated endpapers. Dust Jacket shows some wear due to age: yellowing, fraying and chipping to edges of front, spine and back, but still in tact. Cover boards clean, covered in teal fabric and in good shape. Pages clean, edges slightly yellowed. From the front flap: "...a landmark work in Russian theater scholarship, this study reveals Meyerhold in the context of his time, as seen by friends and enemies, actors and critics, and analyzes the development of his remarkable career as Russia's most celebrated and influential experimental director."

Hardcover. NY, Back Stage Books, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 320 pages. Foreword by Frank Rich. Henderson (curator of the White Barn Theater Museum in Westport, Connecticut, she's lectured and written extensively on theater), using the substantial archive of his writings, has assembled a suitable tribute to one of America's most influential creators of theater design. The book proceeds chronologically through Mielziner's life and long career, richly supplemented with photos and high quality color reproductions of the designer's watercolor and pencil drawings, and excerpts from his writings. He designed the original sets for A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and Carousel and operas such as Don Giovanni. NOTE: While this book is bright and clean, it has a light musty odor.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth covers stamped in orange, yellow and white, 474 pages. The memoirs of a major American playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner for Street Scene. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Brewer & Warren, 1st US, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with green cloth spine, 494 pages. A scholarly biography of the great French dramatist, b&w illustrations. Light shelf wear. Top of spine has some fading/sunning, no markings.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. This is Brigit Brophy's original 1964 edition (she later revisited it in 1988) of her profoundly original and controversial psychoanalytic study of Mozart's five most famous operas. 328 pages, clean copy.

Softcover. San Diego, Harcourt Brace,, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 839 pages, contains two glossy black and white plates sections. This major work, the result of years of careful study and analysis, places Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and music in the context of the intellectual, political and artistic currents of eighteenth-century Europe. The result is a fresh interpretation of Mozart's genius, as Robert Gutman shows the great composer in a new light. With an informed and sensitive handling, Mozart emerges as an affectionate and generous man with family and friends, self-deprecating, witty, and winsome but also an austere moralist, incisive and purposeful. The major genres in which Mozart worked-chamber music, liturgical, theater and keyboard compositions, concertos, operas, symphonies, and oratorios-are unfolded to reveal a man of luminous intellect. Mozart is an extraordinary portrait of a man and his times and a brilliant distillation of musical thought.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 288 pages, b&w photo illustrations, black cloth covers, gilt on spine faded. INSCRIBED BY SHAWN and dated Nov. 5 1960 on front fly leaf. No dust jacket. Ted Shawn was an American dancer and choreographer. Considered a pioneer of American modern dance, he created the Denishawn School together with his wife Ruth St. Denis. After their separation he created the all-male company Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. Covers Shawn's travels and tours: with the army, in the Orient; and his creation of the Denishawn Dancers with the male athletes at Springfield College. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press , 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 438 pages, profusely illustrated in color and b&w. An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. On a winter day in 1953, a mysterious man in a sheepskin coat stood out to Harriet Pattison, then a theater student at Yale. She would later learn he was the architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974). This chance encounter served as preamble to a fifteen-year romance, with Pattison becoming the architect's closest confidante, his intellectual partner, and the mother of his only son. Here for the first time, Pattison recounts their passionate and sometimes searing relationship. Married and twenty-seven years her senior, Kahn sent her scores of letters--many from far-flung places--until his untimely death. This book weaves together Pattison's own story with letters, postcards, telegrams, drawings, and photographs that reveal Kahn's inner life and his architectural thought process, including new insight into some of his greatest works, both built and unbuilt. What emerges is at once a poignant love story and a vivid portrait of a young woman striving to raise a family while forging an artistic path in the shadow of her famous partner. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2009, Hardcover, 384 pages. Ronsequist writes about growing up in a tight-knit community of Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota and Minnesota in the late 1930s and early 1940s; about his mother, who was not only an amateur painter but, along with his father, a passionate aviator; and about leaving that flat midwestern landscape in 1955 for New York, where he had won a scholarship to the Art Students League. George Grosz, Edwin Dickinson, and Robert Beverly Hale were among his teachers, but his early life was a struggle until he discovered sign painting. He describes days suspended on scaffolding high over Broadway, painting movie or theater billboards, and nights at the Cedar Tavern with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the poet LeRoi Jones. His first major studio, on Coenties Slip, was in the thick of the new art world. Among his neighbors were Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, and Jack Youngerman, and his mentors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 259 pages. Illustrated with 16 black & white photographs. Previous owners signature at top of front endpaper. Dust jacket missing 3 small chunks at top and bottom of spine. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 268 pages, illustrated with b&w photos and the author's pen sketches. Dust jacket with light shelf wear, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, Doran and Company, Ltd. Ed., 1937, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. SIGNED BY COWARD. Cream colored cloth with NC embossed on cover, black spine label with gilt lettering that has a narrow chip down the center. Spine darkened. No. 64 of 301 signed copies. Top edge gilt. Binding tight. Red slip case has light wear. The witty English playwright, composer, director and actor Noel Coward's autobiography. With b&w photos scattered throughout, including author frontispiece photo.

Hardcover. Buffalo NY, Prometheus Books, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 188 pages, b&w photos. "At night she was a loving wife and mother. During the day, she'd put her children on the school bus, pack her sequined G-strings and feather boas, and leave for New York City - to take her place in the world of Times Square as the 'Queen of Burlesque. '...Paris refused to compete on an X-rated level, presenting her audiences with old-fashioned burlesque: the gowns, the gloves, the feather fans. Much to her surprise, she beceme the favorite stripper on the New York circuit." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 227 pages, b&w illustrations. In a clean, unclipped dust jacket. Rattigan was a renowned English playwright, the author of 22 plays.

Hardcover. NY, Hermitage House, 2nd pr., 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. 336 pages, illustrated in black and white. The story of a great impresario's adventures in the dance world. Mr. Hurok remembers Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, et al. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1941, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcovrt in a lightly worn dust jacket, 141 pages. Frontis photo of Pinero. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (24 May 1855 - 23 November 1934) was an English actor and later an important dramatist and stage director. He became a prolific and successful playwright, authoring fifty-nine plays. These include serious social dramas, some dealing with social hypocrisy surrounding attitudes to women in second marriages. 'Pinero's talent was stagecraft. He knew how to organize material for effective presentation on the stage. He understood the mass psychology, the emotional reaction of the group in the theater, and thought little of the individual reader. As a result, the dialogue in his plays is right for the actor and the audience, but disconcerting to the readers. But in particular, Pinero was the master of suspense, motivating the turns in his plot sequence with unerring skill. For he understood stage business, the timinng of motion and sound, and, above all, the reactions of an audience to the physical properties on the stage itself. ' Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt , 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 386 pages,b&w illustrations. They stand at the apex of the great age of songwriting, the creators of the classic Broadway musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, whose songs have never lost their popularity or emotional power. Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play. Their songs and dance numbers served to advance the drama and reveal character, a sharp break from the past and the template on which all future musicals would be built. Todd S. Purdum's portrait of these two men, their creative process, and their groundbreaking innovations will captivate lovers of musical theater, lovers of the classic American songbook, and young lovers wherever they are. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 337 pages, b&w illustrations. Still Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch's life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway's great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular television show 30 Rock. We explore the influential-and often fraught-collaborations she developed with Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and above all Stephen Sondheim, as well as her courageous yet flawed attempts to control a serious drinking problem. And we see the entertainer triumphing over personal turmoil with the development of her Tony Award-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which established her as an emblem of spiky independence and Manhattan life for an entirely new generation of admirers. Remainder dot on top edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Arbor House, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 352 pages with photographs. Biography co-written by the author's brother. The definitive biography of one of America's most celebrated playwrights. Drawing on previously unseen diaries, letters, and interviews, the authors explore the life and work of Williams, from his early years in Mississippi to his landmark plays of the 1950s and 1960s. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 765 pages, b&w illustrations. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life-his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin-Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2014-09-22, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 765 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A brilliant and feared critic, Kenneth Tynan was a nabob of the National Theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and he was also the daring impresario who created "Oh Calcutta". He was a notorious eccentric, a louche sophisticate: connoisseur of cuisine, wine, literature and women. Where else could you find such a judicious blend of aesthetics, theatre lore, love, marriage, sex and politics? These sizzling diaries will remind older readers of a man whose reputation as the greatest critic of the twentieth century is still unchallenged and introduce younger readers to an electrifying writer who simply could not be boring. B&w photos, 439 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Inc., 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 312 pages, b&w illustrations. This is the extraordinary story of Eli Wallach's many years dedicated to his acting craft which began in Brooklyn and grew in his college years in Texas. He has worked with many of the stars in movies and has been in many well-known movies, but he will always be remembered as a Western badman in the Spaghetti Westerns of the 60s and 70s. Clean copy.