biography theater

Hardcover. New York, Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 511 pages. Hardcover, slipcase, ribbon marker. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Candid accounts of the people, hit movies, and adventures that have shaped his career enliven these memoirs from the director of Romeo and Juliet, Endless Love, and Jesus of Nazareth. 24 black-and-white, 16 color illustrations.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A critical biography of the comic genius who, as both a writer and a director, dominated the Broadway comedy theater during the twenties, thirties, and forties. Detailed accounts of GSK plays and how they came together -- or did not. Kaufman is captured as a man of the theatre who compulsively was involved in a show a year for decades, as writer or director. 503 pages, b&w photos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Routledge, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 198 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Focusing on the house and museum and its considerable collections of architectural fragments, models, drawings folios and publications, this book is about thirteen Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, England, built in the early 1800s by the renowned eighteenth-century architect Sir John Soane. The book maps the influences, references, connections, extensions, and productions at play in Soane's house-museum. The house, still a public museum, was highly original in its period, and it continues to influence and impress architects and historians alike. Today's visitor is confronted by a dense, complex series of spaces, a strange aCCU1mulation of rooms, objects and effects. This book examines the ways in which Soane enlisted light, shadow, color, fiction and narrative, vistas, spatial complexity, the fragment, and the mirror to produce a spectacular space. No dj issued, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Knopf, 1st US, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 398 pages. Illustrated with 24 pages of black & white photographs. Light foxing to page fore edges. Light wear to price clipped dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Skyhorse, 2nd pr., 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 442 pages, color illustrations. The first portrait of the renowned artist's life-as spirited and unique as his pen-and-ink drawings. Beginning in the 1920s, he caricatured Hollywood actors, Washington politicians, and-his favorite-celebrities of the stage. Broadway belonged to Hirschfeld. His work appeared in the New York Times and other publications, as well as on book jackets, album covers, posters, and postage stamps, for more than seventy-five years. He lived in Paris, Moscow, and Bali, and in a pink New York townhouse on a star-studded block where his closest friends-Carol Channing, S. J. Perelman, Gloria Vanderbilt, Brooks Atkinson, Elia Kazan, Marlene Dietrich, and William Saroyan-flocked in and out.

Hardcover. NY, Skyhorse, 2nd pr., 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 442 pages, color illustrations. The first portrait of the renowned artist's life-as spirited and unique as his pen-and-ink drawings. Beginning in the 1920s, he caricatured Hollywood actors, Washington politicians, and-his favorite-celebrities of the stage. Broadway belonged to Hirschfeld. His work appeared in the New York Times and other publications, as well as on book jackets, album covers, posters, and postage stamps, for more than seventy-five years. He lived in Paris, Moscow, and Bali, and in a pink New York townhouse on a star-studded block where his closest friends-Carol Channing, S. J. Perelman, Gloria Vanderbilt, Brooks Atkinson, Elia Kazan, Marlene Dietrich, and William Saroyan-flocked in and out.

Hardcover. NY, Villard Books, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 306 pages. The author of "Adventures in the Screen Trade" provides an inside look at the Cannes Film Festivals and the Miss America Pageant from his unique perspective as a judge, offering anecdotes about the judging process. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Guilford CT, Applause, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 200 pages, b&w illustrations. Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and . . . Dorothy Fields. These are the giants of the golden age of musical theater. Although she may not be as well known as her male counterparts, Dorothy Fields was America's most brilliant and successful female lyricist, who for five decades kept up with the greats. As the only woman among the boys' club of popular song, Fields was welcomed by her fellow male artists, who considered her as both an equal and a beloved colleague. Working with thirteen different composers, Fields wrote the lyrics and/or librettos for unforgettable masterpieces, such as Annie Get Your Gun, Redhead, and Sweet Charity. Her more than four hundred songs include the standards "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "Pick Yourself Up," and "The Way You Look Tonight," among other classic tunes.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 112 pages. A photographer once remarked to Andre Maurois, "If I were to take a picture of a village wedding, Jean Cocteau would appear between the bride and groom." And he was right; Cocteau was photographed everywhere, by everyone, in all guises and poses. Cecil Beaton posed him smoking an opium pipe, Lucien Clergue caught him in the romantic ruins of Arles where Cocteau was shooting Orphee, Arnold Newman shot him in Paris, and Philippe Halsman in New York. Cocteau possessed, of course, a modern genius for self-promotion, but he also cared deeply about his own art and the art of a technique he embraced with passion throughout his lifetime - photography. Essay by Francis Steegmuller.

Hardcover. New York, Stringer & Townsend, 1st, 1851, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering, 226 pages. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Some pages show minor foxing. Light rubbing to corners and at top and base of spine. Clean, unmarked text.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 430 pages. The titanic choreographer, creator of memorable ballets, master of Broadway musicals, legendary show doctor and director, now revealed in his own words--the closest we will get to a memoir/autobiography--from his voluminous letters, journals, notes, diaries, never before published. Robbins was famous for reinventing the Broadway musical, creating a vernacular American ballet, pushing the art form to new boundaries where it had never gone before, integrating dance seamlessly with character, story and music, and as Associate Artistic Director, Ballet Master, and Co-Artistic Director, with George Balanchine, shaping the New York City Ballet with daring and brio for more than five decades through his often startling choreography in ballet's classical idiom. He was known as the king of Broadway, the most sought-after director-choreographer and show doctor who gave shape to On the Town (1944), Call Me Madam (1950), The King and I (1951), Wonderful Town (1953), Peter Pan (1954), The Pajama Game (1954), Silk Stockings (1955), West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Funny Girl (1964), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and many other classic musicals, winning four Tony Awards, two Oscars, and an Emmy. He shocked and betrayed those he loved and worked with by naming names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. ("I betrayed my manhood, my Jewishness, my parents, my sister," he wrote in a diary. "I can't undo it.") Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, F.A. Stokes Company, 1st, 1900, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with bright gilt stamping, 137 pages. Top edge gilt. Ribbon marker, photographic frontispiece portrait of actor John Drew, as well as numerous photographs of John Drew (and other actresses) in various dramatic productions. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 224 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. 200 illustrations in color. Foreword by Jennifer B. Lee, Performing Arts Curator, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Index. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Joseph Urban is a lavish celebration of this prolific artist, architect, and designer, whose accomplishments include magnificent Art Deco buildings, spectacular Ziegfeld Follies productions, and dramatic sets for the Metropolitan Opera. Joseph Urban (1872-1933) began his career as an architect and artist in Vienna before moving to America in 1911. In 1914 he moved to New York, where he ultimately signed on as set designer of the Metropolitan Opera. He also became immersed in an astonishing array of outside projects, designing nightclubs, hotel lounges, skyscrapers, theaters, stage and film sets, and even children's books. Though his creative output was immense, little remains of his work except the Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, and the New School and the base of the Hearst Tower in New York.

Hardcover. NY, Delacorte Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A director, producer, actor, and author, Joshua Logan had more Broadway hits than almost anyone else. In the late 1940s . Logan worked in theater and film throughout his career, showing talent from the time he was a young student at Princeton University. He acted on stage before achieving his first major success as a director with 'I Married an Angel,' in 1938; he also produced several shows. For many years Logan struggled with manic-depressive illness, and late in life he toured the country to offer encouragement to fellow sufferers. 408 pages, b&w photos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 400 pages. Price-clipped. Clean covers and dust jacket, pages crisp and unmarked, tight binding; clean copy. A generation before Walt Disney, Fred Thompson was the "boy-wonder" of American popular amusements. At the turn of the 20th century, Thompson's entrepreneurial drive made him into an entertainment mogul who helped to define the popular culture of his day.In this lively biography, Woody Register tells Thompson's remarkable story and examines the transformation of commerce and entertainment as American society moved into an era of mass marketing and large-scale corporate enterprise. Getting his start as a promoter of carnival shows at world's fairs, Thompson was one of the principal developers of Coney Island, where he created the majestic Luna Park. Register traces Thompson's career as he built the mammoth Hippodrome Theater in Manhattan, where he mounted many productions noted for their spectacular--and spectacularly costly--staging effects. Register shows how Thompson's fantasies appealed to the growing legions of Americans who found themselves in a world that seemed increasingly "businesslike" and profit oriented. He illustrates how Thompson aggressively marketed to adult consumers a world of make-believe and childlike play, carefully crafting his own public image as "the boy who never grew up."Colorful, well-written, and insightful, The Kid of Coney Island brings to life a kaleidoscopic era in New York history as well as one of its most striking characters.

Hardcover. Woodstock NY, Overlook Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with minor edge wear. Over 300 photographs (many in color), most never-before published, chronology, select recordings and videotapes, index. Text taken from Lenya's interviews, private conversations, letters, and other writings provide captivating glimpses into her on-stage and off-stage world. Married to Kurt Weill, the pair brought their talents to American theater when they left Nazi Germany in the 1930s. She gave unforgettable performances on stage and screen ('Threepenny Opera', 'Cabaret' etc) and established herself as one of the twentieth century's most enduring and talented performers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. An up close and personal portrait of a legendary filmmaker, theater director, and comedian, drawing on candid conversations with his closest friends in show business and the arts-from Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep to Natalie Portman and Lorne Michaels. The work of Mike Nichols pervades American cultural consciousness-from The Graduate and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Angels in America, The Birdcage, Working Girl, and Primary Colors, not to mention his string of hit plays, including Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. If that weren't enough, he was also one half of the timelessly funny duo Nichols & May, as well as a founding member of the original improv troupe. Over a career that spanned half a century, Mike Nichols changed Hollywood, Broadway, and comedy forever. Most fans, however, know very little of the person behind it all. Since he never wrote his memoirs, and seldom appeared on television, they have very little sense of his searching intellect or his devastating wit. They don't know that Nichols, the great American director, was born Mikail Igor Peschkowsky, in Berlin, and came to this country, speaking no English, to escape the Nazis. They don't know that Nichols was at one time a solitary psychology student, or that a childhood illness caused permanent, life-altering side effects. They don't know that he withdrew into a debilitating depression before he "finally got it right," in his words, by marrying Diane Sawyer. Remainder dot to bottom edge otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Jefferson NC, McFarland Publishing, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with white lettering. 176 pages, b&w illustrations. In 1945, the author found herself in the monsoon-drenched jungles of Assam, caring for soldiers in the China-Burma-India theater of war. Nothing in her nurse's training had prepared her for the tropical diseases her patients faced, nor had her experiences readied her for a hospital where men spat on the floor, rats were pervasive, and patients were as likely to sell their medicine as swallow it. What made the experience tolerable was Nurse Camp's romance with one of the airmen who flew the Hump, supplying O.S.S. troops behind Japanese lines and carrying General Joseph Stillwell's Chinese troops to fight the battle of North Burma. She accompanied her future husband on some of his missions. Based, in part, on letters she wrote to her parents, this is the poignant story of one nurse's experience in World War II and how her service changed her life forever. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.

Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. An Armenian national raised in Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897--1987) studied in the influential Stanislavski studio, renowned as the source of the "method" acting technique. Shortly after immigrating to New York in 1926, he created a sensation with an all-black production of Porgy (1927). He then went on to direct the debut Broadway productions of three of the most popular shows in the history of American musical theater: Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), and Carousel (1945). Mamoulian began working in film just as the sound revolution was dramatically changing the technical capabilities of the medium, and he quickly established himself as an innovator. Not only did many of his unusual camera techniques become standard, but he also invented a device that eliminated the background noises created by cameras and dollies. Seen as a rebel earlier in his career, Mamoulian gradually gained respect in Hollywood, and the Directors Guild of America awarded him the prestigious D. W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1983. In this meticulously researched biography, David Luhrssen paints the influential director as a socially conscious artist who sought to successfully combine art and commercial entertainment. Luhrssen not only reveals the fascinating personal story of an important yet neglected figure, but he also offers a tantalizing glimpse into the extraordinarily vibrant American film and theater industries during the twenties, thirties, and forties.

Hardcover. NY, Bobbs-Merrill , 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with faging to spine. Illustrations and jacket art by Al Hirschfeld. One woman's humorous take on life in New York City in the early 1950s. The author was married to NYT drama critic, Brooks Atkinson, but she could write too. Clean copy.

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.