Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. B&w photos, 185 pages. Twenty years after his death, George Balanchine still dominates the world of ballet. Not only have his works been danced by the New York City Ballet continuously since 1948, but they also have been performed by more than two dozen other companies throughout the world. In clear and elegant writing, Terry Teachout brings to life the dramatic story of George Balanchine, a Russian emigre who fell in love with American culture, married four times and kept a mistress on the side, and transformed the art of ballet forever. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Dent / Everyman's Library, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn blue dust jacket with fading to spine. 302 pages. The author was an actor, dramatist and theatrical manager and gives an account of the British stage in the first half of the Eighteenth century. First published in 1740. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Playbill/ Applause Thetre& Cinama Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 357 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Minor wear to dust jacket. Minor rubbing to top spine. Light soil on rear. This is the ultimate backstage tour of Broadway! AT THIS THEATRE tells the complete history of Broadway in the 20th century, theatre by theatre. This gorgeous book is now updated, revised and with a larger format, covering 1900 to 2001. PLAYBILL's columnist, Louis Botto, along with Robert Viagas, opens the doors and lets readers explore the 40 active Broadway theatres in New York. From the conception and design of the buildings, to their original creators, and on to the theatres' transformation, often under duress, from legitimate houses to vaudeville and Burlesque, to movie houses and then back to their original purpose, this book captures the magical world of Broadway. It is a complete and authoritative history that only Botto, the curator of PLAYBILL's incomparable 116-year-old archives, can tell.
Hardcover. New York, Century Co., 1st, 1890, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 501 pages. Hardcover. AUTHORS SIGNED INSCRIPTION PASTED ON TITLE PAGE. 3/4 Leather marbled sections, raised bands on spine. Gilt titles and highlights. Marbled endpapers. Gilt top edge. Light rubbing to cover edges. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. As both star and director of the acclaimed film Henry V, young Branagh has had his career compared to that of Lawrence Olivier. Full of charm, humor, and insight into an actor's craft, Branagh's intriguing autobiography tells of his childhood in Belfast, his training at the Royal Academy of Drama, and his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company.INSCRIBED BY BRANAGH on front fly leaf.
Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown , 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 319 pages, b&w photos. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket with a couple closed tears, mild soil.
Hardcover. US, VH1 Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to covers. Color and Black and white pictures throughout.
Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1st, 1896, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt and black, 399 pages. Forty-one chapters, each on a different actor, with a portrait of each. Each of the mini-biographies was written by a different writer or critic. The editors include such actors as John Drew, Edwin Booth, Rose Coughlan, James O'Neill, Edward Harrigan, Joseph Jefferson. Very good copy of the first edition. The book has brighttop edge gilt. Previous owner's bookplate, inscription on front endpapers.
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. 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, 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. 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. Jefferson NC, McFarland Publishing, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with white lettering, no dust jacket issued. A biography of the sole manager of Laura Keene's Theatre in New York City and one of the most influential members of the 19th century theatre community. Her career and her personal life...includes b&w photos, and an appendix of theatres, companies, plays and roles.
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. 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. 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, 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, 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, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.
Hardcover. Gainesville FL, University Press of Florida, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 267 pages, b&w photos. Biography of the Russian ballet dancer and teacher Agrippina Vaganova (1879-1951).
Hardcover. NY, George H. Doran, 1st, 1915, Hardcover, black cloth covers with gilt title, top edge gilt. 523 pages, b&w photos. The author wrote this book to depict and commemorate "leading representatives of the Stage". He writes about: William Warren, laura Keene, Matilda Heron, Lester Wallack, James W. Wallace, Mark Smith, Edward Adams, Henry J. Montague; Edwin Booth, Augustin Daly, Henry Irving, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe. Index. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 48 pages illustrated in color by Aliki. With her characteristically sprightly words and pictures, Aliki brings Shakespeare's life, times, and legacy to life in this highly acclaimed information-packed treasury that is truly for readers of all ages. This nonfiction picture book is an excellent choice to share during homeschooling, in particular for children ages 6 to 8. It's a fun way to learn to read and as a supplement for activity books for children From Hamlet to Romeo and Juliet to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's celebrated works have touched people around the world. Aliki combines literature, history, biography, archaeology, and architecture in this richly detailed and meticulously researched introduction to Shakespeare's world-his life in Elizabethan times, the theater world, and the Globe, for which he wrote his plays. Then she brings history full circle to the present-day reconstruction of the Globe theater.