Search results for ""Author Steven Suskin""

If Broadway's triumphant musical hits are exhilarating the backstage tales of Broadway failures are tantalizing soap operas in miniature. ÊSecond Act TroubleÊ puts you with the creators in the rehearsal halls at out-of-town tryouts in late-night hotel-room production meetings and at after-the-fact recriminatory gripe fests. Suskin has compiled and annotated long-forgotten first-person accounts of 25 Broadway musicals that stubbornly went awry. Contributions come from such respected writers as Patricia Bosworth Mel Gussow Lehman Engel William Gibson Lewis H. Lapham and John Gruen. No mere vanity productions these; you can't have a big blockbuster of failure it seems without the participation of Broadway's biggest talents. Caught in the stranglehold of tryout turmoil are Richard Rodgers Jule Styne Jerry Herman Cy Coleman Charles Strouse John Kander Mel Brooks and even Edward Albee. The infamous shows featured include ÊMack & Mabel; Breakfast at Tiffany's; The Act; Dude; Golden Boy; Hellzapoppin'; Nick and Nora; Seesaw; Kelly; and How Now Dow JonesÊ.

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Broadway, once upon a time. A place where people buy tickets at the box office, with cash; where patrons dress for theatre, with no sneakers, no water bottles, and no backpacks; and the only text messages are the ones put there by the playwright. A place where iconic legends of stage and screen can be found in plain view, smiling politely or egotistically preening. Where three dollars will get you a balcony seat at the biggest hit—or the lowliest flop—in town. And a place where an innocent teenager from the suburbs can buy a ticket, slip through the stage door, and wander o'er the threshold into the magical world backstage.Steven Suskin introduces Broadway, once upon a time, in Offstage Observations: Tales of the Not-So-Legitimate Theatre. The drama critic and noted chronicler of Broadway takes the reader through a decade's worth of adventures, working his way from a menial pencil sharpener for producer David Merrick toward a career as a full-fledged manager, producer, and drama critic. The book follows the author's progress from the wintry night after his sixteenth birthday, when he unexpectedly finds himself alone on the empty stage of a Broadway theatre, peering out at the silent, empty auditorium lit only by a solitary ghost light to the matinee eight summers later when he finds himself accidentally and uncomfortably acting in a Broadway musical, bombarded by roars of laughter from a houseful of playgoers. A keen observer of the impertinent with an ear for amusing anecdotes, whimsical curiosities, and exaggerated tales of life upon the wicked stage, Suskin draws a portrait of a not-so-long-ago theatre world that has all but vanished.

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In an age of ubiquitous music and countless new songs releasing every minute, the Great American Songbook endures. After all, the Songbook—that sprawling canon of popular songs, standards, and show tunes from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s—is a foundational text of American pop music. Rare indeed is the song that doesn’t in some way draw on this magnificent corpus, and rare is the person who hasn’t heard at least a few of its most enduring melodies.Nonetheless, the Songbook is broader and deeper than most listeners can imagine, and on the margins, the question of whether this or that song should be included is the source of regular arguments among scholars and buffs alike. Attempting to plumb its depths can be a daunting prospect.Enter Steven Suskin, who has been writing about music since the days that Rodgers, Arlen, and Berlin still roamed the streets of Manhattan. In this carefully curated and cheerfully opinionated guidebook, Suskin surveys 201 of the most significant selections from the Songbook, ranging from celebrated masterpieces to forgotten gems. Year by year, he puts songwriters and their contributions in their context, and explains what makes each song such a distinctive treat—whether felicitous melody, colorful harmony, compositional originality, or merely the sheer, irreducible joy of listening to it. Old and new favorites await all readers of this painstakingly compiled, enthusiastically written catalog.

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