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Summary
Summary
In this deliciously revealing oral history of Broadway since World War II, more than 100 theater veterans-including Carol Channing, Hal Prince, Donna McKechnie, Hal Holbrook, Andrea McArdle, and Al Hirschfeld-deliver the behind-the-scenes story of the hits, the stars, the feuds, and the fiascoes. Black-and-white and color photos throughout.
Author Notes
Harvey Frommer was a sports historian who wrote extensively about the Yankees and collaborated with his wife on lively oral histories of Brooklyn, the Catskills and Broadway. Mr. Frommer had a fascination with baseball that began in Brooklyn during the 1940s and ¿50s, when the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants dazzled New York City with players like Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays. In his book New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947-1957 (1980), Mr. Frommer described a three-team universe captured by radio.He contunued writng for 40 years. His dozens of books include an exploration of Robinson¿s breaking baseball¿s modern color barrier in 1947 and Shoeless Joe Jackson¿s banishment from baseball for his supposed role in fixing the 1919 World Series with seven Chicago White Sox teammates.
He also wrote autobiographies of Hall of Fame personalities like the fireballing pitcher Nolan Ryan and the Dallas Cowboys running back Tony Dorsett. Mr. Frommer focused on the Yankees in the 1990s with books like The New York Yankee Encyclopedia (1997); A Yankee Century: A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball¿s Greatest Team (2002); and Five O¿Clock Lightning (2008), about the slugging 1927 team led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Harry Frommer passed away on August 1, 2019, from metastatic lung cancer at his home in Lyme, N.H. He was 83 years old.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A chorus of more than 100 voicesincluding stars, celebrities, producers, costume designers, critics, sons and daughters of Broadway greatslend this oral history of Broadway theater over the past 60 years the heady excitement of a blockbuster show. The editors, whose previous titles include It Happened in Brooklyn and It Happened in the Catskills, understand that what readers want are tales of magic and legend, but here they devote more attention to the drudgery and brute perseverance that go into every Broadway success. Following the lead of Jeff Kisseloff's oral history of television, The Box, the Frommers tell the history of the medium, rather than of individual shows and performancesthough there are plenty of those represented here, too. "The first time I ever set foot on-stage was in grammar school," begins Carol Channing, the book's first speaker. The remembrances that followof Broadway debuts, of its richest era following WW II, of famous musicals and comedies, stars, hits and unexpected flops and a string of laments over what "Broadway no longer" is todaymove so seamlessly you often have to check back to see who's speaking. Charles Durning remembers the first laugh he got on stage. John Raitt describes almost not getting to replace the lead in Oklahoma! because he couldn't fit into Alfred Drake's costume. John Lahr says his comedian father "could get a laugh on a conjunction." Interspersed with stage and backstage photos, caricatures, playbills and posters, the hundreds of magical, informative, sometimes fallacious, never boring stories the Frommers have gathered demonstrate what it took to fill those seats. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The Frommers (Growing up Jewish in America, 1995, etc.) have gathered together the recollections (of widely varying frankness and detail) of actors, playwrights, directors, producers, designers, composers, and critics active in the evolution of theater in New York over the past seven decades. Those who find backstage details about the theater (and more particularly about the musical theater) absorbing will very likely enjoy the often witty chat recorded here, including the widely varying, but generally warm recollections of the producers and actors who worked on many of Rodgers and Hammerstein's landmark musicals, and the musings of a number of figures, from Patricia Neal to Richard Kiley to Louise Lasser, about the manner in which they launched their careers. There are also loving but unsparing portraits of the lives and careers of such major innovators as Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett. But those looking for more than a fleeting recognition of the downside of the business, or for some measured consideration of what, precisely, makes a piece of theatre succeed as art should probably look elsewhere. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The Frommers' work chronicles the decline and fall of Broadway from the perspective of actors, writers, producers, and directors who reigned supreme when the street was synonymous with everything glamorous about showbiz and who later struggled to keep the tinsel shiny as TV, movies, and rock music changed popular taste and stole Broadway's audiences. The Frommers' subjects include superstars like Carol Channing and Betty Buckley, lesser lights like Louise Lasser and Linda Lavin, and friends, family members, and hangers-on like New York Post critic Clive Barnes and New Yorker feature writer John Lahr. The book is not particularly well structured, though, and the Frommers' attempt to order the material thematically is halfhearted. One chapter is devoted to breaking into the big time, another to dancers and choreographers, and yet another to what a crapshoot success on Broadway was. True Broadway aficionados won't care about this scrappiness, for there are plenty of diamonds in this loosely ordered heap of interviews. --Jack Helbig
Library Journal Review
The Frommers, both professors at Dartmouth, specialize in oral histories; their other titles include It Happened in Brooklyn (LJ 11/1/93) and It Happened in the Catskills (Harcourt, 1991). Here they provide a fascinating look at Broadway from different perspectives, including interviews with actors, directors, producers, composers, lyricists, playwrights, stage managers, set designers, and critics. The authors have cast a wide net and drawn in voices from past and present. While some interviewees are noticeably missing (Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, to name two), this book will be enjoyed by anyone who has ever been captivated by live theater, though the price may keep it off the shelves of smaller libraries.J. Sara Paulk, Coastal Plain Regional Lib., Tifton, GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
