Broadway needs to change the ‘preview’ system – pronto!
Lost in a lot of the international press coverage of the first Broadway performance of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” Sunday night was the fact that the show was the first “preview” and that the Julie...
View ArticleArthur Laurents, R.I.P. – he told it like it was
A gift to journalists as well as the stage and film industries, Arthur Laurents was a tell-it-like-it-is playwright and screenwriter who managed to keep working right up to the end. Within the past few...
View Article‘The Rest of the Story’: Arthur Laurents on his own
The recently published Arthur Laurents memoir “The Rest of the Story” (Applause Books) fills us in on the decade after the 2000 publication of the playwright and director’s excellent autobiography...
View Article‘Party Animals’: 1970s Hollywood decadence
If you’re looking for an especially juicy Hollywood biography you should check out then-Variety senior editor Robert Hofler’s 2009 book about the film and stage producer Allan Carr — “Party Animals” —...
View ArticleThe return of ‘Do I Hear a Waltz?’
Every show that Stephen Sondheim has worked on over the past 50+ years has been celebrated with multiple revivals, with one exception – his 1965 collaboration with the great Broadway composer Richard...
View ArticleA late report on ‘Gypsy’
There are theater people who believe Arthur Laurents’ book for the musical “Gypsy” is so strong that it could be done as a straight play without music. The story of Gypsy Rose Lee and her stage mother...
View Article
