Broadway Books Database

Unsinkable is the definitive memoir by film legend and Hollywood icon Debbie Reynolds. Actress, comedienne, singer, and dancer Debbie Reynolds shares the highs and lows of her life as an actress during Hollywood’s Golden Age, anecdotes about her lifelong friendship with Elizabeth Taylor and her experiences as the foremost collector of Hollywood memorabilia, and intimate details of her marriages and family life with her children, Carrie and Todd Fisher. A story of heartbreak, hope, and sur...

Fear grips many American actors and directors faced with the opportunity to perform Shakespeare live. Their tongues twist at the first trauma: To Brit or not to Brit, that is the question. Whether tis nobler to stick to the kings English, or opt out and go all US. The thought of using verse for hours makes them dizzy. Iambic pentameter: Its not to fight, but to welcome. Its the God-given inherent beat of spoken Englishoops, American. And they go into a psychogenic trauma just considering the is...

In this luminous memoir, Rita Moreno shares her remarkable journey from a young girl with simple beginnings in Puerto Rico to Hollywood legend—and one of the few performers, and the only Hispanic, to win an Oscar, Grammy, Tony and two Emmys. Born Rosita Dolores Alverio in the idyll of Puerto Rico, Moreno, at age five, embarked on a harrowing sea voyage with her mother and wound up in the harsh barrios of the Bronx, where she discovered dancing, singing, and acting as ways to escape a tumult...

Taking its inspiration from historical fact, Collaborators explores the intense, paradoxical, and ultimately deadly friendship between the dissident writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Josef Stalin, centering around a play which Bulgakov was forced to write to commemorate Stalin's sixtieth birthday. Stalin has been in power for 16 years and his purges are at their zenith. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is lying unpublished in a desk drawer, and his latest play Molière has been banned following ...

Fear grips many American actors and directors faced with the opportunity to perform Shakespeare live. The challenges of Elizabethan British speech patterns, the thought of using verse for hours, the debate over staging a period piece versus "updating" the Bard of Avon-all can cause psychogenic trauma on this side of the Atlantic. In Shakespeare for American Actors and Directors (Limelight Editions, April 2013, $14.99), Aaron Frankel defines and asserts the acting tools by which American acto...

A decade-long collaboration between three-time Academy Award® winner Steven Spielberg and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President’s tumultuous final months in office. Having just won re-election in a country divided, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of...

Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is pleased to announce the publication of the newest play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet: The Anarchist. Just having completed its world premiere on Broadway under the direction of the playwright and starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger, Mr. Mamet’s work is also currently represented on Broadway with the revival of his award-winning Glengarry Glen Ross starring Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale. “Mamet remains the American theatre’s most ur...

Zachery Kleinmann lives in the elite world of New Canaan, Connecticut and has left his accounting job four years earlier to be a modern stay-at-home father. But as his son is starting pre-school, his wife is passionately involved in her own career, and Zach is knocking on forty years old, he begins to wonder how he will find his own serenity and define himself moving forward. Enter Ginger Charman, an older, eccentric, free living actress who has dedicated her life to bringing joy to childre...

Inspired by Arthur Wooten's life, Dizzy is a unique read in that it marries two genres: an exciting backstage show business tale coupled with a frightening medical drama. Angie Styles, a beloved Broadway star, is struck down at the height of her career by a mysterious disease and is forced to reexamine her life and the people in it as she fights to survive. "Dizzy is a wonderfully told story with such great heart and humor." - Peter Gregus, Broadway actor, writer, director, currently starr...

It has been 150 years since Victor Hugos novel Les Misérables was first published. However, for the last 25 or so, the poignant saga of Jean Valjean, a villain to some, but a savior to others, set in France during the early years of the 19th century, has become one of the worlds most popular musicals, and is about to become one of the must-see movies of 2013. In Les Misérables: The Official Archives, the reader can find out how the musical came to lifethe trials and tribulations of turning it f...

Dress Circle Publishing announces the release of Showbiz, A Novel, the debut novel from award winning Broadwayproducer Ruby Preston. This Broadway beach read offers a fictionalized account of opening night intrigue, backstage romances, Broadway gossip, and colorful characters that inhabit American musical theater. Showbiz, A Novel is available on Kindle and paperback at Amazon.com, Nook, iTunes and the Drama Book Shop. Showbiz, A Novel follows Scarlett Savoy, the under-appreciated apprentic...

“Ready? Set? Act!” is for the working actor who desires to move to the next level in film, TV and theater and who wants to set reachable goals that will sustain his or her career for many years to come. It is for the actor who has been discouraged by his progress so far and wants to know what to do to get ahead! It is for every actor who needs to combine the business aspects of having a career with the creative drive that made him choose to be an actor, in the first place. Joan Sittenfield i...

Hard Times tells the story of the adult musical in 1970s New York City. Featuring strong sexual content, frequent nudity, and simulated sexual activity, adult musicals were cheap to produce, and even the ones that got the most scathing reviews usually made money. Author Elizabeth Wollman illustrates how they both drew from and reflected aspects of American culture at a particularly tumultuous time.

Show Boat draws on exhaustive archival research to tell the story of how Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and a host of directors, choreographers, producers, and performers--among them Paul Robeson--made and remade the most important musical in Broadway history.

Melding a poetic dreamscape with a stream-of-consciousness narrative, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue takes us on an unforgettable journey across time and generations. Lyrically tracing the legacy of war on a single Puerto Rican family, this Pulitzer Prize finalist is the first installment in Quiara Alegria Hudes' The Elliot Trilogy. Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights, which received the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, a Tony nomination for Best Book of a...

Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. Her other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children’s musical; 26 Miles; Yemaya’s Belly and The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third piece in her acclaimed trilogy.

This second volume presents a cross-section of the most diverse and dynamic stage directors defining today’s American theater, in conversation with director/producer Jason Loewith. A follow-up to the immensely popular first volume, which has sold over eighteen thousand copies, much has changed in the twenty years since The Director’s Voice debuted. “The nonprofit model has been turned on its head,” Loewith notes. “Institution-building is out for these directors; creating a distinctive voice fro...

The five Chamber Plays of August Strindberg, written in 1907 and newly translated by Paul Walsh, including "Storm," "Burned House," "The Ghost Sonata,: "The Pelican," and "Black Glove." Strindberg began writing his chamber plays early in 1907 for a group of young actors embarking on a new endeavor: to open a small theater in the center of Stockholm dedicated to the Strindberg plays. The theater would be called Intima Teatern (The Intimate Theater), and it would explore the possibilities of a new...

In celebration of the making of The Book of Mormon, the authors, production team, and entire original cast recount their experiences as they grew their show from the initial idea to opening night on Broadway. With the complete book and lyrics annotated by the full creative team and cast, along with more than 700 photographs and illustrations, they share the journey that began one night in a Manhattan bar and culminated seven years later in the achievement that is The Book of Mormon.

Thornton Wilder: A Life, the first biography of the playwright and novelist since 1983, is also the first to be based on thousands of pages of letters, journals, manuscripts, and other documentary evidence of Wilder's life, work, and times. For more than a decade, biographer Penelope Niven has worked with unprecedented access to Wilder's papers, including his family's private journals and records, searching for the secrets that illuminate Wilder's public life and work, as well as the hidden inn...

Music and Lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Book by Quiara Alegria Hudes, Conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda In the Heights is an exciting musical about life in Washington Heights, a tight-knit community where the coffee from the corner bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open, and the breeze carries the rhythm of three generations of music. During its acclaimed Off-Broadway and Broadway runs, In the Heights became an audience phenomenon and a critical success. It's easy to see why: with...

John Pizzarelli, the son of jazz guitar legend Bucky Pizzarelli, is a connoisseur of American song who grew up among the legends of jazz. From teenage explorations of rock music to life on the road with his father, he worked his way from gigs in tiny clubs to opening for Frank Sinatra during his final international tour. Now Pizzarelli performs in festivals and top venues across the United States and the world, and he shares his unique journey in this revealing, charming, and heartwarming memoir...

Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is pleased to announce the U.S. release of The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary American Plays: Volume One edited by Mark Subias, published by Oberon Books (London). This new volume brings together plays from four of the best young artists on the contemporary American playwriting scene. Volume One is introduced by Andr� Bishop, Artistic Director of the Lincoln Center Theater, and each play is introduced by well-known and critically acclaimed writers. �The f...

The best-selling biographer of Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor tells the electrifying story of how Barbra Streisand transformed herself into the greatest star of her era, etching �an indelible portrait of the artist as a young woman� (Publishers Weekly). In 1960, she was a seventeen-year-old Brooklyn kid with plenty of talent but no connections and certainly no money; her mother brought her soup to make sure she stayed fed as she took acting classes and scraped out a living. Just four...

Geared toward hopeful musical theater, show choir, a cappella, and glee club singers, as well as all shower singers that want to improve their skills, this enthusiastic and practical guide can help anyone’s inner superstardom make a public appearance. Full of straightforward, well-organized advice for every step of the process, this book will help you train your vocal cords, pick the right audition material, and become comfortable with the spotlight. Interactive quizzes, helpful sidebars, and wo...

West End and Broadway theatre legend Ruthie Henshall has given a 25th anniversary present to fans and future musical theatre stars with the release of her new book 'So You Want To Be In Musicals?' The book, co-written with music director Daniel Bowling contains personal anecdotes and professional advice about the world of musical theatre with Henshall revealing what it really takes to build a long and successful career on the stage. Henshall, the triple threat star of hit musicals includ...

Few musicals have had the impact of Lerner and Loewe's timeless classic My Fair Lady. Sitting in the middle of an era dominated by such seminal figures as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, and Leonard Bernstein, My Fair Lady not only enjoyed critical success similar to that of its rivals but also had by far the longest run of a Broadway musical up to that time. From 1956 to 1962, its original production played without a break for 2,717 performances, and the show went on to be adapted into...

Over the last century the New York Times’s six leading critics—Brooks Atkinson, Howard Taubman, Clive Barnes, Walter Kerr, Frank Rich, and Ben Brantley—have offered the most authoritative and influential commentary on the Broadway musical. This definitive volume includes the original reviews of the 119 most important , selected by current chief theater critic Ben Brantley and accompanied by photographs from each show’s first production as well as celebrated revivals. From the golden age of the ...

Best known for the hit musicals West Side Story and Gypsy , Arthur Laurents began his career writing socially minded plays such as Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo . He also garnered impressive credits as a screenwriter ( The Way We Were ) and stage director ( La Cage aux Folles ). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading, as unleashed in his lively 2000 autobiography, Original Story By . Laurents passed away early in 2011 but not before writing The Rest of the Story ...

Actors' Equity Association, the union representing stage actors and stage managers, turns 100 years old in 2013. Shaped by the inequities visited on performers in the 19th century, the union has shaped the landscape of the professional American theater. Founded in 1913, it became a force to be reckoned with in an historic 1919 strike the most entertaining and dramatic one (naturally) the nation had ever seen. Since then, Equity has gone beyond securing the safety, health, and rights of stage ac...

Celebrated actress Ruthie Henshall has starred on Broadway and the West End in Chicago, Les Misérables, Cats, and Oliver! among others. She brings her extraordinary knowledge and personal experiences to this insider account of how to make it in this very tough business. An essential guide to turning dreams into reality.

Everyone has heard of the Jersey Boys. Thirteen million people have seen the show, totaling more than $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Jersey Boys tells the true-life story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and features such hits as "Sherry," "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Walk Like A Man," and "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." The production is currently in its seventh year on Broadway, and is also playing in Las Vegas, London, Auckland, and is on two US National Tours. Since its debut in 200...

From car mechanic to internationally loved opera, musical and recording star: the story of Alfie Boe...Alfie Boe is the first official bad boy of opera: a musical superstar celebrated not only in Britain, but worldwide. This is the story of his life - the ups and the downs, from finding fame to losing his father - and, essentially, of his love affair with music. Raised in Lancashire, the youngest of nine children and with a father who played opera at home, Alfie's story is not typical of most mu...

One of Ireland's leading playwrights, Conor McPherson sets his latest play around a house hemmed in by a restive, starving populace in rural Ireland. In May 1822, the defrocked Reverend Berkeley arrives at the once-glorious Mount Prospect House to accompany seventeen-year-old Hannah to England, where she is to be married off in order to absolve her mother's debts. But compelled by the peculiar voices that haunt his enchanting young charge and a fascination with the spirits that pervade the house...

“Blue Moon, ” “Where or When, ” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “My Romance,” “There’s a Small Hotel,” “Falling in Love with Love,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”—lyricist Lorenz Hart, together with composer Richard Rodgers, wrote some of the most memorable songs ever created. More than half a century after their collaboration ended, Rodgers & Hart songs are indispensable to the repertoire of nightclub singers everywhere. A Ship Without a Sail is the stor...

The Memory of All That is Katharine Weber’s memoir of her extraordinary family. Her maternal grandmother, Kay Swift, was known both for her own music (she was the first woman to compose the score to a hit Broadway show, Fine and Dandy) and for her ten-year romance with George Gershwin. Their love affair began during Swift’s marriage to James Paul Warburg, the multitalented banker and economist who advised (and feuded with) FDR. Weber creates an intriguing and intimate group portrait of the r...

The hilarious script for the Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher is presented along with commentary by the playwright, the directors, the composer, the set designer, and our own Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Filled with behind-the-scenes information and photos of the cast and crew, this annotated script will enchant and entertain fans of the book and the play alike.

Adapted from Stephan Elliott's 1994 cult-classic film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the Tony-winning musical is a comedy of errors involving two drag queens and a transsexual trekking through the remote Australian desert to a drag show in small resort town. Our songbook features 19 well-known pop songs from the score: Don't Leave Me This Way * Girls Just Want to Have Fun * Go West * Hot Stuff * I Love the Night Life * I Say a Little Prayer * I Will Survive * It's Raining Men ...

This matching folio features 14 songs from the much-hyped Broadway musical composed by U2's Bono and The Edge. Songs include: Bouncing off the Walls * Boy Falls from the Sky * A Freak like Me Needs Company * If the World Should End * No More * Picture This * Pull the Trigger * Sinistereo * Turn off the Dark * and more.

14 songs from the Broadway musical based on the film by Pedro Almodovar. Score by David Yazbek. Includes "Invisible," "Island," "Lie to Me," "Lovesick," "Madrid Is My Mama," "The Microphone," "Model Behavior," "Mother's Day," "My Crazy Heart," "On the Verge," "Shoes from Heaven."

Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is pleased to announce the publication of Chinglish, an uproarious new comedy by two-time Pulitzer finalist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face). Chinglish received its world premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2011 before transferring to Broadway later that year. Declared the “Best American Play of 2011” by Time magazine, Chinglish will be adapted for an upcoming film by director-producer Justin Lin with a screenplay by Hwang. Springing from ...

Cyndi Lauper is a singer-songwriter who has released eleven albums and over forty singles. Her hit singles include 'Time After Time,' 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,' and 'True Colors.' She starred as Jenny in THE THREEPENNY OPERA on Broadway. Her most recent project, Kinky Boots, will have its pre-Broadway world premiere in Chicago this fall. Directed and choreographed by Tony® Award-winner Jerry Mitchell, Kinky Boots will play the Bank of America Theatre (18 West Monroe Street, Chicago, IL) i...

Now in its 67th year, Theatre World is the most comprehensive record of the theatrical season-Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway, including listings for over 60 regional companies. Detailing more than 2,000 productions, each entry includes photos, a complete cast listing, producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles, and plot synopses. Theatre World also features the year's obituaries, a listing of all nominees and winners of the major theatrical awa...

Rita Hayworth dancing by candlelight in a small Mexican village; Elizabeth Taylor devouring homemade pasta and tenderly wrapping him in her pashmina scarf; streaking for Sir Laurence Olivier in a drafty English castle; terrifying a dozing Jackie Onassis; carrying an unconscious Montgomery Clift to safety on a dark New York City street. Captured forever in a unique memoir, Frank Langella's myriad encounters with some of the past century's most famous human beings are profoundly affecting, funn...

TCG is proud to present Mojo and Other Plays, a new collection of plays by the author of the Tony Award-nominated Jerusalem. One of Britain’s most compelling and original playwrights, Butterworth follows up the publication of that critically acclaimed play with this collection of six early works. The volume includes the Olivier Award-winning Mojo, as well as an interview between the playwright and Nick Hern, founder of Nick Hern Books.

A vibrant, exuberant self-portrait of one of today’s greatest living actors. Christopher Plummer’s magnificent book recounts the wild adventure that is his life, stretching from a privileged childhood in Canada to the glorious, star-studded New York of the fifties to a sensational career in film appearing in some of our most beloved classics. Here are his late nights out with Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Paddy Chayefsky, and Arthur Miller; his affairs and marriages; his collaboratio...

Vocal selection are now available for Frank Wildhorn's WONDERLAND, which opened on Broadway last Spring. The book features 19 piano/vocal selections from the score including: 'Advice from a Caterpillar,' 'Down the Rabbit Hole,' 'Finding Wonderland,' 'Go with the Flow,' 'Home,' 'I Am My Own Invention,' 'The Mad Hatter,' 'Off with Their Heads,' 'Through the Looking Glass,' and 'Welcome to Wonderland,' along with a special section of full-color production photos.