Curtain up on My Stage


Book Description

What was it like to grow up on a farm during the Great Depression? As a child who did so, Ms. Zimmer answers that it was a better place than most. Following an introduction to her family and the setting, an historic home in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York State, the chapters reveal the skills and resourcefulness that carried the family successfully through those difficult years. The story, told through tales, some humourous, some sad, follows the season as the year rolls around. Lovers of the Finger Lakes Region should find this book of interest, as will senior citizens anywhere.




Curtain Up


Book Description

After 12-year-old Anya is cut from her middle school soccer team, she decides to pursue her true passion, which is theater. With the help of her sister and new friend Austin, Anya puts together a kids’ summer theater troupe (The Random Farms Kids’ Theater), recruiting area kids as actors and crew members. Acting as director, Anya has to navigate the ups and downs of a showbiz life, including preparing scripts, finding a venue, and handling ticket sales, not to mention calming the actors’ insecurities and settling conflicts. It’s a lot of responsibility for a 12-year-old. Will their first show ever get off the ground? This series is closely based on the real-life experience of Anya Wallach, who began a summer theater “camp” in her parents’ basement when she was just sixteen years old. Today, Random Farms has launched the careers of many of today’s youngest stars on Broadway.




Clyde's


Book Description

A funny, moving, and urgent new play from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage.




Before the Curtain Goes Up


Book Description

BEFORE THE CURTAIN GOES UP is a striking photographic journey of behind the scenes action of so many small-town theaters across the United States. A must read for any theater lover, or performer.




My Kitchen Wars


Book Description

A fierce and funny memoir of kitchen and bedroom from James Beard Award winner Betty Fussell A survivor of the domestic revolutions that turned American television sets from Leave It to Beaver to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Julia Child’s The French Chef, food historian and journalist Betty Fussell has spotlighted the changes in American culture through food over the last half century in nearly a dozen books. In this witty and candid autobiographical mock epic, Fussell survives a motherless household during the Great Depression, gets married to the well-known writer and war historian Paul Fussell after World War II, goes through a divorce, and finally escapes to New York City in her mid-fifties, batterie de cuisine intact. My Kitchen Wars is a revelation of the author’s lifelong love affair with food—cooking it, eating it, and sharing it—no matter where or with whom she finds herself. From Princeton to Heidelberg and from London to Provence, Fussell ladles out food, sex, and travel with her wooden spoon, welcoming all who come to the table.




Theatre Magazine


Book Description




Well


Book Description

""This play is not about my mother and me," begins Lisa Kron in Well. And yet, she has brought her mother, Ann, on stage with her. Needless to say, Ann disrupts the proceedings and soon the actors Lisa has hired to enact her "multicharacter exploration of issues of health and illness" discover that Ann is considerably more interesting than Lisa's play. In the end, Lisa's carefully constructed narrative collapses, leaving her to contemplate the notion that wellness lies in our ability to embrace the complexities and contradictions of life. Well is a surprising and funny play that ultimately acknowledges the heartbreaking challenge of true empathy, even toward those we love the most."--BOOK JACKET.




The Bell Family


Book Description

Originally published: London: Collins, 1954.




Sketch


Book Description




Vanity Will Get You Somewhere


Book Description

Joseph Cotten’s story begins in Tidewater, Virginia, moves on to an episode as a Miami ‘potato salad’ tycoon and then brings us to his first big break as an actor, in the New York theatre. Cotten describes how he met the flamboyant Orson Welles- at a radio audition at which Welles set a wastepaper basket on fire- and their involvement with the Mercury theatre. This led to Cotten’s first film role, as Orson’s co-star in Citizen Kane, quickly followed by parts in The Magnificent Ambersons and The Third Man. Orson- perhaps the only man to use Churchill as a stooge while trying to set up a film deal- was a lifelong friend of Cotten’s, and this autobiography was one of the last works he read before his untimely death in 1985. Cotten takes us behind the scenes of his stage plays and films, recalling amusing and intimate stories of his adventures with Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, David Niven, David O. Selznick, Alfred Hitchcock and many others. Sensitive to his own motivations, frank about his marriages and warmly revealing about himself and his friends, Cotten has written much more than the usual film star biography. His skills as an actor have made him a master of character and dramatic momentum, and he brings the same talents to his writing. Vanity Will get You Somewhere is a generous, loving and humorous portrait of a man without a shred of vanity in his nature- and of his friends and colleagues in the larger-than-life world of show business.




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