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SHELF LIFE: Kazan, Williams, Lloyd Webber, Leiber and Stoller, Women Playwrights
By Judy Samelson
27 Jun 2009
This month's mixed bag of books includes the writings of Elia Kazan, a conversational autobiography of Leiber and Stoller, essays by Tennessee Williams, a look at the controversial career of Andrew Lloyd Webber, political playwrights, and more.
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Kazan on Directing
By: Elia Kazan
Published by: Knopf
Publication Date: April 21, 2009
List price: $30, hardcover; 368 pages
In his vaunted career, Elia Kazan put his distinctive stamp on some of theatre and film's most enduring works. From original Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (which he also directed on screen) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and All My Sons to movies like the searing "On the Waterfront," passionate "East of Eden" and life-affirming "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," Kazan's marriage of lyrical staging with unflinching, uncompromising naturalism, as well as his ability to draw inspired performances from his actors, has had a profound effect on the director's art. "Kazan on Directing," with a Preface by Martin Scorsese and Foreword by John Lahr, is a compilation of the director's writing, a record of his creative process drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews and autobiography (entitled "A Life"). A brief example of that process can be found in this excerpt from the director's notebook regarding the 1947 production of A Streetcar Named Desire that starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche Du Bois and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalksi: "Blanche and Don Quixote are both emblems of the death of an old culture. This is a poetic tragedy, not a realistic, naturalistic one. The acting must be styled, not in the obvious sense. (Say nothing about this to the producer and actors.) But you will fail unless you find this kind of poetic realization for these people's behavior." With this extensive record of his work, Kazan, notes the publisher, reveals his method: "how he uncovered for himself the 'spine' or core of each script and each character; how he analyzed each piece in terms of his own experience; how he determined the specifics of his production, from casting and costuming to set design and cinematography . . . how he worked with writers on scripts and with actors on interpretation." Along the way, Kazan not only shares his professional stories and secrets but reveals himself to have been a constantly evolving, self-examining artist.
Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography
By: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with David Ritz
Published by: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: June 2009
List price: $25, hardcover; 336 pages with illustration
In 1995 a show called Smokey Joe's Café opened on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre (now the August Wilson). Subtitled, The Songs of Leiber and Stoller, this jukebox musical revue nabbed seven Tony Award nominations, including one for Best Musical. As the musical's subtitle attests, the team whose tunes (together and with other collaborators) kept the joint jumping for 2,036 performances were songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, authors of such classic hits as "Jailhouse Rock," "Yakety Yak," "Poison Ivy," "On Broadway" and "Stand by Me." This new autobiography of the team takes its name from a song they wrote when barely out of their teens: "Hound Dog," their first hit, was originally written for blues singer Mae (Big Mama) Thornton. Thornton's record, a hard-hitting, down and dirty rendition, met with modest success, but when the song was revamped, reconstituted and recorded by Elvis Presley, it became a megahit. From then on, the Leiber and Stoller story reads like a case study on success in the music business. Their autobiography, "Houndog," co-written in a conversational tone with David Ritz, begins with the unlikely origins of these two blues-loving white kids — Leiber, was raised in a Yiddish-speaking Baltimore family and Stoller was a kid from Sunnyside, Queens. "We were two guys looking to write songs for black artists with black feelings rendered in the black vernacular," says Leiber in this book that recounts the team's successful collaborations with other artists such as Ben E. King, the Drifters, the Coasters and even, writing in a different genre, Peggy Lee (whose recording of their "Is That All There Is?" was a hit for the sleepy-voiced chanteuse). Continued...
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