Bowery to Broadway

Bowery to Broadway
Author: Christopher Shannon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Here, Shannon guides readers through a number of classic films from the 1930s and a T40s and investigates why films featuring Irish American characters were so popular among American audiences during a period when the Irish were still stereotyped and scorned for their religion.

New York’s Yiddish Theater

New York’s Yiddish Theater
Author: Edna Nahshon
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231541074

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage. Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of "Yiddish Broadway" and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. These performances grappled with Jewish nationalism, labor relations, women's rights, religious observance, acculturation, and assimilation. They reflected a range of genres, from tear-jerkers to experimental theater. The artists who came of age in this world include Stella Adler, Eddie Cantor, Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers. The story of New York's Yiddish theater is a tale of creativity and legacy and of immigrants who, in the process of becoming Americans, had an enormous impact on the country's cultural and artistic development.

City of Dreams

City of Dreams
Author: Bernard F. Dick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0813153654

Horror films. Deanna Durbin musicals. Francis, the talking mule. Ma and Pa Kettle. Ross Hunter weepies. Theme parks. E.T. (1982). Apollo 13 (1995). These are only a few of the many faces of Universal Pictures. In February 1906, Carl Laemmle, German immigrant and former clothing store manager, opened his first nickelodeon in Chicago, where he quickly moved from exhibition to distribution and then to film production. A master of publicity and promotions, within ten years "Uncle Carl" had moved his entire operation to Southern California, founded a city, and established Universal Pictures as one of the major Hollywood studios. In City of Dreams, Bernard F. Dick traces the history of Universal Pictures from its humble early origins to the modern day and analyzes the studio's films, from horror flicks featuring Karloff and Lugosi to comedies starring Abbott and Costello and W. C. Fields. Dick details how the Laemmle family was eventually forced out of the Universal empire, replaced by a string of studio heads who entered and exited one after another—the beginning of the age of corporate Hollywood, which transformed Universal Pictures into NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. Dick explains how the Universal-International merger in 1946, Decca's stock takeover in the early 1950s, and MCA's buyout in 1962 all presaged today's Hollywood, where the art of the deal often eclipses the art of making movies. Ultimately, although stars and executives have come and gone, shaping and reshaping the studio's image, Universal's revolving globe logo has lit up screens around the world through it all.

The Bowery Boys

The Bowery Boys
Author: Greg Young
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2016-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1612435769

Uncover fascinating, little-known histories of the five boroughs in The Bowery Boys’ official companion to their popular, award-winning podcast. It was 2007. Sitting at a kitchen table and speaking into an old karaoke microphone, Greg Young and Tom Meyers recorded their first podcast. They weren’t history professors or voice actors. They were just two guys living in the Bowery and possessing an unquenchable thirst for the fascinating stories from New York City’s past. Nearly 200 episodes later, The Bowery Boys podcast is a phenomenon, thrilling audiences each month with one amazing story after the next. Now, in their first-ever book, the duo gives you an exclusive personal tour through New York’s old cobblestone streets and gas-lit back alleyways. In their uniquely approachable style, the authors bring to life everything from makeshift forts of the early Dutch years to the opulent mansions of The Gilded Age. They weave tales that will reshape your view of famous sites like Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, and the High Line. Then they go even further to reveal notorious dens of vice, scandalous Jazz Age crime scenes, and park statues with strange pasts. Praise for The Bowery Boys “Among the best city-centric series.” —New York Times “Meyers and Young have become unofficial ambassadors of New York history.” —NPR “Breezy and informative, crowded with the finest grifters, knickerbockers, spiritualists, and city builders to stalk these streets since back when New Amsterdam was just some farms.” —Village Voice “Young and Meyers have an all-consuming curiosity to work out what happened in their city in years past, including the Newsboys Strike of 1899, the history of the Staten Island Ferry, and the real-life sites on which Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl is based.” —The Guardian

Devil's Mile

Devil's Mile
Author: Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2024-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1531507271

Devil’s Mile tells the rip-roaring story of New York’s oldest and most unique street The Bowery was a synonym for despair throughout most of the 20th century. The very name evoked visuals of drunken bums passed out on the sidewalk, and New Yorkers nicknamed it “Satan’s Highway,” “The Mile of Hell,” and “The Street of Forgotten Men.” For years the little businesses along the Bowery—stationers, dry goods sellers, jewelers, hatters—periodically asked the city to change the street’s name. To have a Bowery address, they claimed, was hurting them; people did not want to venture there. But when New York exploded into real estate frenzy in the 1990s, developers discovered the Bowery. They rushed in and began tearing down. Today, Whole Foods, hipster night spots, and expensive lofts have replaced the old flophouses and dive bars, and the bad old Bowery no longer exists. In Devil’s Mile, Alice Sparberg Alexiou tells the story of the Bowery, starting with its origins, when forests covered the surrounding area, and through the pre–Civil War years, when country estates of wealthy New Yorkers lined this thoroughfare. She then describes the Bowery’s deterioration in stunning detail, starting in the post-bellum years. She ends her historical exploration of this famed street in the present, bearing witness as the old Bowery buildings, and the memories associated with them, are disappearing.

Walking Broadway

Walking Broadway
Author: William Hennessey
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1580935354

Walking Broadway encapsulates the architectural history of Manhattan with fourteen walks that guide readers along New York's most famous street. Walking Broadway offers readers an architectural tour of the entire length of Broadway from Bowling Green to the Harlem River. Through fourteen structured walks the book not only presents the history of New York's most famous avenue, but also explores its architecture in depth, block by block, building by building. This is a book about what can be seen and experienced on Broadway today. Buildings are chosen for discussion first and foremost because they are interesting to look at. In a relaxed and engaging style, the author presents the building's story, explores the reasons why it is there, and explains why it looks the way it does. Along the way, the reader not only has the chance to discover fascinating and unusual buildings, but also gains a comprehensive understanding of the historic, social, economic, and political forces which shaped Broadway's growth and character.

Titanic

Titanic
Author: Christopher Durang
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
Total Pages: 52
Release: 1983
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780822211556

THE STORY: Amid a tangle of changing identities-and sometimes sexes-the action of the play centers on an American family, the Tammurais, who are traveling aboard the Titanic. Comprised of father, mother, brother and sister (or is she actually the Captain's daughter?) the Tammurais undergo a series of sexual permutations as they reveal all manner of shocking secrets and bizarre fetishes while awaiting the iceberg which, somehow, the ship seems unable to find. The mother tells the father that their son is not really his; the father confesses to the mother that their daughter is not really hers; the daughter mysteriously becomes an aunt who is having an affair with her sister (when she isn't seducing her nephew); while the father and son compete vigorously for the affections of a handsome young sailor, who is hard put to choose between them. Eventually the ship does go down, taking its odd assemblage of passengers with it, but leaving behind a remarkable array of original thoughts on the nature of the modern American family and the undeniably disturbed society which nurtures it.

Where Is Broadway?

Where Is Broadway?
Author: Douglas Yacka
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1524786527

Take your seats, because Where Is Broadway? is ready to take center stage! In a lively and engaging style, authors Douglas Yacka and Francesco Sedita cover the development of the first theaters and the birth of the American musical, as well as the shows and stars that have become Broadway legends. Readers will get the inside story on their favorite shows and may even discover some new ones.

Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage

Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage
Author: Joel Berkowitz
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2012
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0814335047

Collects leading scholars' insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater. While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators' responses to changing social and political conditions. Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business showcases the diversity of modern Yiddish theater by focusing on the relentless and far-ranging capacity of its performers, producers, critics, and audiences for self-invention. Editors Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry have assembled essays from leading scholars that trace the roots of modern Yiddish drama and performance in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and span a century and a half and three continents, beyond the heyday of a Yiddish stage that was nearly eradicated by the Holocaust, to its post-war life in Western Europe and Israel. Each chapter takes its own distinct approach to its subject and is accompanied by an appendix consisting of primary material, much of it available in English translation for the first time, to enrich readers' appreciation of the issues explored and also to serve as supplementary classroom texts. Chapters explore Yiddish theater across a broad geographical span--from Poland and Russia to France, the United States, Argentina, and Israel and Palestine. Readers will spend time with notable individuals and troupes; meet creators, critics, and audiences; sample different dramatic genres; and learn about issues that preoccupied both artists and audiences. The final section presents an extensive bibliography of book-length works and scholarly articles on Yiddish drama and theater, the most comprehensive resource of its kind. Collectively these essays illuminate the modern Yiddish stage as a phenomenon that was constantly reinventing itself and simultaneously examining and questioning that very process. Scholars of Jewish performance and those interested in theater history will appreciate this wide-ranging volume.