From Broadway to the Bowery

From Broadway to the Bowery
Author: Leonard Getz
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2015-05-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786487429

In 1935 Sidney Kingsley's play about streetwise urban kids, Dead End, opened on Broadway featuring 14 adolescent actors. For two years on Broadway and then on tour, Kingsley's play delivered its social commentary contrasting affluent neighborhoods and tenement slums on New York City's East River. The film industry picked up the story and in 1937 released Dead End which spawned 23 more years of films and serials featuring the Dead End Kids and their offshoots, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys. This chronicle follows the street kids through the many assorted incarnations, shifting casts and studios. First the reader is introduced to how the original play and film came about. A cast list and analysis of each production follows. For the major players, the author provides a biography and filmography, and several of these entries include a tribute from a friend or family member. Brief biographical profiles are given for other actors. Sketches of the "Dead End" revivals of 1978 and 2005 follow.

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.

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.

From Broadway to the Bowery

From Broadway to the Bowery
Author: Leonard Getz
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

"This chronicle follows the street kids through the many assorted incarnations, shifting casts and studios. First the reader is introduced to how the original play and film came about. A cast list and summary of each production follows"--Provided by publisher.

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

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.

Hollywood's Made-to-Order Punks

Hollywood's Made-to-Order Punks
Author: Richard Roat
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781593934675

Meet and become friends with many of the actors from the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys! Since he began collecting Movie Memorabilia on the Dead End Kids in 1964, author Richard Roat has had the great fortune to develop personal relationships with David Gorcey, Stanley Clements, Gabe Dell, Bernard Punsly, Huntz Hall, Billy Benedict, Frankie Thomas, Eddie Le Roy, Brandy Gorcey (daughter of Leo Gorcey), Gary Hall (son of Huntz Hall), and Leo Gorcey Jr. (son of Leo Gorcey). This book draws upon those acquaintances and his talking with Billy Halop, Bennie Bartlett, Johnny Duncan, Ward Wood, Dick Chandlee, Eugene Francis, Harris Berger, Charles Peck, Ronald Sinclair, and more! Lavished with many photos from the films from the author's personal collection, this is one book you'll need to have in your collection, tough guy!

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.

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.

Dead End

Dead End
Author: Sidney Kingsley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2002
Genre:
ISBN: