Theatre Biographies

'Zindagi ek safar hai suhana...' He was the most outrageous performer of the Hindi film screen - loved for his voice, adored for his comedy, and famous for his eccentricity. His big-screen performances - such as Half Ticket, Pyar Kiye Jaa, Padosan - could make you laugh hard, but his songs -...

A great many writers use their own lives as the raw material for their work, but few have done it with the wit and courage of Simon Gray. Like his previous best seller, The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer has the rare ability to make you laugh aloud one moment and ponder the sad mysteries of mortality the next - and sometimes to do both at the same time.

'Fluent and witty . . . confident . . . highly readable' Kathryn Hughes, GUARDIAN 'Brilliant - so vivid and so sharp, fantastically clever and consistently fascinating' KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite Was Shakespeare gay? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might...

Director of the cult 1980s film Chashme Baddoor and critically acclaimed movies such as Sparsh and Saaz; seasoned Marathi theatre personality; winner of three National Film Awards and two Filmfare Awards; recipient of the Padma Bhushan – Sai Paranjpye has many feathers in the patchwork quilt...

The Bawdy Bard: Shakespeare, sex, and the liberation of love In Shakespeare on Sex, listeners will discover William Shakespeare as they’ve never seen him before: a daring playwright determined to challenge Elizabethan sexual mores and champion the freedom of love.

Timeless and surprisingly current, The Art of the Theatre, published after her death at age 78, is the final and most in-depth record of the great actress' views on acting and the theatre. Here "The Divine Sarah" shares advice on everything from speech, movement, role preparation, vocal warmups, and make-up tips to why she preferred to play Hamlet instead of Ophelia.

Noël Coward on theatre was as dazzling and entertaining as his masterful plays and lyrics. Here his ideas and opinions on the subject are brilliantly brought together in an extraordinary collection of commentary, lyrics, essays, and asides on everything having to do with the theatre and...

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience. The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances.

'Beautifully written, deliciously evocative, funny and touching' STEPHEN FRY 'A thermometer up the Khyber Pass of Comedy, expertly administered' RICHARD E GRANT Aged twenty-five, dressed as Che Guevara, Nigel Planer answers an ad for a room and his life changes for ever. Both a memoir and a love...

The Partnership is the first book to tell the full story of Brecht and Weill's impulsive, combustible partnership, the compelling psychological drama of one of the most important creative collaborations of the past century. It is also the first book to give full credit where it is richly due to the three women whose creative gifts contributed enormously to their masterworks.

Lillian Hellman was a giant of 20th-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.

'This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves' DAILY TELEGRAPH The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the...

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of San Francisco's legendary American Conservatory Theater, pens a lively and revealing memoir of her 20-plus years at the helm and delivers a provocative and impassioned manifesto for the role of live theater in today's technology-infused world. Perloff's personal and professional journey - her life as a woman in a male-dominated profession, as a wife and mother, a playwright, director, producer, arts advocate, and citizen in a city erupting with enormous change.

This audiobook contains the voices of Black prima ballerina Lydia Abarca Mitchell, founding Dance Theatre of Harlem member Shelia Rohan, daughter of late founding member Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Khadija Tariyan McKinney-Griffith, and first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton-Benjamin and Marcia...

Bloomsbury presents Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway by David Rigby, read by Keith MacKechnie. During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, US Navy dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky proved himself to be one of the greatest pilots and combat leaders in American history, but his story has never...

Insightful, incisive & enlightening, the first volume of Simon Callow's comprehensive biography of Orson Welles. Now in abridged audio, Callow's vastly entertaining chronicle of Welles's first 26 years seems even finer than it did in 1995. The author's ability to skewer his subject's evasions...

In keeping with The Rehearsal Club mission to “preserve its legacy,” a national network of former residents came together to tell their stories while living at The Rehearsal Club. Spanning four decades, 1940s-1970s, The Rehearsal Club “Cinderellas” (coined by TV Guide in the 1950s) captures New York City and Broadway history while charting the journey leading to The Rehearsal Club’s incorporation in 2019.

To many people, Lucia Chase (1897-1986) was the American Ballet Theatre, and her reign as the queen of American ballet lasted for more than four decades. It was Chase who brought Nureyev, Bujones, Kirkland, and eventually Baryshnikov to ABT. Under her leadership, the company worked with such legends as Agnes de Mille, Anthony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and Twyla Tharp. Her drive, ambition, tenacity, and money kept the doors open even during the lean years. A dancer when the company made its debut in 1940, she was artistic director for an unprecedented thirty-five years, from 1945 to 1980.

The inside story of San Francisco's burgeoning gay history and Hollywood's trials and tribulations. Marc Huestis' showbiz memoir is an entertaining and personal retelling of his coming out in the streets of San Francisco in the early ’70s, his relationship with Harvey Milk, his award-winning early AIDS documentary work, and 20 years of memorable experiences and behind the scenes secrets of screen icons - including Debbie Reynolds, John Waters, Patty Duke, and Tony Curtis - honored at his grand singular extravaganzas at the world-renowned Castro Theater.