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Arthur Laurents's career as a playwright, screenwriter, book writer for musicals and director spanned over half a century. His first Broadway play, Home of the Brave, was produced in 1945; his last play, Come Back, Come Back, Wherever You Are, was produced in 2009 when he was ninety-one. Although he is best known for his work on the classic musicals Gypsy and West Side Story and for his screenplays for Rope, The Way We Were, and The Turning Point, Laurents is the author of seventeen full-length plays, numerous screenplays and three volumes of memoirs. Despite the length and distinction of Laurents's career, until now no one has written a full-length critical study of his work. Laurentss' nam...
Two desperate people have a wonderful romance, but their political views and convictions drive them apart.
"Home of the Brave is an honest play by an honest playwright on an honest theme. Arthur Laurents, American, and now a G.I. out of uniform, walks right up and faces the predicament of a lad who is a soldier and a Jew, but above all is a human being, sensitive to the shock of prejudice. I am convinced that Coney's position in or out of Home of the Brave is none too comfortable, that the Coneys of the whole world respond as Arthur Laurents has made his Coney respond to the prejudices around him. His is more than a soldier's problem; it is the problem of people everywhere."--The author.
Best known for the hit musicals West Side Story and Gypsy, Arthur Laurents began his career writing socially minded plays such as Home of the Brave and Time of the Cuckoo. He also garnered impressive credits as a screenwriter (The Way We Were) and stage director (La Cage aux Folles). Such a varied professional life makes for absorbing reading, as unleashed in his lively 2000 autobiography, Original Story By. Laurents passed away early in 2011 but not before writing The Rest of the Story, in which he revealed all that had happened in his life since Original Story By, filled with the wisdom he gained in growing older and a new perspective brought on by Laurents' experience of deep personal loss, including the death of his longtime companion, Tom Hatcher. Laurents' style remains engrossing and brutally honest. His voice is still highly intelligent, loving, generous, and gracious. He remained committed to his artistic vision to the very end, as captured in the epilogue, which he completed only days before his death. The book ends with a loving and insightful coda by Laurent's good friend and the editor of this book, David Saint.
THE STORY: George Oppenheimer's brief summation: It skirts about the fairy story of Sleeping Beauty , but never settles for long in one mold. There is social comment on conformity and other failings of our modern civilization; there is satir
Leona Samish, a single American woman of a "certain age" takes a long-planned European vacation from her job as a secretary and finds herself in a pensione in Venice, Italy. At a street market, she meets the handsome proprietor Renato DiRossi, entering into a casual flirtation which turns into an affair. Her complacency is jolted when she discovers he is married, has several children and is quite happy with the arrangement as is. Long-dormant frustrations and anger come to the surface as Leona faces the harsh reality of this new found infatuation and her own romantic notions of love. Shirley Booth and later Katharine Hepburn ("Summertime") played the leading role.
THE STORY: A group of congenial friends have restored several adjoining houses in one of New York's more attractive neighborhoods, and plan to move in en masse--setting up a sort of urban commune. However, one of their number, a confirmed bachelor,
The star of Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train “recalls life onstage and in film in an engaging, colorful memoir” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Synonymous with the golden age of Broadway, the dazzling lights of Hollywood, and the rise of television arts, Farley Granger’s charm and talent captivated the acting community and audiences alike. Working with creative visionaries like Alfred Hitchcock, Luchino Visconti, and Nick Ray, Granger was a celebrated figure in films like Strangers on a Train, Rope, Senso, and They Live by Night, bringing to the big screen a stunningly memorable presence. But behind his characters, he was an intensely complex man. In his richly told memoir...
THE STORY: A CLEARING IN THE WOODS is in a sense a fantasy--in which a multitude of times and experiences are telescoped into a single moment. The entire life of a young woman is shown during the course of the play. Atkinson, in the New York Time
Although almost neglected in research and studies on American Literature, the American Musical is certainly the most interesting and the most popular genre of American theater and drama. It has been influenced by the necessities of a self-funding commercial theater system of a democratic country. The fact that it has developed in a country of democracy means that it should be a genre for everyone: the intellectual and the common man. Broadway has provided all these. In his study, Marc Bauch analyzes three American Musicals, namely South Pacific (1949) by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, West Side Story (1957) by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim as well as Sunday in the Park with George (1984) by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Special attention is paid to the themes and topics, the literary means and the dramatic dodges of the aforementioned American Musicals. The three analyses are extended with historical overviews of the American Musical. Marc Bauch is also the author of Themes and Topics of the American Musical after World War II (2001) also published by Tectum Verlag.