1 comments about The Dancer's Foot Book (A Dance Horizons Book).

1. I have danced my entire life and often I would get an injury and simply ignore it or treat it how I would a simple sore muscle or cramp. This book gives a complete encyclapedic dictionary of common "dancer" injuries and how to remedy them. It has proved to be a very helpful reference book for me on a daily basis. This book is easy to understand and even easier to use, this book will help anyone with basic foot problems, it isn't just for dancers.

2 comments about Mary Poppins: Anything Can Happen If You Let It.

1. An absolutely amazing book on the creation of the musical Mary Poppins.
   
   It is full of information, facts, photos and even the design folio is included! A beautiful, incredible book that will definitely be kept forever.



2. Though the musical of Mary Poppins was no masterpiece, its production values were certainly enchanting and this well put together volume includes a multitude of color production photos, scenic models and concept sketches from the stage show as well as photos and concept sketches from the much better 1964 Disney film starring Julie Andrews.
   I'd recommend this book to any fan of this musical (which I wasn't all that keen on) or fan of the film (which I certainly am) or anyone interested in studying stage design.

5 comments about The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.

1. I have to disagree with those who trash this book. I've read it more than once, and find it quite good. The amateur psychoanalysis doesn't dominate the proceedings, while you do get a very well written overview of an enormous career. Readability counts! - most Hitch books are boring junk, based on some dire Lacanian theory or whatnot. Okay, so Spoto feels he must "explain" Hitch's often morbid sensibility - if you notice, Spoto is also very interested in Christian subject matter. Possibly he feels there is something naughty about Hitch flicks, and must apologize for/excuse his interest in this way. (Speaking of amateur psych...) But that wouldn't be reason enough to pan the book. It's a compelling read, and much of it seems to be accurate. I believe its trashy rep is overstated. Read it, you'll probably be won over.



2. Nearly 25 years later Donald Spoto's book on Hitchcock, which caused sch a stir when it appeared, is still the champ. You could read it for its salacious details, such as the real reason he wanted Madeleine Carroll in handcuffs. Or you could read it to see him organize Hitchcock's different films into categories, classifying them not only by way of theme but with reference to studio politics. Think of how different Hitchcock's "Warners" films are than his Selznick pictures, even with the understanding that the same auteur created them.
   
   Spoto is unable to make out what was really going through Hitchcock's head while making VERTIGO. Did he really want the insipid Vera Miles to play the part(s) of Judy and Madeline, and then grow impatient with Kim Novak largely because she was no Vera Miles (thank goodness). If he was so furious with Miles, why did he then cast her in THE WRONG MAN, where she's so dreadfully bland one forgets she's in the picture? (And later he used her in his longrunning TV series.) If, as Spoto says, Hitchcock had an erotic fetish for blondes, did it somehow turn itself off when confronted with Kim Novak, one of the most obsessable women in film? I don't believe it!
   
   However Spoto is spot on when it comes to Hitchcock's last passion, for the actress "Tippi" Hedren with whom he made his two best films. Another reviewer here dismisses Ms. Hedren as a "mediocre performer at best who should have been grateful for a great man's attention and adoration," but under Hitchcock's skilled direction, she was able to pull off quite capably two of the most intense and primal roles ever created in the American cinema. People might have been startled by her work at the time, but it just keeps looking better and better where some of the other performances he elicited aren't looking that good any more, for he could make good actors look bad (Olivier, Fonda, Clift, Paul Newman, etc)--like the cattle he thought of them as.
   
   Our views of Hitchcock will continue to evolve, but we will always be grateful to Donald Spoto for expressing a certain biographical turn with great elegance and, almost, wit.



3. Of course, in 2005 we're accustomed to knowing a lot more about celebrities than we really ought to. When this book was first published twenty years ago, this fixation had not quite gotten to where it is today.
   
   No - instead, on the heels of Spoto's "The Art of Alfred Hitchcock," which gave Spoto free access to the late director and to his archives, Spoto insists that knowing way too much information about Hitch's private life is essential, somehow, to understanding his art.
   
   To a certain extent, that's the case. But some of this stuff is simply gratiutous. How relevant to art is the "Marnie" incident with Tippi Hedren? What possible addition to an important body of knowledge does that story make?
   
   If you want gossip, it's here. If you want to gain some insight into our greatest director's artistic character, it's promised here but maybe not delivered.



4. "Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
   
   ...and here is the Master of Suspense. While Hitchcock happens to be one of the better-known directors of the 20th century, he surely is the only master of enigma. Spoto has done an admirable job in depicting the life of a man always shrouded in mystery.
   
   The book follows Hitch from his childhood. A rather unattractive mother's boy, he was an outcast at public school. It continues his story from humble beginnings, through the discovery of genius, and ends at his death in 1980, at the age of 81. Throughout the pages, Spoto covers Hitchcock's life in detail, including his many quirks, obsessions bizarre sense of humour.
   
   Hitchcock's life was indeed bizarre - his personality and obsessions manifesting themselves in his over-eating and his dry, often macabre sense of humour. However, as the author rightly points out, the director also revealed this side of himself through the images of his movies. This makes a fascinating study once you have read the book and you'll never view Hitch's films at face value again.
   
   Because of her desire to protect her father's privacy, Hitch's daughter, Pat, refused Spoto any assistance in the writing of this book. He went instead to a veritable legion of actors and screenwriters who knew him and worked with him. The result is an extremely revealing and often very dark portrait of a man whose character was as shadowed as his films.
   
   But not all is dark and foreboding. There are several amusing anecdotes, which highlight Hitch's macabre sense of humour. Like the time he had a dummy made in his own likeness and sent it floating on its back down the Thames river as a publicity stunt for his movie "Frenzy" in 1972.
   
   My own personal favourite is the story of a woman who accosted him and complained that the "Psycho" shower scene so frightened her daughter that the girl would no longer shower. His laconic reply was, "Then, Madam, I suggest you have her dry cleaned."
   
   He also did not suffer actors gladly. While he did have his stable of favourites that he worked with, he once claimed that actors were cattle. Later he said, "I didn't say that actors are cattle - I said they should be treated as cattle." Another story says that when an actress asked Hitchcock if her right or left profile was better, he told her, "My dear, you're sitting on your best profile."
   
   Some of Spoto's claims I can't help but treat with a little scepticism. I do know that Hitch had a fascination with murder but the tender way in which he presents it in his films is classic Hitchcock. However, the author's statement that scenes in Hitch's movies reflect kind of voyeurism, I feel that with his trademark camera pans through windows, the director was trying to give the audience a bird's eye view of the scene - no more and no less. It is his way of allowing us to enter the private lives of his characters.
   
   When all is said and done, this is a fascinating book of a fascinating man. A genius in his own time, but also a frustrated enigma, with a taste for the truly macabre. I highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in learning about the man behind the mystery, although it is a little heavy at times.
   
   I'll leave the last word to the Master of Suspense himself:
   
   "Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs.



5. Donald Spoto has done a tremendous work in obtaining first-hand accounts from Hitchcock's friends, colleagues, family, and even Alfred, himself. There is not one iota of information about Hitchcock left out of this monumental work.

   He traces the ghosts of psychology that haunted Hitchcock from a very young child on until his pitiful death. Hitch's wants, desires, insecurities, and love affairs (one-sided) are intricately outlined and analyzed in a biography that has few contemporaries. This truly is the ultimate work on Hitchcock's life.

No comments about Stagings: Short Scripts for Middle and High School Students.

1 comments about The High School Theatre Teacher's Survival Guide.

1. I found this book extremely preachy - and if I as a theatre student thought so, a seasoned theatre teacher definitely will. It could use some more chapters on curriculum and lessons, she skims but doesn't give the instruction a novice needs.

1 comments about The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

1. Frederick Nolan tells the story of Rodgers and Hammerstein both as a team and as separate people. Indeed there is a good deal of space allotted to their careers BEFORE they ever worked together. But after they team up the narrative becomes more lively and a real page turner, at least partly because Nolan's style is graceful and charming in itself. He seems to have read everything written about them, even going so far as to watch TV kinescopes of them from the 1950s, and he talked to many people who knew them, worked with them.

   It's the backstage stories that make the book sing. Practically every page has a at least one fascinating anecdote. And he doesn't sugar-coat their personalities--Rodgers's curtness, even cruelty, and Hammerstein's insecurity, tendency to swallow his pride.

   It's hard to read the book without singing to yourself. My God, what songs these two wrote! But more than that, what dramatists they were; they broke convention again and again and mostly successfully.

   Pull out your recordings of Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific and start reading!

1 comments about Clues to Acting Shakespeare.

1. This is a user friendly and practical guide for high school theatre teachers. The exercises are useful and the worksheets tremendous. I have just completed a unit of Shakespearean scenes with my second and third year students and this was a helpful resource. For a more indepth book try Speaking Shakespeare Speaking Shakespeare

No comments about Handke Plays: 1: Offending the Audience, Self-Accusation, Kaspar, My Foot My Tutor, The Ride Across Lake Constance, and They Are Dying Out (Contemporary Dramatists Series).

5 comments about The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies.

1. This is one of the very few books that has useful information on gays in cinema from the beginning of the film industry to (somewhat) present day. I used it as research for a writing project on homosexuals in film and it was probably the most useful source as a stepping stone of information. By current standards, some academics may say that this book is outdated and "overdone" however I consider it to be the best single source of information on gays in film to date. I question why there are so few other "popular" publications that branch out from the wonderful points and concepts that Vito Russo makes.



2. The movie "The Celluloid Closet" is great, but you
   occasionally get the feeling that the directors
   are straining to make a point about homosexuality
   in old movies. But you never feel this way reading
   Russo's book. Russo is not a gifted prose stylist,
   the writing of the book is wel, it's prosaic, but
   he's a good writer with a keen eye and an excellent
   memory. If you've seen the movie and enjoyed it get this
   book to complete the experience.



3. Although Vito Russo (1946-1985) was well known as a gay activist and was extremely influential in the creation of such AIDS-activist organizations as ACT UP, today his reputation rests almost exclusively on THE CELLULOID CLOSET, a powerful commentary on the way Hollywood portrayed homosexuality on film from the silent era to the early 1980s. The book received considerable attention when first published in 1981, and it continues to receive considerable attention to this day--and justly so, for Russo's examination of the various gay characters created by Hollywood explores not only how such images were created by Hollywood, but how they shaped "straight" America's ideas about homosexuals and often altered the gay community's own self image as well.

   The position Russo takes and the interpretations he offers are nothing short of fascinating, and THE CELLULOID CLOSET holds up extremely well to re-reading. Even so, it is essentially an excellent work by an amateur writer. For all the power of its interpretations and arguments, the text is badly structured, and too often the tone of the prose seems less about the films under consideration than about the personality that considers them. And there are frequent factual errors in the text, with Russo's comments on the cult favorite The Rocky Horror Show perhaps the most glaring case in point.

   Although Russo's omnipresent personality tends to undercut his prose at times, it is an engaging personality, and in a certain sense it drives the narrative--and indeed does a great deal to make the book's shifting structure seem more acceptable than it would have otherwise been. And after a careful re-reading of the text, I have come to the conclusion that the errors involved are best described as "surface" errors; they do not seem to me to undercut the power of Russo's interpretations, arguments, or positions, all of which are extremely well presented and very astute. Even so, given the book's somewhat problematic nature, I would take issue with those who describe it as "definitive," which is a rather sweeping word. I would prefer to describe it as a fascinating analysis of a difficult subject written by a gifted amateur author--who manages to overcome his limitations to present an endlessly fascinating series of interpretations, arguments, and positions. The book deserves a place on the bookshelf of every one who loves film as much as the writer did, and I recommend it strongly. But it would be a mistake to take it as an absolute.

   GFT, Amazon Reviewer




4. Russo, now deceased, published the first edition of this book in 1981, in the dark ages before queer independent cinema, and before mainstream cinema began the tradition of giving every female lead a gay man for a best buddy -- back when gay men appeared only as swishy queens or psychotic killers, and lesbians appeared only as psychotic killers, period. He exhumed hundreds of long-forgotten films, from moody German expressionism through the fluffy bedroom farces of the 1950's, and created an invaluable survey of the way movies look at gay people, comparable in scope to Donald Bogle's survey of African-Americans in film, "Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks." We desperately need an update, but for everything from Laurel and Hardy shorts to "Personal Best," this is the place to go.



5. For me, this book answered many questions about why people, both gay and straight, have certain attitudes about homosexuality. The portrayal of gays in popular entertainment plays a gigantic role in how gay people are perceived, and this book gives many great examples of that.

   It also points the way to plenty of interesting movies that deal, in one level or another, with the subject. It would never have occurred to me to rent "Victim" (the 1961 movie) or "Suddenly Last Summer" if it weren't for this book. (What can I say--I'm provincial.)

   The newer addition includes some of the changes in the 80s. I wish that Vito Russo were still alive. The topic of gays in the movies is one that's still moving forward and backward at the same time, and it would be interesting to read his take on movies like "Beautiful Thing," and "Boys Don't Cry" as well as "To Wong Foo" and "Braveheart."

1 comments about Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History (DIAgram (Detroit Institute of Arts)).

1. When I got this book I thought; may be is just another book full of pictures. On the contrary the book starts on with a brief puppetry history and then gives an overview of the different types of puppetry. It gives an in depth summary of the puppet theatre since the 1960's and the overhaul that Jim Henson gave to the art of puppetry. It talks about puppetry as a new art an avant-garde entertaiment that has been around for centuries. A great book with a brilliant compilation of ideas and photographs.