A brilliant collection of highly illuminating, lively, often polemical essays (two of which have received the ASCAPDeems Taylor Award) that speak about the theatre, about writing, about fame and notoriety, and about the men and women who spend their lives in the service of entertainment.
Included here are three brilliant extended essays on the inextricably linked works and lives of three playwrights: Noel Coward, whose seemingly frivolous, charming plays reflected both his own detachment from the world and his deep craving for affection... Eugene O'Neill, who turned to writing as an anodyne for the anxiety and pain of his own life and attempted to make peace with the present by confessing, in his work, the sins of his past ...and Joe Orton, whose plays confronted the audience with facets of life they would have preferred to ignore, and whose own life confirmed his belief that "man is capable of every bestiality."
There is a brilliant critique of the work of Stephen Sondheim that finds the dark side of the lyrics written by the "laureate of disillusion"... a paean to Leiber & Stoller, whose lyrics for such songs as "Yakety Yak," "Poison Ivy," and "Charlie Brown" "took our confusion and gave it back to us asjoy"...a study of Sam Shepard as both "bad boy" and artist... a re-examination of the Beatles' music in light of the "crow's feet and the other crenulations of age" that the author now sees in his mirror... an examination of the "mood of decline" displayed in the comedy of Woody Allen.
In a relentlessly acute essay called "Hog Heaven: Scenes from Dallas," Lahr examines the city and finds in its "protean, schizophrenic personality" a symbol of the way contemporary America has distorted the 'American Dream." And further particularizing this observation, he looks at the writing of Studs Terkel, whose American Dream: Lost and Found seems to show that the Dream has become a trance... of Walt Whitman (he "promoted a cult of identity which, stripped of its spiritual trappings a century later, has its apotheosis in.. stardom")... of Hunter Thompson, the "first wild man" of American journalism ...ofJoan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, "the Luntsof the Los Angeles literary scene." And finally, in a long, penetrating essay entitled "Notes on Fame," he analyzes the ways in which the notion and facts of fame affect not only the famous but those who have made them so.
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