In 1982, James Lapine, at the beginning of his career as a playwright and director, met Stephen Sondheim, nineteen years his senior and already a legendary Broadway composer and lyricist. Shortly thereafter, the two decided to write a musical inspired by Georges Seurat's nineteenth-century painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.Through conversations between Lapine and Sondheim, as well as most of the production team, and with a treasure trove of personal photographs, sketches, script notes, and sheet music, the two Broadway icons lift the curtain on their beloved musical. Putting It Together is a deeply personal remembrance of their collaboration and friend - ship and the highs and lows of that journey, one that resulted in the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning classic.

    . . Tony Bennett shares countless tales about showbiz, his famous friends, his family, and his artistic career. . . . [His] tips for happiness, success, and longevity are like music to the ears.” — Publishers WeeklyA magnificent testament to an extraordinary man and his art, and illustrated with Tony Bennett's own beautiful hand-drawn artwork, Life Is a Gift is a work that will captivate, delight, and be cherished by music lovers of all ages. Legendary singer, artist, and performer Tony Bennett has been one of the world's most beloved entertainers for more than six decades. From the 78 to the LP to the digital age, Tony has done it all, and is still at the top of his game. Decade after decade, this artistic icon—who has won seventeen Grammys, sung for ten presidents, and performed for royalty—has refused to compromise his vision or values. Bennett's popularity continues to grow as each new generation discovers his timeless songs and incredible voice.In this entertaining and thoughtful memoir, Bennett shares stories of friends and family and the essential lessons they have taught him: of the value of hard work and of creating art that continues to inspire; of perseverance and a dedication to excellence; of the necessity of humility, love, respect, and, most important, gratitude. He pays tribute to all the remarkable talents he has had the honor to work with and to learn from, including Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, and others.

    Evan Hansen is about to get the one thing he's always wanted: a chance to finally fit in. Both deeply personal and profoundly contemporary, Dear Evan Hansen is a new American musical about life and the way we live it.The book-produced by Melcher Media, the team behind Hamilton, Wicked, Rent, and many more-tells the story of the musical from its conception nearly a decade ago to the Broadway stage. From developing the idea to writing the show, composing, casting, and rehearsals, Dear Evan Hansen appeals to fans far and wide offering them the opportunity to continuously revisit the show, and for those who haven't seen the musical, reading the book will make them feel like they have.Filled with interviews with the cast and crew, original behind-the-scenes photography, a deeper look into Evan's fictional world and the visual world of the show, unreleased lyrics, and of course the libretto, as well as reflections on the creators own formative memories from their adolescence as it relates to the show's themes, and important examinations of how we present ourselves online and mental health, Dear Evan Hansen is a beautifully produced, thoughtful, and uplifting book.

    It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.

    Beginning with the scandalous Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849, Larry Stempel traces the growth of musicals from minstrel shows and burlesques, through the golden age of Show Boat and Oklahoma!, to such groundbreaking works as Company and Rent.Stempel describes the Broadway stage with vivid accounts of the performers drawn to it, and detailed portraits of the creators who wrote the music, lyrics, and stories for its shows, both beloved and less well known. But Stempel travels outside the theater doors as well, to illuminate the wider world of musical theater as a living genre shaped by the forces of American history and culture. He reveals not only how musicals entertain their audiences but also how they serve as barometers of social concerns and bearers of cultural values.Showtime is the culmination of decades of painstaking research on a genre whose forms have changed over the course of two centuries. In covering the expansive subject before him, Stempel combines original research—including a kaleidoscope of primary sources and archival holdings—with deft and insightful analysis. The result is nothing short of the most comprehensive, authoritative history of the Broadway musical yet published.

    It is a smorgasbord of genres, styles, and tales: laughter, tears and, of course, provocation, featuring covers of songs made famous by musical legends as diverse as Pink, Adele, and the Disney princesses.

    Records, and the remarkable secret to its meteoric rise.The roster of Warner Brothers Records and its subsidiary labels reads like the roster of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Prince, Van Halen, Madonna, Tom Petty, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, and dozens of others. But the most compelling figures in the Warner Bros. story are the sagacious Mo Ostin and the unlikely crew of hippies, eccentrics, and enlightened execs. Ostin and his staff transformed an out-of-touch company, revolutionized the industry, and, within just a few years, created the most successful record label in the history of the American music industry.How did they do it? One day in 1967, the newly tapped label president Mo Ostin called his team together to share his grand strategy: he told them to stop trying to make hit records/"Let’s just make good records and turn those into hits.”With that, Ostin ushered in a counterintuitive model that matched the counterculture. His offbeat crew recruited outsider artists and gave them free rein, while rejecting out-of-date methods of advertising, promotion, and distribution. And even as they set new standards for in-house weirdness, the upstarts’ experiments and innovations paid off, to the tune of hundreds of legendary hit albums.Warner Bros Records conquered the music business by focusing on the music rather than the business. Their story is as raucous as it is inspiring—pure entertainment that also maps a route to that holy grail: love and money.Includes black-and-white photographs

    Led Zeppelin was the last great band of the 1960s and the first great band of the 1970's and When Giants Walked the Earth is the full, enthralling story of Zep from the inside, written by a former associate of both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Rich and revealing, it bores into not only the disaster, addiction and death that haunted the band but also into the real relationship between Page and Plant, including how it was influenced by Page's interest in the occult. Comprehensive and yet intimately detailed, When Giants Walked the Earth literally gets into the principals' heads to bring to life both an unforgettable band and an unrepeatable slice of rock history.

    Born in Chicago, young Fosse began his career tap-dancing as part of the Riff Brothers in sleazy strip joints, where he encountered the erotic style that later became his signature. Best known for his Broadway hits (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Sweet Charity, and Chicago), he was also a successful movie director. Three of his five films were nominated for Academy Awards: Cabaret, Lenny, and the autobiographical All That Jazz. A compulsive womanizer, he had many affairs, even during his three marriages, the last of which was to actress Gwen Verdon, with whom he shared his most fruitful Broadway collaborations. As his fame grew, so too did his insecurities and addictions. He survived two heart attacks and several epileptic seizures, only to die on a street corner in Washington, D.C., in Verdon’s arms. After his death Fosse became a Broadway legend. Based on interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, this eloquent biography provides a vivid connection between Bob Fosse’s life and his work for stage and screen.

    He sheds light on Diana Ross’s relationship with Berry Gordy and her cutthroat rise to top billing in the group, as well as Florence Ballard’s corresponding decline. He also takes us inside the studio, examining how timeless classics were conceived and recorded on the Motown “assembly line,” and considers the place of Motown in an era of cultural upheaval, when not being “black enough” became a fierce denunciation within the black music industry.Deftly combining personal testimony, history, and expert analysis, Ribowsky not only tells the full, heartbreaking story of the Supremes, but shows why Gordy’s revolutionary concept of “blacks singing white” was essential to the modern evolution of music.

    Beginning in the 1920s when blues, country, and black popular music played over the air waves and the first independent record labels were born, this first volume of a two-part series finishes in December 1963, just as an immense sea-change begins to take hold and the Beatles prepare for their first American tour. Ward introduces you to the musicians, DJs, record executives, and producers who were at the forefront of the genre. Sharing story after story of some of the most unforgettable and groundbreaking moments in rock history, Ward reveals how different sounds, harmonies, and trends came together to create the music we all know and love today.Ed Ward has been NPR’s Fresh Air rock & roll historian for the last thirty-five years reaching 14 million listeners. In these pages he shares his endless depth of knowledge and through engrossing storytelling hops seamlessly from Memphis to Chicago, Detroit, England, New York, and everywhere in between covering all the big-name acts everyone is already familiar with, from Elvis and Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry, while filling in gaps of knowledge with the more obscure and forgotten names of music’s past like T-Bone Walker and The Ventures.For all music lovers and rock & roll fans, this sweeping history will shine a light on the corners of the genre to reveal some of the less well-known yet hugely influential artists who changed the musical landscape forever.

    The show is based on a remarkable series of taped discussions made in the mid 1970s with some of the top "gypsies" (veteran Broadway dancers), many of whom went on to play characters based on themselves in the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning musical. In many ways, On the Line: The Creation of "A Chorus Line" is a continuation of the show itself. In this collective oral history, the 19 original cast members tell how they got involved with the project, how they labored through the months of workshops that shaped it, and what its success has meant for their lives and careers. They paint intimate and frank portraits of co-creators Michael Bennett, Joseph Papp, Ed Kleban - and each other. Originally published in 1990, the book has been updated to continue telling their stories over the past 16 years. Wayne Cilento ("I Can Do That") has become a Tony-winning choreographer of shows like Wicked and Aida; Kelly Bishop ("Can the adults smoke?") has become a TV star; Trish Garland has become a California fitness guru, and so forth.

    Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: Why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists’ community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palace is the intimate and definitive story.Today the Chelsea stands poised in limbo between two futures: Will this symbol of New York's artistic invention be converted to a profit-driven business catering to the top one percent? Or will the Chelsea be given a rebirth through painstaking effort by the community that loves it? Set against these two competing possibilities, Inside the Dream Palace could not be more fascinating or timely.

    Indeed, fist-pumping hits like Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It," Mötley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls," and Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" are as inextricably linked to the era as Reaganomics, Pac-Man, and E.T.From the do-or-die early days of self-financed recordings and D.I.Y. concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy, to the multi-Platinum, MTV-powered glory years of stadium-shaking anthems and chart-topping power ballads, to the ultimate crash when grunge bands like Nirvana forever altered the entire climate of the business, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock's "Nothin' But a Good Time" captures the energy and excess of the hair metal years in the words of the musicians, managers, producers, engineers, label executives, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and hangers-on who lived it.

    From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the States. Its stars were America's first stars in the modern sense, and it utterly dominated American popular culture. Writer and modern-day vaudevillian Trav S.D. chronicles vaudeville's far-reaching impact in No Applause--Just Throw Money. He explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is the story of show business in America and documents the rich history and cultural legacy of our country's only purely indigenous theatrical form, including its influence on everything from USO shows to Ed Sullivan to The Muppet Show and The Gong Show. More than a quaint historical curiosity, vaudeville is thriving today, and Trav S.D. pulls back the curtain on the vibrant subculture that exists across the United States--a vast grassroots network of fire-eaters, human blockheads, burlesque performers, and bad comics intent on taking vaudeville into its second century.