Juke-box musicals such as Carole King’s Beautiful, ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys don’t always have to make sense if the music and staging are truly spectacular. After the Chicago tryout, the creative team behind The Cher Show have their work cut out for them to shape-shift this vehicle into true fabulousness for its Broadway debut in November at the Neil Simon Theatre.
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SET in the years following the Civil War in an unnamed state, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a Western that begins with Jessilyn Harney recalling that her mother died when giving birth to her, leaving her father to raise her and her brother Noah …
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Pennsylvania Station offers a powerful glimpse into gay life in America before Stonewall, and a look at the complicated relationship between two very different men.
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Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms by Michelle Tea Feminist Press. 318 pages, $18.95 THE EARLY DAYS of lesbian-feminist literature boasted authors with big personalities—Rita Mae Brown, Germaine…More
The strength of The Children of Harvey Milk is the very detailed stories of legislators in the North Atlantic world whom Reynolds interviewed, often providing us with more detail than a reader can assimilate.
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These two books are not the place where someone unfamilar with Warhol’s œuvre should dive in. Flatley’s prose can sometimes lapse into postmodernist verbosity and opaqueness, a scholarly idiom that this reader found at time impossible to penetrate. Nevertheless, each essay makes a serious and valuable contribution to Warhol studies. The illustrations alone are well worth the price of these (somewhat expensive) volumes.
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Book reviews of Read by Strangers: Stories, She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak, Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition, The Great Believers, and Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940; and the movie Juliet, Naked.
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So much happens in this beautifully rendered novel. The South comes to life in the way we have come to expect of Southern writers. Blanche Boyd does not overlook essential Southern themes—American themes, really—such as race and historical memory. Some mysteries are “cozies” in which a sweet lady detective pours lavender tea and reveals that the vicar did it. Tomb of the Unknown Racist is a not-cozy: sensibilities are not spared. The vigilant reader is thus rewarded.
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Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography in which Perry expresses her feelings of oneness with Hansberry through similarities in their backgrounds and reactions to political events. The book also offers critiques of many of Hansberry’s works, both published and unpublished.
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Berenice Abbott remains a major influence in photography today. Her work is visually breathtaking—immediate, clear, and indelible. Van Haaften has written a book that’s a major resource for fans of urban and architectural photography.
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