John Lahr

John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

John Lahr— New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion) —reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978."I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.

With a New Preface by the AuthorFirst published in 1969, Notes on a Cowardly Lion has established itself as one of the best-ever show business biographies. Drawing on his father's recollections and on the memories of those who worked with him, John Lahr brilliantly examines the history of modern American show business through the long and glorious career of his father--the raucous low-comic star of burlesque, vaudeville, the Broadway revue and musical, Hollywood movies, and the legitimate stage. Here in rich detail is Lahr evolving from low--dialect comic to Ziegfeld Follies sophisticate, hamming it up with the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman on the set of The Wizard of Oz , and debuting Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in America, which Kenneth Tynan called "one of the most noble performances I have ever seen." In the examination of Bert Lahr's chronic insecurity and self-absorption, the breakdown of his first marriage, and the affectionate arm's length he kept between himself and his adoring second family, John Lahr's book also brings the reader closer than any other theater biography to the private torment of a great funny man.This edition of the book includes the award-winning essay "The Lion and Me," John Lahr's intimate reflections on family life with his distant, brooding, but lovable father. A first-class stylist, John Lahr takes the reader beyond the magic of show business to a dazzling examination of how a performing self is constructed and staged before the paying customers. Both as theater history and biography, Lahr's book is superb.

"Lahr creates a book worthy of its title: It is a living celebration of theater itself." ―Caryn James, New York Times Book Review Since 1992 John Lahr has written for The New Yorker , where for twenty-one years he was the senior drama critic, the longest stint in that post in the magazine's history. Joy Ride is a collection of his profiles and reviews that throws open the stage door, taking us behind the scenes both on and off Broadway to introduce such creators of contemporary drama as August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Wallace Shawn, and Mike Nichols. The result is a delightful, literate, and essential crash course in contemporary theater. 2 illustrations

A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights “Lahr’s cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal “ New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters.”— Publishers Weekly Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual—this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller’s most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller’s early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus ; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , and The Crucible , providing an original interpretation of Miller’s work and his personality.

From David Mamet to Ingmar Bergman, Frank Sinatra to Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr to Eddie Izzard, The New Yorker's resident drama critic, John Lahr has had unparalleled access to the most elusive, compelling and irresistible public personas of our time. In SHOW AND TELL, Lahr - 'the most intelligent and insightful writer on theatre today' (NEW YORK TIMES) - reinvents the celebrity profile to find the essence of performance. Lahr's gift is his understanding of both the art and the artist, to show how the work and the life intersect. He has had unusual access to his subjects, who talk to him with rare candour.

A biography of Frank Sinatra.

John Lahr is one of the most celebrated critics of the performing arts. Winner of Britain's 1992 Roger Machell Award for the best writing about public performance, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation is an insider's account of a great clown and a great act. It takes us backstage at London's Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, with Barry Humphries, and into the weird and wonderful world of his show-stopping creation--Dame Edna Everage.Humphries is a prodigious comic talent. His copresence in Edna-- a character so real to the public that her autobiography, My Gorgeous Life, appeared on the nonfiction list--actively invites speculation about reality and fantasy, male and female. With her "natural wisteria" hair and her harlequin eyeglasses, Dame Edna was the first solo performer to sell out the most famous theater in England, and she also took the United States by storm, filling theaters from coast to coast. Hilarious and malign, polite and rude, highbrow and very low, the character Barry Humphries inhabits is a bundle of contradictions.John Lahr, the son of another comic genius, takes us behind the scenes to investigate how a provincial dandy from Melbourne transformed himself into one of the most unlikely megastars of today. In showing the connection between Humphries's comedy and the life it parodies, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation goes beyond reportage to an exploration of the nature of comedy, a subject that Lahr has pursued over the years in his acclaimed biographies of Bert Lahr, Noël Coward, and Joe Orton. Richly entertaining and engagingly written, this book is an anecdotal treatise on the nature of comedy and an absorbinginquiry into what makes us laugh.

As drama critic for The New Yorker, John Lahr has always striven to tell the story behind the story; to use biography and history as well as his skill as a critic to illuminate the theater and all of its players. Light Fantastic is a wide-ranging, comprehensive collection of his best critical pieces exploring the heart and soul of the theater. From his penetrating examination of Oscar Wilde's path to self-destruction, to his tragic portrait of Joe Orton's corrosive relationship with Kenneth Halliwell; from his chronicle of the rise and fall and reprisal of the American musical to his insightful commentary on such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller and Tom Stoppard, John Lahr brilliantly illuminates the dazzling world of contemporary theater.

A collection of essays about some of the modern world's most provocative cultural icons is a compendium of celebrity profiles, anecdotes, and observations about such figures as Dame Edna, Cole Porter, and Laurence Fishburne. By the Tony Award-winning writer of "Elaine Stritch at Liberty."

Hailed as a "tour de force" by the New York Times , this irresistible novel captures John Lahr's madcap geniusMeet Benny busboy at the Homestead restaurant in New York City by day, compulsive autograph hunter by night. Known for going to extraordinary lengths for a much-coveted signature, Benny is also tangled up with an actress and fellow autograph hound named Gloria, and drawn into an embittered battle with his archenemy, a headwaiter with a grudge. Lahr's acclaimed debut novel captures one wild week in Benny's life. It is an introduction to a brilliantly drawn and determined character who will stay with you long after the final page.

Sgt Raymond Shaw is a hero of the first order. He's an ex-prisoner of war who saved the life of his entire outfit, a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the stepson of an influential senator ...and the perfect assassin. Brainwashed during his time as a POW he is a "sleeper", a living weapon to be triggered by a secret signal. He will act without question, no matter what order he is made to carry out. To stop Shaw, his former commanding officer must uncover the truth behind a twisted conspiracy of torture, betrayal and power that will lead to the highest levels of the government...

A reissue in hardback of critic John Lahr's famous 1982 study of Noël Coward's plays"Noël Coward," said Terence Rattigan, "is simply a phenomenon, and one that is unlikely to occur ever again in theatre history." A phenomenon he certainly was, and it is part of John Lahr's purpose in this book to show how that phenomenon called "Noël Coward" was largely Coward's own careful creation. Lahr's penetrating critical study of Coward's drama investigates all the major and minor plays of "The Master". Private Lives, Design for Living and Hay Fever make a fascinating group of "Comedies of Bad Manners". Blithe Spirit and Relative Values raise the "Ghost in the Fun Machine". Lahr then goes on to explore the "politics of charm" oozing through The Vortex, Easy Virtue and Present Laughter. In all Coward's plays Lahr uncovers a coherent philosophy in which charm is both the subject of Coward's comedies and the trap which made his very public life a perpetual performance. "A smashing, thoughtful and very good guide to Coward's plays" (Sheridan Morley)

(Limelight). Screenplay to John Lahr's successful dramatization of The Orton Diaries that chronicles the last eight months of Joe Orton's life, his growing theatrical celebrity, and the corresponding punishing effect it had on his relationship with his friend and mentor Kenneth Halliwell, who murdered him on August 9, 1967, and then took his own life.

The critic-author reviews the work of Noel Coward, Eugene O'Neill, Joe Orton, Stephen Sondheim, the Beatles and other providers of "high" and "low" entertainment

Drama, Criticism

TV executive George Mellish has separated from his wife and seems determined to live it up in the lonely grandeur of his new penthouse flat, yet he finds himself still obsessed by his wife, to the point of spying on her from a treehouse. A comic novel from the author of Joe Orton's biography.

Plays with words and the familiar images of our life and culture to lead to a new appreciation of the theatre on stage through understanding theatre in life.

Cover worn, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

"Nine explosions of pure theater from the most vital and vigorous talents in American drama!" The nine plays, each of which is preceded by a short introduction by one of the editors, are: "In the Wine Tree" by Ed Bullins; "The Serpent" by Jean-Claude van Itallie; "Operation Sidewinder" by Sam Shepard; "Slaveship" by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones); "The Kid" by Robert Coover; "Cop-Out" by John Guare; "Injun: A Happening" by Claes Oldenburg; "Mysteries and Other Pieces" by Judith Malina & Julian Beck; "AC/DC" by Heathcote Williams. The most radical in form is Oldenburg's piece, "A Happening" rather than a play per se, which is represented here by three texts: "A Statement" by Oldenburg himself; "the script," a three-page narrative written by Oldenburg "for himself" during the preparation of the piece; and "Injun/the production," a 12-page account by Michael Kirby of the staging of this "Happening" at the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts in 1962.

Catalog of an exhibition, Siena 2005

biography

In Razzle Dazzle 'Em, John Lahr, the lead theatre critic for The New Yorker for 21 years and a multi-award-winning biographer, captures the essence of some of Hollywood's most influential actors and directors. This compelling collection of pen portraits offers a rare glimpse into the minds of those we see on screen. In this volume, Lahr's profiles of Helen Mirren, Ethan Hawke, Viola Davis, Sean Penn, Julianne Moore, Todd Haynes, Cate Blanchett, Sam Mendes, Claire Danes, Judi Dench, Mike Nichols, Emma Thompson, and Al Pacino, spanning from 2000 to 2022, are brought together for the first time alongside Lahr's award-winning essay Petrified, on stage fright. Showcasing the voices of these industry titans, Lahr masterfully explores the triumphs, challenges, and artistic processes that define the careers of these 'show-biz legends'.