I'd Like Two Tickets To Yesterday
About this book
Just as American showbiz has always mirrored the society of its time, so does this selection of newspaper and magazine columns from the 1960s to the 1990s by the veteran journalist Gerald Nachman superbly capture American showbiz of the last half of the twentieth century. In the new introductions he wrote to these columns, Nachman joins his present-day readers in a nostalgic look back on this fertile period of idiosyncratically American entertainment, returning us to what it felt like for the first time to experience iconic performers like Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, Betty Garrett, Bob and Ray, Michael Feinstein, and many others. Enduring highlights and passing fads alike come to life again in these columns about showbiz celebrities and the live shows, radio, and theater they made so exciting subjects that were once the common currency of the time. For first-time readers and old fans alike, these columns reveal what made all of Gerald Nachman s quotidian writing so special unstinting admiration of talent, wherever he encountered it; devastating callouts of entertainment industry "excesses and idiocies ; and always, underlying every word, a profound and enduring love for all things theater.