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Showstoppers! : the surprising backstage stories of Broadway's most remarkable songs
Showstoppers! is all about Broadway musicals most memorable numbers why they were so effective, how they were created, and why they still resonate.
Book
Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!
Before the advent of cable and its hundreds of channels, before iPods and the Internet, three television networks ruled America's evenings. And for twenty-three years, Ed Sullivan, the Broadway gossip columnist turned awkward emcee, ruled Sunday nights. It was Sullivan's genius to take a worn-out stage genre-vaudeville-and transform it into the TV variety show, a format that was to dominate for decades. Right Here on Our Stage Tonight! tells the complete saga of The Ed Sullivan Show and, through the voices of some 60 stars interviewed for the book, brings to life the most beloved, diverse, multi-cultural, and influential variety hour ever to air. Gerald Nachman takes us through those years, from the earliest dog acts and jugglers to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and beyond. Sullivan was the first TV impresario to feature black performers on a regular basis-including Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey, James Brown, and Richard Pryor-challenging his conservative audience and his own traditional tastes, and changing the face of American popular culture along the way. No other TV show ever cut such a broad swath through our national life or cast such a long shadow, nor has there ever been another show like it. Nachman's compulsively readable history, illustrated with classic photographs and chocked with colorful anecdotes, reanimates The Ed Sullivan Show for a new generation.
eBook
A Live Broadway Column Every Sunday Night
In 1948, to be a syndicated New York gossip columnist was to enter into the literati as a major mover and shaker. Ed Sullivan wasn’t the first of his swaggering breed to be awarded a broadcast of his own. He followed in the footsteps of the gabby Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Jimmy Fidler of Hollywood, Irv Kupcinet out of Chicago, and Dorothy Kilgallen and Hy Gardner of New York. None of them were on TV as yet, but each one had a popular radio program with a large, avid following.
Sullivan, in fact, was following in his own radio
Book Chapter
INTRODUCTION
You can tell a lot about a people by how they choose to amuse themselves. “The Ed Sullivan Show,” for millions of otherwise culturally deprived Americans, was the prime source of pure entertainment, television’s most powerful, influential show for 23 years, between 1948 and 1971.
Popular culture is a quick, reliable barometer of the national spirit at a moment in time, and for nearly a quarter century “The Ed Sullivan Show”—and Sullivan himself—produced and nurtured America’s cultural life. Not just pop culture but haute culture, art with a capital A. The hot, the new, the old and cold,
Book Chapter
Not Quite All in the Family
While Ed Sullivan wrapped his seemingly invincible and enshrined show—and his public persona—in family values, he was, in his own home life, a peculiar role model. He was tightly bound to his wife, Sylvia, and their daughter speaks of him with affection, but Ed used to say, “Family life is overrated.” As it turns out, he had three families—one at home, one at the show, and one at theDaily News, plus a circle of girlfriends on the side.
Sullivan’s grandson Rob Precht told biographer James Maguire, “He did not, on a personal level, enjoy family life.”
Book Chapter
Extended Family
Unlike Arthur Godfrey, who had his “friends,” or even Steve Allen, who had his “Man in the Street” gang, Ed Sullivan never had a snug on-screen television “family” unit. Over time, however, he adopted a small circle of regulars that viewers eagerly welcomed.
There was Ed’s house hold TV pet, Topo Gigio, the cutesy-pie rubber Italian mouse that Sullivan played straight man to; Señor Wences, whose surreal act consisted of a hand puppet named Johnny (or “Yonny”), Wences’s fist turned into a face with lipstick and a tiny blond wig (whose catchphrase was “Deefeecul’ fo’ you—eesy fo’ me!”), and
Book Chapter
The $375 Extravaganza
From his first days in New York City, Ed Sullivan had skillfully maneuvered himself into place as journalism’s ambassador to show business. He produced and hosted charity bashes and emceed theDaily News’s annual Harvest Moon Ball for 12 years, lining up names like Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Risë Stevens, Ronald Colman, Bill Robinson, and Lena Horne. Sullivan boasted that, to put on a benefit, “you had to be a bookkeeper, a showman, and a manager, and you didn’t have time to freeze”—precisely the gifts needed to produce a weekly TV show on a laughably tight budget.
Book Chapter
Herding Comedians
From the mightiest diva to the lowliest tumbler, each performer came equipped with his or her own set of neuroses, needs, idiosyncrasies, problems, and demands. They all required stroking and often had to be firmly dealt with. They could be nervous, truculent, childish, paranoid, and unmanageable—often all at once. Their nerve endings, as well as their careers, were on the line when they were at last invited to play “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
A performer could be famous in five minutes or dumped back into oblivion. For Sullivan, it was just another show he had to get through.
He
Book Chapter