“Reagan’s Cowboys is something of a memoir of Roberts’s career with the 40th president, and as such, it’s a time machine back to the days of typewriters, hard-line telephones, and Marlboro cigarettes. .. Be grateful to Roberts for giving us history as it actually happened, uncensored and un-politically corrected. … [He] gives us glimpses of a huge cast of characters in Reaganworld.”―James P. Pinkerton, Breitbart
(View on Amazon)
A Presidential Election Year Is Like the Wild West . . .
When rumors about Geraldine Ferraro–the first woman vice-presidential nominee by a major party in U.S history–reached First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1984 presidential election, a secret operation was launched to investigate her. It revealed Ferraro’s familial ties to organized crime and the extent to which she would have been subject to pressure or blackmail by the Mafia if elected.
Written by an insider responsible for running the investigation, this never-before-told story goes behind the scenes as an incumbent president’s campaign works to expose a political opponent’s mob connections. Part detective story, part political thriller, the narrative features all the major players in the Reagan White House and 1984 reelection committee, with revealing anecdotes about Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
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View Reagan’s Cowboys on Amazon
John B. Roberts II got his start as an author with a play that he wrote and directed for a school performance in the fourth grade. His first professional work as a writer came when he and a college buddy scraped by through a dreary English winter to launch a magazine in London. When State Department exams required him to go back to America, he wrote magazine and newspaper articles for the airfare home. To get the money back to London, he took a temporary job on a presidential campaign. Sixteen years later, after two terms in the White House and a decade as an international political consultant, he made a mid-career switch back to writing fulltime.
For the last two years, he has been criss-crossing America’s backroads towing a retro-mod Bowlus Road Chief travel trailer while exploring America’s “fly over” country for a travel book.
His latest novel, “Stripping Lolita,” is in revision.
“Reagan’s Cowboys” is a true account of the 1984 Reagan-Bush reelection campaign’s secret operation against Geraldine Ferraro, America’s first female candidate for vice president on a major party ticket. It will be the first book to expose the hardball political tactics used at the pinnacle of American politics.
Roberts was The Mclaughlin Group’s senior producer and creative collaborator with television host John McLaughlin until his death in 2016. He has written thousands of shows and interviews for world leaders, celebrities, experts, politicians, and authors. In 1998, he launched CNCB’s top-rated talk show, “The McLaughlin Special Report.” As a freelance producer, he works on assignment around the world, from exotic locales such as a remote atoll in Tahiti to world capitals like London and Madrid.
When he isn’t writing books, articles, or TV shows, he can be found drawing and painting, or wandering remote byways in his 1984 CJ7 Jeep.
‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café. ‘You and I for instance. What have we done this morning that is good? What have we done to resist the ruination of our planet? Nothing. It is terrifying!’
Peter Brook fixes me with blue eyes which, while diminished by macular degeneration that means he can make me out only dimly, shine fiercely. But for the genteel surroundings and quilted gilet, he could be Gloucester or Lear on the heath, wildly ardent with insight.
‘Think of Prospero. He’s a bad character, hell-bent on revenge for his brother’s wrong, a colonialist who dominates Caliban and the rest of the island. Only when he sees love growing between Miranda and Ferdinand does he learn humility and tolerance. He knows he deserves to be punished. And if we are honest — you and I, everybody — then we can say with Prospero “Me too”. But we are not that honest.’
I’d asked the 94-year-old theatre director to explain to me, as we sit knee to knee in South Kensington, the puzzling final words of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. Prospero, his books drowned, his charms o’erthrown, addresses the audience:
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Brook seemed worth asking, since The Tempest howls through his life. It is 62 years since he directed John Gielgud as Prospero clad not in magician’s robes but half-naked, a hermit in hemp on a bare stage — Brook startling Stratford with his lifelong love of less. In 1990, at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, his Parisian base since the 1970s, the walls flayed raw by time and the stage scattered with a carpet of sand, he conjured up theatrical magic again, stripping theatre bare to get to the play’s essence. And in his book on Shakespeare The Quality of Mercy, he reflects on the soliloquy.
What is Prospero on about, I ask Brook? ‘Oh, don’t put me on the spot!’ he wails. ‘I can’t tell you the meaning, all I can do is invite you to share the sense of wonder beyond words that those words open up. That is what theatre does.’
(Stanley Wells’s article appeared in the Spectator, 8/23.)
The role of Hamlet is, Max Beerbohm famously wrote, ‘a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump’. In this book, and in its online supplement, Jonathan Croall charts the flight through that hoop of pretty well all of the ‘eminent actors’ — male and female, young and not so young, white and black — who have taken the leap in British performances, from Michael Redgrave with the Old Vic company in 1950 to Andrew Scott at the Almeida in 2017.
The trajectory of the actor’s flight is of course different in every production. No play text is complete until it is performed, and every time it is performed it takes on a new identity, determined by factors such as the personalities of the actors, the place of performance, the interpretative ideas of the director, and even the weather — in a brief account of Hamlets at Elsinore, Croall records John Gielgud’s description of a performance there as resembling ‘extracts from the Lyceum production with wind and rain accompaniments’.
Moreover, even on the page Hamlet is the most fluid of texts. It’s come down to us in three versions: one corrupt (the ‘bad quarto’ of 1603) ; another printed as Shakespeare first completed it (the ‘good quarto’ of 1604–5); and a third with changes, omissions and additions made for performance, some of them of a topical and local nature (the First Folio text of 1623). If you try, as the 18th-century actor David Garrick put it, to ‘lose no drop of that immortal man’, you end up with a text of over 4,000 lines — the ‘eternity version’, as it has come to be known — rivalling in performance length the longest of Wagner’s operas. Most directors, like most editors, draw variously on the good quarto and the Folio.
View Performing Hamlet on Amazon
Photo: Medium
Chilton Williamson Jr., at Chronicles Magazine writes:
“Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and nonfiction authors ever succeed at: mastering, with apparent effortlessness, the craft of fiction. . . .
“The novel is a considerable literary achievement as well as an appalling prophetic vision of contemporary America, and of the modern world. I can think of no more pessimistic view bound between covers, yet the pessimism compels the reader and pulls him in rather than putting him off. . . .
“This is a true, and terribly beautiful, novel by an artist of considerable ability. . . worthy of comparison with some of the best American works of fiction in recent times.. . .”
[Field of Blood: A Modern Western, by Wayne Allensworth (London: Endeavour Media) 213 pp., $7.99]
Allensworth has previously received the following quote:
“Wayne Allensworth provides a powerful and moving meditation on American modernity–part gritty action yarn, part compassionating polemic, part evisceration of spiritual emptiness. Across his grand, boldly-coloured landscapes, confused prisoners of circumstances kill or are killed, while republics and civilizations bleed in and out of each other, and everyone and everywhere is compromised”–Derek Turner, author of Sea Changes, Displacement, and A Modern Journey
Visit Amazon: [Field of Blood: A Modern Western, by Wayne Allensworth (London: Endeavour Media) 213 pp., $7.99]
Visit Chronicles Magazine
Chronicles entire review
Credit: Wayne Allensworth photo (c) 2017 by Elizabeth Allensworth Merino. All rights reserved.
Sherman Yellen was nominated for a Tony Award for his book for the 1970 musical The Rothschilds, with a score by Fiddler on the Roof songwriters Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, which he and Harnick have recently reimagined as Rothschild & Sons. Sherman wrote the libretto for the Will Holt and Gary William Friedman musical Treasure Island, winner of the Broadway World Best Regional Musical Award (2012). Among his many theater works is his satirical sketch “Delicious Indignities,” which appeared in the New York and London revue Oh! Calcutta! His straight plays on and off Broadway include New Gods for Lovers, Strangers, and December Fools.
Sherman was librettist and lyricist for Josephine Tonight, an original musical he wrote with the late composer Wally Harper, about the early life of Josephine Baker, which The Chicago Sun-Times called “a shining new musical” and which the D.C. press praised for being “so hot that it sizzles.”
In his youth he worked as a librettist with legendary composer Richard Rodgers. Together with Sheldon Harnick they recently revised the Rodgers-Harnick musical Rex about Henry VIII. This new version had a successful premiere in Toronto. Yellen’s teleplays have won him two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award, first for his John Adams, Lawyer in the PBS series The Adams Chronicles, and later for An Early Frost, a groundbreaking drama about AIDS in America broadcast on NBC, as well as an Emmy Nomination for his Hallmark Hall of Fame version of Beauty and the Beast starring George C. Scott. Sherman’s screenplay adaptations of classic novels range from Great Expectations to Phantom of the Opera. He has received awards in Arts and Letters from Bard College, and he is a frequent contributor of essays on the arts, literature, and politics to online publications such as The Huffington Post.
Sherman recently published his autobiographical novella Cousin Bella–The Whore of Minsk, available in a volume, which also includes his holiday short story “A Christmas Lilly,” and a collection of three plays, December Fools and Other Plays (December Fools * Budapest * Gin Lane). Sherman is married, the father of two sons, Nicholas and Christopher, and has three much loved granddaughters. He has lived in London and Los Angeles, worked in Berlin and Budapest, but home was, is, and always will be New York City.
Sherman Yellen talks, with SV’s Bob Shuman, about his new memoir Spotless: Memories of a New York City Childhood. The second part, of this three-part interview, will appear, 6/28.
View ‘Spotless’ on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y7hp725x
How are the Yellens, the Rothschilds, and the Adamses the same; how are they different?
When I write about people I can only do so by connecting them to myself, my character, my beliefs, and my experiences. All three: the Yellens, the Rothschilds, and the Adamses come from very different cultures, but what they share is a deep belief that the world must be better, and we must work to make it so. It may sound foolish but, while writing these very different works, I became John Adams, Mayer Rothschild, and the little boy who inhabits Spotless, the saga of my family. If we don’t bring ourselves to everything we write, there can be little truth or passion in the writing–it becomes a dry history rather than drama. The trick is to find some part of yourself in every character you write, even the nasty ones. For a while I had the joy of being John Adams, Mayer Rothschild, and, late in life, the observant child that I was.
Did you ever believe that you would excel in writing about families–or how would you describe your new book?
I’ve always had a deep interest in families–what holds them together, what pulls them apart–probably flowing from the closeness of my own family– both my first family, the one in Spotless, and the second, with my wife, Joan, which has lasted nearly 64 years. I am deeply interested in how we remember those who are gone: For me, Spotless was an attempt to recall and recreate what I had experienced as a child of the ‘30s and ‘40s–to go deeper yet into that world of my grandparents and parents: their journey, from European and Lower East Side poverty to affluence, and the cost of it, for everyone who traveled that very American path. It is summed up by critic/novelist Christopher Davis who said, “Spotless is a story of family love trapped in the old world’s hurricane of desire to share in American dreaming.”
How did you decide on the title? Tell us about it.
The title Spotless has several meanings–it certainly has little to do with that questioning, and somewhat judgmental, child on the cover of the book, a born observer: indeed, the title has more to do with my mother’s use of the word to describe the character of a friend, a housekeeper, or the kitchen floor in our apartment. In a sense it was her ideal. She came from a world where half her family died of TB–spots on the lung were the sign of that disease. To be Spotless was, for her, to be safe, healthy, and to be alive.
You write that hardship “doesn’t often make people better, it just makes them harder.” You are referring to the Depression and the ‘40s. Have you noticed other periods when people became harder–and have there been times when they seemed otherwise?
My observation is a generalization, and, like most, it is only partially true. There are people who rise up from their own despair to help others in the worst of times, but I have observed that many who have suffered are locked into their own cages of suffering, and they have not found a key to escape. I do believe that we learn and grow more from kindness than from suffering. Corny? Maybe. But I have found the truth in this over a long lifetime.
What do you miss most about the New York you grew up in (the book brings up cultural references, such as Baby Peggy, Olive Thomas, and Sonja Henie)?
I miss so many of the old pleasures of the old NYC: the trolley cars in the Bronx, the double-decker buses on Fifth Avenue, the old Schrafft’s restaurants, where my parents took me for a Sunday lunch, and I miss the mom-and-pop stores that helped to create the New York of neighborhoods–I miss the old Reuben’s Restaurant, of the 1950s, which allowed my wife and I to dine with our schnauzer Gus seated beside us–before the health police took charge of the city. I love the spirit of that city, before real estate became the King of New York, driving the small shopkeepers out and bringing in those ubiquitous banks and chain stores. And I miss the affordable price of a theater ticket, and the smaller, more human scale of the city. An example of that is the old MOMA. I would go there with my friends and girlfriends, as a teenager at the High School of Music & Art–a kid who loved fine art–and it was a welcoming place. Today, it is a glass palace, an expensive tourist spot, not the warm, second home for many art-loving city kids. Needless to say, I loved the New York that didn’t have a Trump Tower and kept its Trumps sequestered in Queens.
I am not one who subscribes to the idea that the high cost of living in NYC is proportionate with the cost of living in the past. Baloney! The world was affordable for those who were not in the one percent. It was there for most of the residents–even during the Depression. I miss the courtesies that made for a gentler city, and oh Lord, do I miss those marvelous movie theaters–growing up, as I did, in the golden age of Hollywood. Nothing short of heaven itself can replicate the grandeur of the old Loew’s Paradise, on the Grand Concourse, and its sister theaters throughout the boroughs. I do not miss the bigotry of that time, but we may have traded it in for the repellant hard-nosed ambition that I often see today. But oh, the beauty of Central Park now–almost nothing compares with it in the past–and the everyday mix of races and classes in NYC makes me proud to be a New Yorker.
View ‘Spotless’ on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y7hp725x
(c) 2017 by Sherman Yellen (answers) and Bob Shuman (questions). All rights reserved.
Yellen family photos: Courtesy of the Sherman Yellen. All rights reserved.
Central Park: Fodor’s Travel Guides.
(Emma Brockes’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/15.)
When I was growing up, I had access to two VHS videos. One was The Snowman, the classic adaption of the Raymond Briggs cartoon, and the other was Mary Poppins. (I’m talking about the mid-1980s, when this represented an extraordinary range of options on top of Britain’s four terrestrial TV channels.) As a result, I watched Poppins probably 3,000 times; I know it from the first spit-spot to the umbrella’s final squawk. It is thanks to this movie that I still misuse the word “amortize” and, in times of stress, can be unaccountably soothed by the phrase “Shipyards, the mercantile”.
I was, therefore, interested to read this week of a new Poppins movie in the works, to be directed by Rob Marshall – who just made a long-winded version of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods – and with new music by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, a songwriting duo known mainly for Hairspray and the Broadway production of Catch Me if You Can. There is no word on casting yet, but with the memory of Carrie Underwood’s Maria von Trapp still waking many of us screaming in the night, I am braced for the worst.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(Peter Crawley’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 8/28.)
Marconi, the wireless set acquired by the five unmarried Mundy sisters in 1936 Ballybeg, seems to have developed a mind of its own. At least that’s how Michael remembers it, as a thing possessed, blaring to life or falling away at will. As the adult narrator of Brian Friel’s 1990 memory play casts his mind back, memories are no easier to command. They come unbidden; to delight, disturb, overwhelm.
On the 25th anniversary of Friel’s remarkable play, director Annabelle Comyn’s respectful and inquisitive revival is engaged as much with nostalgia – more acutely, the pain at the root of that word – as the act of summoning itself. The staging of the Lyric Theatre’s production, in association with the inaugural Lughnasa International Friel Festival, may seem unusually austere, with Paul O’Mahony’s set erasing the small home’s boundaries in favour of a dominant patina mirror that looms down from above. It suggests a play where reflection is more wary than warm.
Stage Voices Publishing for archived posts and sign up for free e-mail updates: http 2015:// www.stagevoices.com/ . If you would like to contribute a review, monologue, or other work related to theatre, please write to Bob Shuman at Bobjshuman@gmail.com.
(From Sina English, 10/19.)
JINAN, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) — As China hosts an international arts festival in its eastern province of Shandong, experts from home and abroad are weighing in on the key for Chinese performers to gain international success.
The 10th China Arts Festival, which runs from Oct. 11 to Oct. 26, is bringing nearly 2,000 performances, including orchestra concerts, dance shows, musicals and operas from home and abroad to Shandong. But the focus of many at the event has been on how China can develop a domestic cultural industry that remains weak when considered alongside the country's status as the world's second-largest economy.
"Chinese artists should be more passionate and cultivate works that strike a chord in the hearts of overseas audiences," said Yannick Rieu, a Canadian composer and saxophonist who has delighted audiences with his shows at the festival.
In his view, it would be especially interesting to see works on China's history playing abroad. "China is a country with a long history and rich cultural resources, but few works about its glorious past have been seen in the international cultural field until now," Rieu told Xinhua.
Can YOU beat the bard?
A sparkling tome of questions, answers, and Shakespearean wisdom, by Joyce E. Henry, Ph.D., Beat the Bard is guaranteed to stimulate, entertain, and educate your mind as you match wits with the world's greatest dramatist. Beat the Bard e-book: pages: 230; price: $6.99. Order from Payloadz: http://store.payloadz.com/details/844378-eBooks-Plays-and-Scripts-Beat-the-Bard.html
Shakespeare photograph © 2010 by Marit Shuman