Author: Neil Simon Publisher: Concord Theatricals ISBN: 9780573694141 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 108
Book Description
Inspired by the playwright's youthful experience as a staff writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, with all the attendant comic drama as the harried writing staff frantically scramble to top each other with gags while competing for the attention of star madman "Max Prince."
Author: Susan Fehrenbacher Koprince Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 9781570034268 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Koprince (English, U. of North Dakota at Grand Forks) seeks to grant the prolific and popular playwright a measure of the serious literary attention that has passed his work by. She analyzes 16 of Simon's comedies beginning with his first Broadway effort, Blow your horn (1961) and ending with Laughter on the 23rd floor (1993). Koprince emphasizes Simon's versatility, craftsmanship, and willingness to experiment with the comedic form as well as the fundamentally serious nature of his plays. Small format: 5.25x7.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Neil Simon Publisher: Simon & Schuster ISBN: 9780684847856 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Since 1960, a Broadway season without a Neil Simon play has been a rare one. For more than thirty years, Simon's wry and astute observations on life, love, and the human condition have been making audiences laugh uproariously even as his beautifully realized characters touch their hearts. These five plays, including the Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning Lost in Yonkers, show Simon at the pinnacle of his extraordinary career. Rumors Lost in Yonkers Jake's Women Laughter on the 23rd Floor London Suite Including the author's introduction: "How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities"
Author: Neil Simon Publisher: Concord Theatricals ISBN: 0573694141 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 87
Book Description
Inspired by the playwright's youthful experience as a staff writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, with all the attendant comic drama as the harried writing staff frantically scramble to top each other with gags while competing for the attention of star madman "Max Prince."
Author: Patrick McGilligan Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062560964 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 772
Book Description
A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award–winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family. The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh. Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy. McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television—working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success. Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.
Author: Jackson R. Bryer Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496822935 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.
Author: Neil Simon Publisher: Samuel French, Inc. ISBN: 9780573694356 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 116
Book Description
Neil Simon Full Length, Comedy Characters: 1 male, 7 female Combination interior and Unit set. America's premier comic playwright makes another hilarious foray into the world of modern relationships. Jake, a novelist who is more successful with fiction that with life, faces a marital crisis by daydreaming about the women in his life. The wildly comic and sometimes moving flashbacks played in his mind are interrupted by visitations from actual females. Jake's women i
Author: Neil Simon
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Author: Susan Fehrenbacher Koprince
Author: Neil Simon
Author: Neil Simon
Author: Patrick McGilligan
Author: Otis L. Guernsey
Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Author: Neil Simon
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