Tony and Olivier Award–winning Bob Avian’s dazzling life story, Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey, is a memoir in three acts. Act I reveals the origins of one of Broadway’s legendary choreographers who appeared onstage with stars like Barbra Streisand and Mary Martin all before he was thirty. Act II includes teaching Katharine Hepburn how to sing and dance in Coco and working with Stephen Sondheim and Michael Bennett while helping to choreograph the original productions of Company and Follies. During this time, Avian won a Tony Award as the cochoreographer of A Chorus Line and produced the spectacular Tony Award–winning Dreamgirls. For a triumphant third act, Avian choreographed Julie Andrews’s return to the New York stage, devised all of the musical staging for Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard, and directed A Chorus Line on Broadway. He worked with the biggest names on Broadway, including Andrew Lloyd Webber, Carol Burnett, Jennifer Holliday, Patti LuPone, Elaine Stritch, and Glenn Close. Candid, witty, sometimes shocking, and always entertaining, here at last is the ultimate up-close and personal insider’s view from a front row seat at the creation of the biggest, brightest, and best Broadway musicals of the past fifty years.
A beautifully nostalgic picture book about one grandfather's younger days that shows you're only as old as you feel! "In this affectionate story, three children follow their grandfather up to the attic, where he pulls out his old bowler hat, gold-tipped cane, and his tap shoes. Grandpa once danced on the vaudeville stage, and as he glides across the floor, the children can see what it was like to be a song and dance man. Gammell captures all the story's inherent joie de vivre with color pencil renderings that leap off the pages. Bespectacled, enthusiastic Grandpa clearly exudes the message that you're only as old as you feel, but the children respond--as will readers--to the nostalgia of the moment. Utterly original."--(starred) Booklist.
Southern California is many things to many people. A continuous influx of new people, new ideas, new interests, and different life styles creates a mind-boggling diversity. This story covers the life of an individual who is part of that diverse mosaic - an East Coast transplant who comes to Southern California by way of the US Marine Corps and San Diego. This book is a chronology of indelible memories that begin with family life in the depression thirties and the early-on impact of Catholicism from elementary school to mid-college. It provides a unique insiders view of life in a near monastic setting when the author, at age 15, commits himself to a religious order. Leaving the order in mid-college, he joins another highly disciplined organization the United States Marine Corps where, as both an enlisted man and officer, he sheds the earlier mold of the religious life. After military service, years of mainstream jobs follow including city halls, county government, and aerospace - all blended with a heavy dose of politics and teaching. His engagement with entrepreneurial undertakings follows with responses to critical needs such as jobs for displaced aerospace engineers when space programs are cutback, creation of a charter school to meet the need for better public schools, and his expansion of academic programs to engage older Americans in mentally stimulating and life enhancing learning experiences. All these experiences are couched within the context of events that highlighted each decade. This multifaceted career takes its toll on a marriage of thirty years whose continuity has been sustained in large measure through a family- shared hobby of dancing. But even dancing cant hold together the strains put on a marriage by a roller coaster life of continuous change. Divorce and the premature death of 3 of 4 children mar a life absorbed with programs designed to benefit the community. Despite these losses, the author continues to lead, teach, and dance. This book reflects so many facets of southland life that many readers, especially long time residents of Southern California, will identify with one or more aspects the military, former aerospace workers, city workers, teachers, and the retirement community. It provides a unique overview of Southern Californias dance scene especially in the Los Angeles-Orange County-San Bernardino/Riverside, and San Diego areas. Dancing has long been central to the authors family - ballroom, country, folk, and swing. The hobby continues to fuel the authors energy and pleasure. To those in or about to enter the expanding ranks of Americas seniors, the author sets an example of an age-impervious effort to enhance a communitys learning resources. His current efforts involve formation of a senior think tank whose analyses of current events will be shared with schools and the community.
Title story plus three others featuring the peerless sleuth and his faithful sidekick: "The Adventure of the Dying Detective," "The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans."
Title story plus 3 others featuring the peerless sleuth and his faithful sidekick: "The Adventure of the Dying Detective," "The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans."
Dancing in the English style explores the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain from the end of the First World War to the early 1950s. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain's predominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls. It focuses in particular on the relationship between the dance profession and dance hall industry and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a 'national' dancing style, which constructed, circulated, and commodified ideas about national identity. At the same time, the book emphasizes the global, exploring the impact of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain's place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age.
By the 1920s, much of the world was ‘dance mad,’ as dancers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Manchester to Johannesburg and from Chelyabinsk to Auckland, engaged in the Charleston, the foxtrot and a whole host of other fashionable dances. Worlds of social dancing examines how these dance cultures spread around the globe at this time and how they were altered to suit local tastes. As it looks at dance as a ‘social world’, the book explores the social and personal relationships established in encounters on dance floors on all continents. It also acknowledges the impact of radio and (sound) film as well as the contribution of dance teachers, musicians and other entertainment professionals to the making of the new dance culture.
