The Playmakers

by Arthur Cantor and Stuart W. Little

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393043150
• ISBN13: 9780393043150
• Release Date: January 1970
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Primer On, and History of, Broadway and the Industry of American Theater

Athough a bit dated [written in 1969] this book gives a good overview of Broadway. Well written and funny its stories and characters [all real] are gems to behold. Anyone intersted in the Broadway Theater Industry will find reading this book time well spent.

Dated But Worthy

Cantor and Little did an amazing job of researching their landmark 1970 book. Cantor produced a number of exciting Broadway hits in the 1950s and 1960s including Paddy Chayefsky's THE TENTH MAN and the Pulitzer Prize winning ALL THE WAY HOME; also A THOUSAND CLOWNS> Stuart Little, who wrote this book with him, must have hated E B White with a justifiable passion. The two of them write very smoothly together, and My Goodness, did they have access--even the foreword was written by Frederic March, the venerable acting patriarch. That said, the book is very dated. A lot of it has to be read through the prism of inflation, for large chunks of it are spent in sober, and eye-opening accounts of financing Broadway productions, but of course today the figures don't mean anything. We learn, for example, that it cost 17 million dollars a year to mount all he Broadway shows--"less than it cost to wage one day of the Viet Nam war." Today the figures would be much higher. <br /> <br />It is also amusing to read about the long ago divas who are forgotten today, and also the author's predictions for who will have a longtime showbiz career--the stars of tomorrow, that is. On the distaff side, they pick Blythe Danner, who did pretty well for herself but who, some think, never did as well as she was supposed to have. For their male star of tomorrow, the authors focus on a young Nebraskan called Terry Kiser. Who? He sounds odious from the profile they make of him. Maybe his personality caused his career to falter. <br /> <br />The chapter called "The Sexual Ethic" focusses largely on the question of whether there is a secret homosexual cult that rules the world of Broadway. The authors are not certain, but they suspect so. Very few names are given. It's not very edifying. "The counterphobia that underlies performance carries over into the actor's sex life and may cause perversity--group sex, mate swapping, promiscuity, bisexuality, obsessional sexuality, and homosexuality." Whew, count me in!