A massive international celebrity, at fifty-three Kevin Nealon thought he had it all. But like every other overindulged superstar, the perpetually insatiable Nealon wanted more: a little addition that drooled, burped, and pooped (no, not a Pomeranian).

In Yes, You're Pregnant, but What About Me? Nealon courageously reveals the truth about confronting first-time dadhood at an age when most fathers are packing their kids off to college. In hilariously vivid detail, he carries the reader through all the emotional stages of pregnancy--discomfort, denial, hunger, exhaustion, self-consciousness, hungrier, confusion, crankiness, not-quite-as-hungry-but-still-craving-something, sweatiness, covered in cookie crumbs--while addressing the major worries that fathers everywhere have been dealing with for centuries: Can I duct-tape a crib together? How often can I reuse a disposable diaper? What if the baby looks like me and not my wife?

1920s Cairo: singers were pressing hit records, dramatic troupes were springing up and cabarets were packed - a counterculture was on the rise. In bars, hash-dens and music halls, people of all backgrounds came together as a passionate group of artists captivated Egyptian society. Of these performers, Cairo's biggest stars were female, and they asserted themselves on the stage like never before. Two of the most famous troupes were run by women; Badia Masabni's dancehall became the hottest nightspot in town; pioneer of Egyptian cinema Aziza Amir made her stage debut; and legendary singer Oum Kalthoum first rose to fame. It is these women, who knew both the opportunities and prejudices that this world offered, who best reveal this cosmopolitan and raucous city's secrets. Midnight in Cairo tells the thrilling story of Egypt's interwar nightlife and entertainment industry through the lives of its pioneering women. Introducing an eccentric cast of characters, it brings to life a world of revolutionary ideas and provocative art - one which laid the foundations of Arab popular culture today. It is a story of modern Cairo as we have never heard it before.

A concert saloon is an establishment offering various kinds of entertainment, including alcohol, with some also providing gambling and prostitution. Brooks McNamara explores the concert saloon in New York from the Civil War to the early years of the twentieth century. He focuses on the theatrical aspects of the concert saloon and examines the sources of saloon shows, changes in direction during the century, performing spaces and equipment, and employees and patrons.

Glasgow has always been known for its live music, and at the heart of any music community it is the live venues and buildings that are important, and play host to local and touring acts. One of the main reasons for Glasgow's continued blossoming as a cultural capital is the infrastructure of clubs and buildings available for live performances. This book in glorious colour throughout tells the history of the city's music through Glasgow's famous landmark buildings by people best placed to tell those stories - music writers and journalists and historians. This book is a collection of memories and stories about the buildings that hosted stars such as Michael Jackson, Joan Armatrading, Joy Division, among many thousands more - ranging from the Apollo to the Pavilion, Piping Centre, Sub Club and King Tut's.

With the exception of the occasional local case study, music-hall history has until now been presented as the history of the London halls. This book attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Kift also sheds a new light on the roles of managements, performers and audiences. For example, the author confutes the commonly held assumption that most women in the halls were prostitutes and shows them to have been working women accompanied by workmates of both sexes or by their families. She argues that before the 1890s the halls catered predominantly to working-class and lower middle-class audiences of men and women of all ages and were instrumental in giving them a strong and self-confident identity. The hall's ability to sustain a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths - but this factor was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. These controversies are at the centre of the book and Kift treats them as test cases for social relations which provide fresh insights into nineteenth-century British society and politics.

The dual biography of the great British comedy double-act and the rise and fall of mass audience television by the respected biographer of Cary Grant . Following the success of Cary Grant - A Class Apart, Graham McCann has now created an intricate portrait of Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise, possibly the most famous Bristish comedy double-act of all time. This book charts the progress of the duo from a conventional working class music hall act to a mass-audience television team to a national institution. From northern working men's clubs at the beginning of their career to the 1977 Christmas special that had an audience of 28 million, Morecambe and Wise were a double act continually changing the dynamics of their relationship to reflect their influences and their times. Their shows were like nostalgic reflections on a century of popular entertainment, an entertainment that was inclusive to a wide audience and paid homage to the past. McCann's study is also an investigation in the background of mass audience entertainment from which Morecambe and Wise rose. Morecambe & Wise is the definitive biography of one of the most-loved double acts as well as a history of their times.

Jack Cardiff tells the story of his life in films, first as a cameraman and then as a director. He was one of the first to use the Technicolor film camera, and the book provides a record of how colour cinematography developed in Britain. He also provides a humorous account of his days on the music-hall circuit during the 1920s and '30s, and anecdotes about his experiences photographing actresses such as Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.

(Limelight). "This is a riotous story which is reasonably mad and as accurate as a Marx brother can make it. Despite only a year and a half of schooling, Harpo, or perhaps his collaborator, is the best writer of the Marx Brother. Highly recommended." Library Journal "A funny, affectionate and unpretentious autobiography done with a sharply professional assist from Rowland Barber." New York Times Book Review

Gigs provides a fascinating account of a unique victory for musicians against repressive entertainment licensing laws. It provides a much-needed study of the social, political, cultural and legal conditions surrounding a change in law and public attitudes toward vernacular music in New York City. This second edition includes a new preface by Hamish Birchall and an introduction by the series editors, Guy Osborn and Steve Greenfield, as well as an afterword by the author, and it will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of social attitudes toward the popular arts and the use of constitutional litigation for social change.

A couture of the risque evolved on a bridge of fashion from Paris nightclubs to Las Vegas casinos. A one-time writer for sexy magazines and on style, the author, with contributions from many experts on topics from Paris to feathers and sequins explores that entertainment story, and the hedonism behind it. For over a century, France exported costumes and millinery, as well as whole productions from the Moulin Rouge, the Lido, and Folies Bergere in Paris to the United States and the world. French has meant luxury, sexuality and fashion. In large part, the concept of glamour itself was founded in what French courtesans and French burlesque performers wore in Paris. Where did the costume typifying showgirls originate and from what? Whereas fashion implies change, the iconic showgirl costume stabilized into feathers, sparkle and revealing clothes by 1910. A tall pretty girl wearing a headdress, nude core with spangles, high heels, and dramatic makeup came to be a Gallic symbol. She performed a role of the dissimulation of sexual availability with now venerable features. She was the fizz on intoxication with no hangover, and by the 1920s, the trademark of Hollywood musicals. More recently, while showgirls are an endangered species, the scanty French cabaret clothes have translated into today's day, sport and evening clothes.

May Irwin reigned as America's queen of comedy and song from the 1880s through the 1920s. A genuine pop culture phenomenon, Irwin conquered the legitimate stage, composed song lyrics, and parlayed her celebrity into success as a cookbook author, suffragette, and real estate mogul. Sharon Ammen's in-depth study traces Irwin's hurly-burly life. Irwin gained fame when, layering aspects of minstrelsy over ragtime, she popularized a racist "Negro song" genre. Ammen examines this forgotten music, the society it both reflected and entertained, and the ways white and black audiences received Irwin's performances. She also delves into Irwin's hands-on management of her image and career, revealing how Irwin carefully built a public persona as a nurturing housewife whose maternal skills and performing acumen reinforced one another. Irwin's act, soaked in racist song and humor, built a fortune she never relinquished. Yet her career's legacy led to a posthumous obscurity as the nation that once adored her evolved and changed.

Adoption allows families to modify, either overtly or covertly, what is considered to be the natural order. Cures for Chance explores how early modern English theatre questioned the inevitability of the biological family and proposed new models of familial structure, financial inheritance, and gendered familial authority. Because the practice of adoption circumvents sexual reproduction, its portrayal obliges audiences to reconsider ideas of nature and kinship. This study elucidates the ways in which adoptive familial relations were defined, described, and envisioned on stage, particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Middleton. In the plays in question, families and individual characters create, alter, and manage familial relations. Throughout Cures for Chance, adoption is considered in the broader socioeconomic and political climate of the period. Literary works and a wide range of other early modern texts - including treatises on horticulture and natural history and household and conduct manuals - are analysed in their historical and cultural contexts. Erin Ellerbeck argues that dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family by rendering the family unit a social construction rather than a biological certainty, and that in doing so, they evoke the alteration of nature by human hands that was already pervasive at the time.

In the early years of his performing career, Will Rogers was a vaudeville performer of limited prominence. Around the age of thirty-five, however, this Oklahoma cowboy philosopher shed his role as local stage entertainer and moved toward fame as a Broadway star and nationally beloved humorist. This documentary history, volume four in the definitive five-volume Papers of Will Rogers, reveals Rogers's personal and professional transformation during what may have been the most productive period of his diverse career. Between 1915 and 1928 - the years covered by this volume - Rogers developed his unique monologues of topical humor, sampled the relatively new medium of radio, and pursued a career in silent films. He also tried his voice in sound recordings, witnessed his work as a writer reach millions of readers of daily newspapers, became one of the most sought-after speakers on the dinner circuit, and embarked on a three-year tour of the nation's lecture halls. In addition to Rogers's personal correspondence with family members and friends, editors Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson present more than one hundred letters and telegrams to and from people Rogers touched both inside and outside public life, including prominent figures in politics, show business, literature, industry, government, publishing, and the arts. Much of this material, gleaned from private collections, interviews, manuscripts, and sound recordings, has never before been published.

From New York Times bestselling author of The French Photographer 'A glamorous, transporting read' Woman's Weekly . . . IN 1920s NEW YORK, EVERYONE IS CHASING A DREAM . . . The Roaring 20s - a time for glamour, frivolity and freedom for women. But for Evie Lockhart, a small-town girl who is determined to become one of the first female doctors, it means turning her back on her family and the only life she's ever known. In a desperate attempt to support herself through Columbia University's medical school, Evie auditions for the infamous late-night Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. But if she gets the part, what will it mean for her new relationship with Upper East Side banker Thomas Whitman - a man Evie thinks she could fall for, if only she lived a less scandalous life . . . Captivating and inspirational, A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald is a love story starring a woman ahead of her time, set against the backdrop of Jazz Age New York. Perfect for fans of Lucinda Riley and Kate Furnivall. 'If you're mad about the roaring twenties and all things Gatsby, this romance will have you enchanted' WOMAN'S DAY PRAISE FOR NATASHA LESTER: 'A fantastically engrossing story. I love it' KELLY RIMMER 'Intrigue, heartbreak... I cannot tell you how much I loved this book' RACHEL BURTON 'A gorgeously rich and romantic novel' KATE FORSYTH 'If you enjoy historical fiction (and even if you don't) you will love this book' SALLY HEPWORTH 'Utterly compelling' GOOD READING

The first full-length study of comedy on the burlesque stage, this book takes the reader inside the burlesque houses of the 1930s, looks at the role comedy played in an entertainment form known mostly for striptease, and explores how these sketch performers approached their craft.

The most iconic concert hall in the world celebrates 150 years with a stunning review of history's finest performances and performers. Opening with a personal letter from Queen Elizabeth II, this beautiful book celebrates 150 moments that have shaped The Royal Albert Hall over the last century and a half. From The Beatles to the Suffragettes, Albert Einstein to Winston Churchill, Mohammed Ali to B.B. King, few other buildings have housed such a stunning variety of era-defining people and events. This gorgeous, illustrated guide takes you behind the scenes of one of the most well-loved concert halls in the world, offering insights into the building's iconic architecture, as well as its lesser-known quirks such as the reinforced toilets designed for Sumo wrestlers. This book features events ranging from the world's first sci-fi convention in 1891 to the annual Cirque du Soleil, which requires the auditorium to be transformed into a gymnasium. Autographs and candid comments from incredible performers who have appeared on its stage, like Russell Howard, Eric Clapton and Katie Derham, give a unique insider's perspective on an esteemed and beloved British institution. With never-before-seen images, insights and more, this is the ultimate celebration of a British architectural icon which continues to inspire artists and audiences from around the world.

"Babylon Girls" is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows--chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like--between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston--black dances by which the "New Woman" defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences.

Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the "picaninny choruses" of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in "The Creole Show" (1890), "Darktown Follies "(1913), and "Shuffle Along" (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.

In this book Brooks McNamara explores the world of the concert saloon in New York from the Civil War to the early years of the twentieth century. A concert saloon is defined as an establishment offering various kinds of entertainment, including alcohol, with some also providing gambling and prostitution. All of these saloons employed 'waiter girls' to sell drinks and sit with male customers and all had bad reputations. McNamara focuses on the theatrical aspects of the concert saloon and examines the sources of saloon shows, the changes in direction during the century, the performing spaces and equipment, as well as the employees and patrons. McNamara paints a picture of a lively and theatrically fascinating environment and his work sheds light on our understanding of American popular theatre. The book contain informative illustrations and will be of interest to historians of theatre, popular culture and American social history.

Acclaimed through three editions for its uniquely informative and entertaining style, this fourth edition of Stanley Green's "World of Musical Comedy" updates and enlarges the theatrical scope to include such recent shows as "A Chorus Line, Barnum, They're Playing Our Song," and "Annie," In a format that provides biographies of all the leading figures in the musical's development, Stanley Green manages to convey the spirit of the Broadway stage, its musical make-believe, and yet remain objective about the creative swings in its history and the careers of its individual creators. Everyone is here: Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser, Lerner and Loewe, Stephen Sondheim, Cy Coleman, Marvin Hamlisch, and many others--not in a quick run-through but in vivid detail accompanied by pertinent interviews and photographs.This latest edition contains an expanded appendix that lists the casts, credits, songs, and recordings of every Broadway musical written by these illustrious and industrious composers and librettists. As always in a Stanley Green book, the research is exhaustive and impeccable, the presentation enjoyable, the judgments fair. From America's foremost theater historian, here is another edition of a classic theater chronicle.

On the night of Sunday, April 23, 1961 Judy Garland made history. That's no hyperbole. Surrounded by a throng of ecstatic fans (3,165 to be exact), the legendary performer delivered a concert in Carnegie Hall the live recording of which became, upon release, an unlikely pop cultural phenomenon. Judy at Carnegie Hall, the two-disc set that captured all 25 numbers she performed that night, went on to spend more than 70 weeks on the Billboard charts, win four Grammy Awards--including Album of the Year (making it the first live music album and the first album by a female performer to win the category)--and become, in the process, the fastest-selling two-disc set in history. What the recording highlights, and what's made it an enduring classic in a class of its own, is the palpable connection between the songstress and her fans. "Indeed," The New York Times reported in its review of the evening's proceedings, "what actually was to have been a concert--and was--also turned into something not too remote from a revival meeting." By looking at her song choices, her stage banter, the album's cultural impact, and her place in the gay pantheon, this book argues that Judy's palpable connection with her fans is precisely what her Capitol Records' two-disc album captured.

Dancer, award-winning choreographer, show producer, stand-up comedienne, TV/Film actress and author, Norma Miller shares her touching historical memoir of Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom and the phenomenal music and dance craze that \u0022spread the power of swing across the world like Wildfire.\u0022 A dance contest winner by 14, Norma Miller became a member of Herbert White's Lindy Hoppers and a celebrated Savoy Ballroom Lindy Hop champion. Swingin' at the Savoy chronicles a significant period in American cultural history and race relations, as it glorifies the home of the Lindy Hop and he birthplace of memorable dance hall fads. Miller shares fascinating anecdotes about her youthful encounters with many of the greatest jazz legends in music history, including Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and even boxer Joe Louis. Readers will experience the legend of the celebrated Harlem ballroom and the phenomenal Swing generation that changed music and dance history forever.

Shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize; former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the story of the British music hall. John Major shares memories of his performer father Tom and then shines the spotlight on the story of the music hall itself, from its Victorian heyday to its demise. In this fond look back at characters such as Marie Lloyd, Little Tich and Vesta Tilley, these faded stars take their place in the limelight once more. Packed with colourful anecdotes, 'My Old Man' is a warm-hearted account of a golden and bygone age.

For over a decade, Magnus Hastings has been photographing the world's greatest drag superstars and asking each of them a simple question: Why drag? The result is this mesmerising volume in which the queens strut their stuff and reflect on their shared passion through a mixture of quips and philosophising. Subjects include icons of reality TV and underground drag royalty, and photographs range from the divine to the trashy. Featuring the likes of Bianca Del Rio and Courtney Act, this collection is a beautiful celebration of drag as an art form and an exhilarating exploration of what drag means to its greatest artists.

This book explores the foundation of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and also the home-grown entertainments put on by members of the military services in all theatres of war during the Second World War. ENSA ensured that troops were visited by big bands, ballet stars, Shakespearian actors and the most famous popular entertainers of the day. And the forces were resourceful too when it came to putting on their own shows when ENSA couldn't come, with pantomimes and plays written and performed by POWs being a prime example. Many of Britain's biggest stars cut their teeth performing on makeshift stages to homesick soldiers, sailors and airmen and women during the war years. Famous individuals who feature are Laurence Olivier, Gracie Fields, George Formby, Al Bowlly, Vera Lynn, Ninette de Valois and members of The Goons.

Step into Ernst Wolzogen's Motley Theater, Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke, Rudolf Nelson's Chat noir, and Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel. Enjoy Claire Waldoff's rendering of a lower-class Berliner, Kurt Tucholsky's satirical songs, and Walter Mehring's Dadaist experiments, as Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. Fads and fashions, sexual mores and political ideologies - all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstable yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism. By situating cabaret within Berlin's rich landscape of popular culture and distinguishing it from vaudeville and variety theaters, spectacular revues, prurient "nude dancing", and Communist agitprop, Jelavich revises the prevailing image of this form of entertainment. Neither highly politicized, like postwar German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitude toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances - as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt. This book gives us a senseof what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin and at the same time lets us see, from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual, and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.