Kirjahaku

Based on Barry Day's book, Love, Noel: The Letters and Songs of Noel Coward is the dramatic staging of the letters and correspondence of the playwright, director, actor, composer, and singer. Coward's letters span several decades and give you insight to some of his closest relationships with everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Edna Ferber, from the Queen Mother to his own mother, and of course, his constant collaborator, Gertrude Lawrence. A loving portrait of one

Although he wrote hundreds of songs and was a key figure in the birth of the American stage musical, P. G. Wodehouse's (1881-1975) long and influential career as a lyricist has been almost completely forgotten and unheralded - until now. Highly regarded by literati for his rich, sardonic Wooster and Jeeves books (among his more than ninety novels and volumes of short stories), Wodehouse broke new ground by writing songs that were cohesively integrated into the narrative action of musicals rather than presented as a string of unrelated tunes, which was the then-standard format. Particularly in the shows he wrote with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, Wodehouse transformed the musical from a poor man's Gilbert and Sullivan-style operetta into a more idiomatic and respectable form based on contemporary life. This book sets the lyrics from his nearly forty theatrical productions within the context of each individual show, providing incisive and informative commentary for each. Lavishly illustrated with photos and memorabilia, Barry Day establishes why, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Wodehouse was considered a top-tier theatrical figure on both sides of the Atlantic.

Despite her prolific output, ageless writer and wit Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) never penned an autobiography (although if she had, she said that it would have been titled Mongrel). Combing through her stories, poems, articles, reviews, correspondence, and even her rare journalism and song lyrics, editor Barry Day has selected and arranged passages that describe her life and its preoccupations-urban living, the theater and cinema, the battle of the sexes, and death by dissipation. Best known for her scathing pieces for the New Yorker and her membership in the Algonquin Round Table ("The greatest collection of unsaleable wit in America."), Parker filled her work with a unique mix of fearlessness, melancholy, savvy, and hope. In Dorothy Parker, the irrepressible writer addresses: her early career writing for magazines; her championing of social causes such as integration; and the obsession with suicide that became another drama ("Scratch an actor...and you'll find an actress."), literature ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and much more.