John Lahr

In Razzle Dazzle ‘Em, John Lahr, the lead theatre critic for The New Yorker for 21 years and a multi-award-winning biographer, captures the essence of some of Hollywood’s most influential actors and directors. This compelling collection of pen portraits offers a rare glimpse into the minds of those we see on screen. In this volume, Lahr’s profiles of Helen Mirren, Ethan Hawke, Viola Davis, Sean Penn, Julianne Moore, Todd Haynes, Cate Blanchett, Sam Mendes, Claire Danes, Judi Dench, Mike Nichols, Emma Thompson, and Al Pacino, spanning from 2000 to 2022, are brought together for the first time alongside Lahr’s award-winning essay Petrified, on stage fright. Showcasing the voices of these industry titans, Lahr masterfully explores the triumphs, challenges, and artistic processes that define the careers of these 'show-biz legends’.

A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights “Lahr’s cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal “New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters.”—Publishers Weekly Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual—this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller’s most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller’s early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller’s work and his personality.

A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights “Lahr’s cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal “New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters.”—Publishers Weekly Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual—this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller’s most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller’s early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller’s work and his personality.

For more than sixty years John Hancock has pursued a remarkable and often tumultuous career as a writer/director/producer. From the hallucinatory horrors of Let's Scare Jessica to Death and the gritty fantasy of Prancer to the unshakable humanity of Bang the Drum Slowly, Weeds and The Looking Glass, he has cultivated a deeply personal yet accessible cinema; one that yields a textured emotionalism and philosophical richness that belies its surface simplicity. Hancock on Hancock draws on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with the filmmaker over the course of five years, providing a candid commentary on one man's life and work filtered through his unceasing desire to create art and tell stories. With chapters devoted to every film he has made - including his Academy Award-nominated short Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet and his anonymous contributions to the troubled Hollywood movies Wolfen and 8 Million Ways to Die - these conversations also throw a spotlight on Hancock's lively experiences directing classic and contemporary plays Off-Broadway, as well as charting his labors on such iconic television shows as The Twilight Zone and Hill Street Blues. Additionally, he offers a harrowing account of his notorious dismissal from the blockbuster sequel Jaws 2 and shares unbuttoned recollections of collaborators like Robert De Niro, Tennessee Williams, Jean Arthur, Nick Nolte, Faye Dunaway and Dorothy Tristan.

For more than sixty years John Hancock has pursued a remarkable and often tumultuous career as a writer/director/producer. From the hallucinatory horrors of Let's Scare Jessica to Death and the gritty fantasy of Prancer to the unshakable humanity of Bang the Drum Slowly, Weeds and The Looking Glass, he has cultivated a deeply personal yet accessible cinema; one that yields a textured emotionalism and philosophical richness that belies its surface simplicity. Hancock on Hancock draws on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with the filmmaker over the course of five years, providing a candid commentary on one man's life and work filtered through his unceasing desire to create art and tell stories. With chapters devoted to every film he has made - including his Academy Award-nominated short Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet and his anonymous contributions to the troubled Hollywood movies Wolfen and 8 Million Ways to Die - these conversations also throw a spotlight on Hancock's lively experiences directing classic and contemporary plays Off-Broadway, as well as charting his labors on such iconic television shows as The Twilight Zone and Hill Street Blues. Additionally, he offers a harrowing account of his notorious dismissal from the blockbuster sequel Jaws 2 and shares unbuttoned recollections of collaborators like Robert De Niro, Tennessee Williams, Jean Arthur, Nick Nolte, Faye Dunaway and Dorothy Tristan.

A son's funny, frank, and "endlessly fascinating" memoir of his father, Wizard of Oz star Bert Lahr (Harper's Magazine). Bert Lahr, best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, made audiences laugh from burlesque stages to vaudeville to Broadway--and impressed them as Estragon in the American theater debut of Waiting for Godot. But reality wasn't always funny for the legendary actor and comedian, or his family. Drawing on personal recollections and the memories of his father's colleagues, a veteran writer for the New Yorker and renowned theater critic brilliantly explores both the long and glorious professional career of a Hollywood icon and the experience of growing up with him. Here, in rich detail, is Bert Lahr evolving from a low-comic star to a Ziegfeld Follies sophisticate, hamming it up with the Scarecrow and Tin Man on the set of TheWizard of Oz, and garnering rich praise as he performed in Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. But while Lahr could be equally raucous and polished in public, in private he was painfully insecure and self-absorbed, keeping his family at arm's length as he quietly battled his inner demons. "A work of literature, a work of history, a subtle psychological study," Notes on a Cowardly Lion is more than one man's quest to understand his father. It is an extraordinary examination of a life on the stage and screen (Harper's Magazine). From a writer with an intimate knowledge of the theater and show business world, this is both a "frank and objective" (The New York Times Book Review) family memoir that will appeal to readers of Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking or Alan Cumming's Not My Father's Son, and a "book-length love letter. To open it is to enter a life, to participate in a sensibility and, perhaps most important, to laugh. Uproariously" (Life).

A dazzling celebration of theatre, its workings and its most compelling playwrights by the New York’s senior drama critic emeritus and the author of Tennessee Williams'By far the best thing about my stuff I’ve ever read' Arthur Miller'Luminous with insight and love for every aspect of the act of dramatic creation' Daily Mail'A wonderful celebration of theatre, filled with insights' Guardian‘John Lahr manages to write better about the theatre than anybody in the English language,’ says Richard Eyre. Joy Ride, which includes the best of his New Yorker profiles and reviews, makes his expertise and his exhilaration palpable.From modern greats, like Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Tony Kushner and August Wilson, through the work of directors like Nicholas Hytner and Ingmar Bergman, to Shakespeare himself, the depth of Lahr’s understanding is plain to see and extraordinary to read. He brings the reader up close and personal to the artists and their art.Whether you are a regular theatre-goer, or just starting out, Lahr’s book delights as both a celebration and a guide.

Since 1992 John Lahr has written for The New Yorker, where for twenty-one years he was the senior drama critic, the longest stint in that post in the magazine's history. Joy Ride is a collection of his profiles and reviews that throws open the stage door, taking us behind the scenes both on and off Broadway to introduce such creators of contemporary drama as August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Wallace Shawn, and Mike Nichols. The result is a delightful, literate, and essential crash course in contemporary theater.

This mesmerizing story of playwright and author Joe Orton’s brief and remarkable life was named book of the year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Patrick White Told with precision and extensive detail, Prick Up Your Ears is the engrossing biography of playwright and novelist Joe Orton. Orton’s public career spanned only three years (1964–1967), but his work made a lasting mark on the international stage. From Entertaining Mr. Sloane to his career-making Loot, Orton’s plays often shocked, sometimes outraged, and always captivated audiences with their dark yet farcical cynicism. A rising star and undeniable talent, Orton left much undone when he was bludgeoned to death by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who had educated Orton and also dreamed of becoming a famous writer. Prick Up Your Ears was the basis for the distinguished 1987 film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett, and starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave. A brilliant, page-turning examination of the dueling forces behind Orton’s work, Prick Up Your Ears secured the playwright’s reputation as a great twentieth-century artist.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTIONThe definitive biography of America’s most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren'Riveting ... masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the YearOn 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show’s thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, ‘like a farm boy in his Sunday best’. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams’s work – blood hot and personal – pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, ‘a revolution’ in American theatre.Tracing Williams’s turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams’s late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and ‘mad’ sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama.Including Williams’s poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work – posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day – Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America’s greatest dramatists. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

Joy Ride throws open the stage door and introduces readers to such makers of contemporary drama as Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, Wallace Shawn, Harold Pinter, David Rabe, David Mamet, Mike Nichols, and August Wilson. Lahr takes us to the cabin in the woods that Arthur Miller built in order to write Death of a Salesman; we walk with August Wilson through the Pittsburgh ghetto where we encounter the inspiration for his great cycle; we sit with Ingmar Bergman at the Kunglinga Theatre in Stockholm, where he attended his first play; we visit with Harold Pinter at his London home and learn the source of the feisty David Mamet's legendary ear for dialogue.In its juxtaposition of biographical detail and critical analysis, Joy Ride explores with insight and panache not only the lives of the theatricals but the liveliness of the stage worlds they have created.

John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life--his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin--Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Critic Kenneth Tynan, the impresario who created "Oh Calcutta", was also an eccentric and connoisseur of cuisine, wine, literature and women. His diaries record a judicious blend of aesthetics, theatre lore, love, marriage, sex and politics.

John Lahr, New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic playwright, whose plays scandalised and delighted the public, and whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely death. 'I have high hopes of dying in my prime,' Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. In PRICK UP YOUR EARS, originally chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978, Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stage struck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE, LOOT, and WHAT THE BUTLER SAW.

From David Mamet to Ingmar Bergman, Frank Sinatra to Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr to Eddie Izzard, The New Yorker's resident drama critic, John Lahr has had unparalleled access to the most elusive, compelling and irresistible public personas of our time. In SHOW AND TELL, Lahr - 'the most intelligent and insightful writer on theatre today' (NEW YORK TIMES) - reinvents the celebrity profile to find the essence of performance. Lahr's gift is his understanding of both the art and the artist, to show how the work and the life intersect. He has had unusual access to his subjects, who talk to him with rare candour.

In five dexterously argued chapters, John Lahr investigates all the major plays and many of No l Coward's lesser-known pieces. Hay Fever, Private Lives, and Design for Living, for instance, make a fascinating group of "Comedies of Bad Manners." Blithe Spirit and Relative Values raise the "Ghost in the Fun Machine." And Lahr explores the "politics of charm" oozing through The Vortex, Easy Virtue, and Present Laughter. Further chapters consider the patriotic plays like Cavalcade and This Happy Breed and examples of Coward's later work, such as Waiting in the Wings and A Song at Twilight.In all Coward's stage work, Lahr detects a coherent philosophy in which charm is both the subject of Coward's comedies and the trap that makes his very public life a perpetual performance.