Broadway Babylon by Boze Hadleigh - 9780823088300 - Compare Prices on New & Used Textbooks, Cheap Textbooks

Here’s the book that airs Broadway’s dirty laundry! Inspired by the classic Hollywood Babylon (in print for more than forty years, more than 100,000 copies sold), Broadway Babylon presents a hyper-entertaining look at the Great White Way’s biggest scandals, best-kept secrets, and most over-the-top feuds. Author Boze Hadleigh, the preeminent disher of celebrity dish, serves up 400 pages of tasty, never-before-told stories about such show-biz icons as Ethel Merman, Tennessee Williams, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, and many, many others. Get it while it’s hot! From Kirkus Reviews:

The fabulous invalid (Broadway) is also, apparently, the horny invalid. The curtain is barely up on this history of the Great White Way when Hadleigh (Celebrity Diss and Tell, 2005, etc.) notes that actor-director-choreographer Bob Fosse was sexually insatiable. Hadleigh puts a sexual spin on the adage that you can't tell the players without a scorecard by homing in on who slept with whom and who was/is bi-, gay or straight. As to how Topic A shaped what happens onstage, Hadleigh suggests homophobia shaded the plays and reputation of Tennessee Williams and helped destroy playwright William Inge. But Hadleigh terms his history "selective . . . and non-chronological," its aim to entertain. So his history soon heads to diverting topics such as dueling divas Mary Martin and Carol Channing and the history of Gypsy, punctuated by frequent blasts from Ethel Merman. But even the most devoted theater buffs will wonder if Lucille Ball's Broadway flop Wildcat deserves an entire chapter, especially since much of what turns up has already turned up elsewhere. Sources of specific stories remain unclear. Many anecdotes come from books Hadleigh cites in an extensive bibliography and, apparently, from the showbiz scribe's own interviews. Some reported events sound suspiciously like stunts devised by desperate press agents. One such tale finds Tommy Tune coming up from the audience to dance with Josephine Baker onstage at the Palace Theater. (Tune claims the moment effectively ended his imminent film career.) Hadleigh builds entire chapters on just quotes, scattering them one after the other like ticket stubs in the West Forties. Many of these quips have been making the rounds of parties for years. Thefinal two chapter titles, "Rumors" and "Broadway Babble On," sum up the effort. Useful for hosts looking for party lines, but no match for Ethan Mordden's All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (2007).

		Broadway Babylon by Boze Hadleigh ISBN-10: 9780823088300 ISBN-10: 0-8230-8830-8 ISBN-13: 9780823088300 ISBN-13: 978-0-8230-8830-0 Hardcover 2007-06-26 Back Stage Books Find Lowest Price
Editorials

Product Description Here’s the book that airs Broadway’s dirty laundry! Inspired by the classic Hollywood Babylon (in print for more than forty years, more than 100,000 copies sold), Broadway Babylon presents a hyper-entertaining look at the Great White Way’s biggest scandals, best-kept secrets, and most over-the-top feuds. Author Boze Hadleigh, the preeminent disher of celebrity dish, serves up 400 pages of tasty, never-before-told stories about such show-biz icons as Ethel Merman, Tennessee Williams, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, and many, many others. Get it while it’s hot! From Kirkus Reviews: The fabulous invalid (Broadway) is also, apparently, the horny invalid. The curtain is barely up on this history of the Great White Way when Hadleigh (Celebrity Diss and Tell, 2005, etc.) notes that actor-director-choreographer Bob Fosse was sexually insatiable. Hadleigh puts a sexual spin on the adage that you can't tell the players without a scorecard by homing in on who slept with whom and who was/is bi-, gay or straight. As to how Topic A shaped what happens onstage, Hadleigh suggests homophobia shaded the plays and reputation of Tennessee Williams and helped destroy playwright William Inge. But Hadleigh terms his history "selective . . . and non-chronological," its aim to entertain. So his history soon heads to diverting topics such as dueling divas Mary Martin and Carol Channing and the history of Gypsy, punctuated by frequent blasts from Ethel Merman. But even the most devoted theater buffs will wonder if Lucille Ball's Broadway flop Wildcat deserves an entire chapter, especially since much of what turns up has already turned up elsewhere. Sources of specific stories remain unclear. Many anecdotes come from books Hadleigh cites in an extensive bibliography and, apparently, from the showbiz scribe's own interviews. Some reported events sound suspiciously like stunts devised by desperate press agents. One such tale finds Tommy Tune coming up from the audience to dance with Josephine Baker onstage at the Palace Theater. (Tune claims the moment effectively ended his imminent film career.) Hadleigh builds entire chapters on just quotes, scattering them one after the other like ticket stubs in the West Forties. Many of these quips have been making the rounds of parties for years. Thefinal two chapter titles, "Rumors" and "Broadway Babble On," sum up the effort. Useful for hosts looking for party lines, but no match for Ethan Mordden's All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (2007).
Reviews

Great Read! Lots of Broadway dish and fun. I couldn't put it down. And I will re-read it many times. Hooray for this book!
Could not put it down! This is a must have for every broadway fan. It tells the stories behind the hits and misses on the great white way. If you think you know the story wait until you read it here. How close some hits came to being misses! I could not put it down!
Great Fun! This book by Boze Hadleigh is GREAT FUN! He always entertains without being really nasty in HIS comments about celebrities talking trash about other celebs.He let's THEM do it! His focus in this book is Broadway and if you love Broadway, you should find this book entertaining. Some quotes of stars are "repeats" from his other books, but they are well-placed and relevant to what is his focus.Don't expect any bombshells but DO expect to enjoy! Note: If "Show Biz" is of no particular interest to you, you might want to skip Boze's new work.
Mindless and trashy A mix of rather humorous, sometimes outlandish, sometimes unbelieveable quotes from various Broadway personalities and stories about the Great White Way, Boze Hadleigh's book is rather trashy, but entertaining to read on a rainy day when there's nothing better to do. The book spends much too much time on the topic of homosexuality and the horrible AIDS crisis. Of course, this topic cannot be ignored as much of Broadway's community consists of gay men and AIDS was a disease that killed an entire gerneration of brilliant talents, but much of this becomes redundant and sometimes sort of bitchy. On one final note, you could find plenty of these stories and one liners in other books as well. For the David Merrick section, Hadleigh seems to use bits from Jerry Herman's lovely memoir Showtune and for the Michael Bennett section, repeats of stories from Ken Mandelbaum's book appear. This could be said for numerous other chapters. Honestly, if you'd like to spend some extra cash, buy those various books instead of this one.
This is not HOLLYWOOD BABYLON for Broadway fans This is a weird little scrapbook promoted as a book. Hadleigh has two goals. One is to make sure we know that a great many people working on or around Broadway are gay. Even when he is addressing topics unrelated to sexuality, he must get in that such-and-such was -- Wow! -- gay. But how many people who would buy this book have missed that there is a certain nexus between the gay world and the theatre world? The other goal is to just dish, and that could make for a fun book. But what Hadleigh wants to dish about often makes him seem like someone who stepped out of a time machine from 1986. This is a book most excited about the likes of Carol Channing, how bad CATS was, Michael Bennett, and AIDS. Except for the coverage of RENT, this book reads as if it was written two decades ago-plus by a show music fan of a certain age. Mary Martin? Harold Lang? THE BOYS IN THE BAND? I suppose there is value in getting the nuggets Hadleigh has mined from dishy conversations in piano bars and after cabaret shows down in print, and I am sincere in that. But readers going from the title will be disappointed. This book is largely a meandering anthropological survey of the Broadway scene from about 1948 to 1988. Special attention is paid to who was gay and which among them died of AIDS. Special attention is paid to performers and shows most of interest to people who were attending to the aforesaid scene during those years, and thus chapters on the controversy over Jonathan Pryce in MISS SAIGON, whether or not Ethel Merman was nice, and magnificently "floppish" shows (a cultish in-joke cherished largely by fans the age of Ken "Not Since Carrie" Mandelbaum). One chapter follows another for no apparent reason; it's like a transcript of a conversation you could have with an august old gent at Don't Tell Momma's. If you wouldn't mind having that conversation, pick this one up. Otherwise, be under no impression that this is, in the true sense, a book.