On Broadway – Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater by Eddie Shapiro

This is a series of twenty-one chatty interviews, by theater journalist Eddie Shapiro, conducted from 2008 through 2012. He began with the late Elaine Stritch and Carol Channing and worked his way to Sutton Foster and Laura Benanti, with stops along the way for Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, and Idina Menzel, plus many others. If you enjoy musical theater, you’ll be entertained by this collection…and the photos are fun too.

Roughly ten years have passed since the book's initial publication, and it's time for an update, along with some more interviews. Certainly Bernadette Peters is a major omission, and he could add additional profiles for Lea Salonga, Sara Bareilles, and Kelli O'Hara, to name just a few.

When I'm feeling nostalgic, I like to flip through my collection of Playbill theater programs, remembering performers who might have appeared as an unknown and later became famous – one great example is Glenn Close, who appeared as the opera singer Jenny Lind in "Barnum" around 1980, making her singing debut. It's also bittersweet to consider performers (in plays and musicals), who have passed on, including such luminaries as Lena Horne, Madeline Kahn and Gilda Radner – so grateful to have seen them all.  

Of Broadway Giants – Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution by Todd Purdom

This was an excellent (and very thorough) look into the lives of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and their remarkable contributions to musical theater. The author, Todd Purdom, known for his political reporting at the New York Times, Politico and Vanity Fair, is obviously someone who loves Broadway and the musical theater. The book does feel like a labor of love, but because Purdom is such a fine journalist, it is also very balanced and we get deep insights into these men and their working relationship, warts and all. 

Purdom has organized and annotated the material well. He takes us through his subjects' individual histories and then brings us to their partnership, and completes the picture with an account of Rodgers's life and work after Hammerstein's early death.

The book is lively and full of anecdotes about the men themselves and others, including Agnes de Mille, Stephen Sondheim, Mary Martin, Julie Andrews, Irving Berlin, Joshua Logan, Gene Kelly and many more. It is a great read, but never descends into gossip.

If you are a devotee of the Broadway theater, you will love this book. Some of the territory has been covered in other biographical books about theater figures, but this is probably one of the best and most professionally written Broadway-oriented books you are likely to encounter.