Carol de Giere, an Interview

Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Carol de Giere, author of the Stephen Schwartz biography Defying Gravity, joins Patrick for a Wicked-themed episode of The Patrick Phillips Show. This episode has been cut down and reposted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of Patrick Phillips. Visit his site for the full episode, including interview with Schwartz himself.

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Defying Gravity takes readers into the creative world of Broadway and film composer Stephen Schwartz, from writing Godspell‘s score at age 23 through the making of the megahit Wicked. For this first authorized biography, de Giere draws from 80 hours of interviews with Schwartz and over 100 interviews with his colleagues, friends, and family. Her sympathetic yet frank narrative reveals never-before-told stories and explores both Schwartz’s phenomenal hits and expensive flops. The book also includes a series of “Creativity Notes” with insights about artistic life, and more than 200 photographs and illustrations.

Carl Gottlieb and Toni Attell, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, both authors of The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers, Toni Attell and Carl Gottlieb, chat with Off the Meter host Jimmy Failla about their book, acting classes, and filmmaking. This episode has been re-edited and posted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of Off the Meter.

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The Little Blue Book for Filmmakers discusses issues faced by all beginning filmmakers, with a historical perspective that explains problems and solutions that reach back to the invention of movies at the turn of the last century, and stretch forward to include new digital technology and the popularization of videography as global self-expression. A valuable addition to the shelves of all film school instructors who’ve not had years of practical experience working in the trade, it’s also a syllabus in itself and can be the foundation for a course schedule. More important, it’s something every film student will want to own as a reference and guide.

Rich Podolsky, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Rich Podolsky, author of Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear joins Ed Robertson in this episode of TV Confidential. This episode has been reposted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of TV Confidential.

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Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear by Rich Podolsky
In 1958, long before he created and hosted Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, the most dynamic rock-and-roll series in television history, before he developed the Monkees and created the Archies, Don Kirshner was a 23-year-old kid with just a dream in his pocket. Five years later he was the prince of pop music. He did it by building Aldon Music, a song publishing firm, from scratch. This is about how he did it – with teenage discoveries Bobby Darin, Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and more.

Charles Grodin, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Actor Charles Grodin joins Ed Robertson in this episode of TV Confidential. As you may have seen on Jimmy Fallon, Charles Grodin has a new DVD out called The Perils of Show Business. His real-life advice for would-be actors, screenwriters, directors, and entertainment business professionals is invaluable, and not without Grodin’s typical wry, straightforward humorous style. This episode has been reposted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of TV Confidential.

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Charles Grodin has created a frank, no-nonsense, no-question-about-it, one-hour video that reveals his personal experience of working his way through the world of acting schools, agent representation, auditions, and the rest of the real-life world that makes up what’s called show business. Included is what to really expect from others who offer you acting lessons, writerly advice, and professional representation; and more important, what it all means for a person who wants to get into this line of work. One thing is for sure: Show business isn’t for the faint of heart. If you want to be successful, you not only have to really want it, you have to work endless hours, work extremely hard, and love it.

Walter Carter, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Guitar historian Walter Carter chats about the history of the Epiphone guitar and his book, The Epiphone Guitar Book. This episode is reposted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of Ed Driscoll at PJ Media.

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The story of Epiphone, one of the oldest and most famous guitar companies, is told by former staff historian Walter Carter. It’s an epic story spanning three centuries, from Old World roots in the 19th century to the golden age of American makers in the 20th century and onward into the global market of the new millennium. It’s the story of America’s business, from an individual luthier to a family business and on to corporate ownership. And it’s the story of American popular music, powered by Epiphone guitars, from big-bodied Emperor that drove the swing bands of the 1930s, to the electric hollowbodies of the 1960s used by The Beatles and studio ace Howard Roberts, to custom solidbody models for such modern rockers as Noel Gallagher (Oasis), Jeff Waters (Annihilator), and Frank Iero (My Chemical Romance). Beautifully illustrated with photos of all the important Epiphone instruments and the extraordinary musicians who played them, this is a fascinating history of an iconic name in the world of the guitar.

Nancy Nelson, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Nancy Nelson joins Patrick Phillips to talk about her time working on the lecture circuit with actor Cary Grant and the book that came out of those experiences, Evenings with Cary Grant (Applause Books). This episode has been reposted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of Patrick Phillips.

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Charming, witty, effortlessly debonair, and elegant, Cary Grant was the ultimate leading man, a silver screen icon who seemed to embody all that a movie star should be. But beneath the glamour was a real and complicated man – surprisingly vulnerable, unabashedly romantic, often exacting perfectionist who rose above a traumatic childhood and failed marriages to become an incomparable Hollywood legend. In this sublimely truthful and candid portrait, biographer Nancy Nelson draws on interviews with Grant, as well as material from his personal papers, along with loving, revelatory reminiscences from some of his closest friends and loved ones – including Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Quincy Jones, James Stewart, and many more – to reveal the vaudevillian, actor, lover, and father. With a treasury of both well-loved and rarely seen photographs and a foreword by Grant’s wife, Barbara, and daughter, Jennifer, this is the definitive biography of one of the screen’s greatest stars.

Dave Thompson, an interview

Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, author Dave Thompson chats with Patrick Phillips, host of the Patrick Phillips Show, about Dave’s new book If You Like Led Zeppelin… and to talk about the band’s influence and the bands who were influenced by the mighty Zep. Not to mention really odd things about band nicknames, where the name of the band came from, and playing records backward.

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If You Like Led Zeppelin… is the unique story of how Led Zeppelin came together not just as players, but as influences and ideas. It unearths the music that the musicians themselves were listening to, to open up an entire new world of experience and excitement for both casual and committed fans. It then travels beyond Led Zeppelin, to the bands and artists who in turn took their own lead from the Zep.

Live Audio Recording – Actors’ Equity

Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, we have a special treat for those of you who were not able to attend the Performance of the Century book signing in New York City December 2012. You can listen to the entire discussion for free on our podcast!

In 2013, Actors’ Equity Association turns 100 years old. To celebrate, they’ve written a book, penned by Robert Simonson, called Performance of the Century. In this episode of Onstage and Backstage podcast, Simonson, actors Lee Roy Reams and Danny Burstein, AEA president Nick Wyman, and the book’s cover illustrator “Squigs” come together at Drama Book Shop in New York City to talk about this beautiful publication and 100 years of AEA.

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Performance of the Century

Actors’ Equity Association, the union representing stage actors and stage managers, turns 100 years old in 2013. Shaped by the inequities visited on performers in the 19th century, the union has shaped the landscape of the professional American theater. Founded in 1913, it became a force to be reckoned with in an historic 1919 strike – the most entertaining and dramatic one (naturally) the nation had ever seen. Since then, Equity has gone beyond securing the safety, health, and rights of stage actors, to become arguably the most progressive force in theater. It stared down not only obdurate producers, but segregation – on and off the stage, the political hysteria of the blacklist years, and the challenge of the AIDS epidemic, its members forming what would become Equity Fights AIDS. It entertained the troops of several successive American wars and fostered the spread of stage culture across the land, from the government-fostered productions of the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project to the Equity Library Theatre, which offered the classics to the public at bargain prices. It oversaw the little theater movement’s growth into the regional theater movement, and was there when Broadway begat Off-Broadway, and then Off-Off-Broadway. To read this resplendent new book, lavishly illustrated with historical images and stunning photographs, is to learn not only the union’s glorious past, but that of American theater itself.

Alonso Duralde, an interview

Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Alonso Duralde, author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, talks Christmas films on Off the Meter with Jimmy Failla. This episode has been re-posted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of Off the Meter.

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Don’t waste another second of your valuable holiday time on another boring Christmas movie. Film critic Alonso Duralde highlights the best – and worst – movies of the Yuletide season with this fun and informative film guide. Whether you’re looking for the classics, family favorites, holiday horror, Christmas-themed crime epics, or the most wonderfully awful cinematic lumps of coal, Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas will point you and your rental queue in the right direction. Whether your idea of a holiday classic is White Christmas, Bad Santa, Die Hard, Eyes Wide Shut, or Gremlins, you’ll find the right film for you, as well as an exhaustively entertaining breakdown of the various screen Scrooges, from Alistair Sim to Jim Carrey to…Tori Spelling? And get ready to encounter movies you may never have heard of from the gritty noir Christmas Holiday, starring 1930s singing ingénue Deanna Durbin in her first hard-bitten adult role, to the loony Santa Claus, a Mexican kiddie movie in which St. Nick teams up with Merlin to fight the devil! Plot synopses, video availability, and fun facts – did you know the actor cast as Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life was also in the running to play mean old Mr. Potter? – make this a stocking stuffed with information you’ll turn to every Christmas season.

Keith Elliot Greenberg, an interview

 Onstage and Backstage podcast from Hal Leonard is available on iTunes and Libsyn. Each episode authors and their guests have a chat about the topics of their books. Today, Keith Elliot Greenberg talks about his book December 8, 1980: The Day John Lennon Died on Off the Meter with Jimmy Failla. This episode has been re-posted on Onstage and Backstage podcast with permission of Off the Meter.

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December 8, 1980: The Day John Lennon Died follows the events leading to the horrible moment when Mark David Chapman – the paunchy, mentally ill Beatles fan – calmly fired his Charter Arms .38 Special into the rock icon, realizing his perverse fantasy of attaining perennial notoriety. New York Times-best-selling author Keith Elliot Greenberg takes us back to New York City and the world John Lennon woke up to, and we follow the other Beatles, Lennon’s family, the shooter, fans, and New York City officials through the day. Once the fatal shots are fired, the pace only becomes more breathless.