Before the advent of cable and its hundreds of channels, before iPods and the Internet, three television networks ruled America's evenings. And for twenty-three years, Ed Sullivan, the Broadway gossip columnist turned awkward emcee, ruled Sunday nights. It was Sullivan's genius to take a worn-out stage genre-vaudeville-and transform it into the TV variety show, a format that was to dominate for decades. Right Here on Our Stage Tonight! tells the complete saga of The Ed Sullivan Show and, through the voices of some 60 stars interviewed for the book, brings to life the most beloved, diverse, multi-cultural, and influential variety hour ever to air. Gerald Nachman takes us through those years, from the earliest dog acts and jugglers to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and beyond. Sullivan was the first TV impresario to feature black performers on a regular basis-including Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey, James Brown, and Richard Pryor-challenging his conservative audience and his own traditional tastes, and changing the face of American popular culture along the way. No other TV show ever cut such a broad swath through our national life or cast such a long shadow, nor has there ever been another show like it. Nachman's compulsively readable history, illustrated with classic photographs and chocked with colorful anecdotes, reanimates The Ed Sullivan Show for a new generation.

Over the last couple of decades, minor league baseball games have shown substantial attendance figures, with more than forty-one million spectators in both 2010 and 2011. With all the high-tech, live-streaming, fast-paced entertainment available to consumers, what is it about minor league baseball that still holds appeal with today’s audiences? With access to major league games broadcast on countless cable networks, what draws fans to small stadiums to watch obscure players struggle to make the big time? Sports historian David M. Sutera set out to answer these questions by visiting fourteen minor league baseball parks around the country. In Vaudeville on the Diamond, Sutera discusses the lure of minor league baseball with fans, players, and team representatives, examining how teams have survived and thrived in today’s competitive entertainment world. Combining interviews with game-day observations, Sutera argues that minor league baseball’s key to survival lies in the creation of on- and off-field attractions that invoke the traditions of vaudeville with their unique and quirky spectacle. From inviting fans to participate in dizzy bat competitions and races against the mascot to featuring Star Wars theme nights and monkeys riding border collies, teams have created a multifaceted form of entertainment that transcends the game itself. Part study and part travelogue, Vaudeville on the Diamond features numerous photographs of on-field entertainment, showcasing the vaudevillian side of minor league baseball. A light-hearted and engaging look at the minor leagues, this book will appeal not only to scholars and students of popular culture, sports and leisure studies, and sports management but to all fans of baseball and minor league sports.

Anything Goes: the enchanting story of a vaudeville troupe that makes its way to Western mining towns, from renowned master of the Western novel, Richard S. Wheeler. The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Most towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in. All that is about to change. August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, the shopworn singer now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences with just one side of his face while needling them with acerbic dialogue; Harry the Juggler, who went from tossing teacups to tossing scimitars; Mrs. McGivers and her capuchin monkey band; and the Wildroot Sisters, born to show business and managed by a stage mother who drives August mad. Though the towns are starved for entertainment, the Follies struggles to fill seats as the show grinds from town to town. Just when the company is desperate for fresh talent, a mysterious young woman astonishes everyone with her exquisite voice. The Wild West will never be the same. They've seen comics, gorgeous singers, and scimitar-tossing jugglers. Now if the troupers can only make it back East . . . alive! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Softcover - Biography/Memoir. A charming morsel of a book about one man's real life Vaudeville story tap dancing back and forth across the country in the 1930s. More than 100 photos and newspaper clippings to enjoy.

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation "One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge!, and numerous ballets, stage plays (starring Lillian Gish, Eleonora Duse, Tallulah Bankhead, and Sarah Bernhardt, and films (starring Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Rudolph Valentino, Isabelle Huppert, and Colin Firth), The Lady of the Camellias itself was inspired by the real-life nineteeth-century courtesan Marie Duplessis, the lover of the novel’s author, Alexander Dumas fils. Known to all as “the Lady of the Camellias” because she is never seen without her favorite flowers, Marguerite Gautier, the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved—until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome, and hopelessly in love with her. “Marguerite and Armand are the kind of bright, self-destructive young things we still read about in magazines, watch on-screen, or brush up against today.” —Liesl Schillinger, from the Note on the Translation For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.