I Could Have Sung All Night

The most celebrated "voice" in Hollywood speaks for herself! Everyone knows Marni Nixon...even if they think they don’t. One of the best-known and best-loved singing voices in the world, Nixon dubbed songs for Natalie Wood inWest Side Story, Audrey Hepburn inMy Fair Lady, and Deborah Kerr inThe King and I. She was the voice of Hollywood’s leading ladies, arriving in filmland after a debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at 17 and continuing her career with Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Stephen Sondheim, Rogers and Hammerstein, and many others. Her inspiring autobiography reveals Nixon as a singer, an actress, and a woman fighting for artistic recognition. Today, a survivor of breast cancer, she works on Broadway and television’sLaw & Order SVU, tours with her own stage show, and teaches master classes in voice.I Could Have Sung All Nightreveals the woman behind the screen in a frank, funny biography that is as remarkable as the woman whose story it tells. • Beloved show-biz icon Nixon dubbed the singing of Natalie Wood inWest Side Story, Deborah Karr inThe King and I, and Audrey Hepburn inMy Fair Lady—she now tells her story for the first time • Entertaining behind-the-scenes celebrity stories from six decades of performing • Nostalgia appeal, plus insider's account of the music and film worlds of the 20th century • Breast cancer survivor Nixon is an inspiration to millions of women

Colors, Rubin tells us, affect everyone through sound, smell, taste, and a vast array of emotions and atmospheres. She explains that although she has been blind since birth, she has experienced color all her life. In her memoir Do You Dream in Color?, Laurie Rubin looks back on her life as an international opera singer who happens to be blind. From her loneliness and isolation as a middle school student to her experiences skiing, Rubin offers her young readers a life-story rich in detail and inspiration drawn from everyday challenges. Beginning with her childhood in California, Rubin tells the story of her life and the amazing experiences that led her to a career as an internationally celebrated mezzo-soprano. Rubin describes her past as a "journey towards identity," one she hopes will resonate with young people struggling with two fundamental questions: "Who am I?" and "Where do I fit in?" Although most of us aren't blind, Rubin believes that many of us have traits that make us something other than "normal." These differences, like blindness, may seem like barriers, but for the strong and the persistent, dreams can overcome barriers, no matter how large they may seem. This is what makes her story so unique yet universal and so important for young readers.

Best known as the woman who “ran MGM,” Ida R. Koverman (1876–1954) served as talent scout, mentor, executive secretary, and confidant to American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer for twenty-five years. She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman is the first full account of Koverman’s life and the true story of how she became a formidable politico and a creative powerhouse during Hollywood’s Golden Era. For nearly a century, Koverman’s legacy has largely rested on a mythical narrative while her more fascinating true-life story has remained an enduring mystery—until now. This story begins with Koverman’s early years in Ohio and the sensational national scandal that forced her escape to New York where she created a new identity and became a leader among a community of women. Her second incarnation came in California where she established herself as a hardcore political operative challenging the state’s progressive impulse. During the Roaring Twenties, she was a key architect of the Southland’s conservative female-centric partisan network that refashioned the course of state and national politics and put Herbert Hoover in the White House. As “the political boss of Los Angeles County,” she was the premiere matchmaker in the courtship between Hollywood and national partisan politics, which, as Mayer’s executive secretary, was epitomized by her third incarnation as “one of the most formidable women in Hollywood,” whose unparalleled power emanated from her unique perch inside the executive suite of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Free to adapt her managerial skills and political know-how on behalf of the studio, she quickly drew upon her artistic sensibilities as a talent scout, expanding MGM’s catalog of stars and her own influence on American popular culture. Recognized as “one of the invisible power centers in both MGM and the city of Los Angeles,” she nurtured the city’s burgeoning performing arts by fostering music and musicians and the public financing of them. As the “lioness” of MGM royalty, Ida Koverman was not just a naturalized citizen of the Hollywood kingdom; at times during her long reign, she “damn near ran the studio.”

Blessed with a natural beauty, Scotland-born actress Deborah Kerr (1921–2007) provided the cinema with memorable studies of English gentility. A star in British pictures before she was 21 and a Hollywood fixture from 1946 on, she projected a cool reserve and stoic nobility, often hinting at passion and insecurity beneath the surface. Frequently portraying selfless, sympathetic women, she was brilliant in such roles as Anna Leonowens in The King and I (1956). And in a fascinating departure from her normal range, her portrayal of the sexually frustrated Army wife in From Here to Eternity (1953) resulted in the screen’s most famous “clinch”—the beach scene with Burt Lancaster. Though she never won an Academy Award despite six nominations, Deborah Kerr received an honorary Oscar in 1994.

"Media Ventriloquism repurposes the term "ventriloquism," which has traditionally referred to the act of throwing one's voice into an object that appears to speak, to reflect our complex vocal relationship with media technologies. Indeed, media technologies have the potential to separate voice from body and to constitute new relationships between them that could scarcely have been imagined before such technologies' invention and mass circulation. Radio, cinema, television, video games, digital technologies, and other media have each fundamentally transformed the relationship between voice and body in myriad and often unexpected ways. Our volume interrogates the categorical definitions of voice and body as they operate within mediated environments, exploring the experiences of ventriloquism facilitated by media technologies and theorizing some of the political and ethical implications of separating bodies from voices. We build in particular on Steven Connor's notion of the vocalic body, which he coined to identify an imaginary body that is created and maintained primarily through voice. In modifying Connor's term to theorize the "technovocalic body," we focus our study on cases in which the relationship between voice and body has been modified specifically by media technologies. The essays in the collection demonstrate not only how particular bodies and voices have been been (mis)represented through media ventriloquism but also how marginalized groups - racialized, gendered, queered, etc. - have used media ventriloquism to claim their agency and power"--

Few musicals have had the impact of Lerner and Loewe's timeless classic My Fair Lady. Sitting in the middle of an era dominated by such seminal figures as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, and Leonard Bernstein, My Fair Lady not only enjoyed critical success similar to that of its rivals but also had by far the longest run of a Broadway musical up to that time. From 1956 to 1962, its original production played without a break for 2,717 performances, and the show went on to be adapted into one of the most successful movie musicals of all time in 1964, when it won eight Academy Awards. Internationally, the show also broke records in London, and the original production toured to Russia at the height of the Cold War in an attempt to build goodwill. It remains a staple of the musical theater canon today, an oft-staged show in national, regional, and high school theaters across the country. Using previously-unpublished documents, author Dominic McHugh presents a completely new, behind-the-scenes look at the five-year creation of the show, revealing the tensions and complex relationships that went into its making. McHugh charts the show from the aftermath of the premiere of Shaw's Pygmalion and the playwright's persistent refusal to allow it to be made into a musical, through to the quarrel that led lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe to part ways halfway through writing the show, up to opening night and through to the present. This book is the first to shed light on the many behind-the-scenes creative discussions that took place from casting decisions all the way through the final months of frantic preparation leading to the premiere in March 1956. McHugh also traces sketches for the show, looking particularly at the lines cut during the rehearsal and tryout periods, to demonstrate how Lerner evolved the relationship between Higgins and Eliza in such a way as to maintain the delicate balance of ambiguity that characterizes their association in the published script. He looks too at the movie version, and how the cast album and subsequent revivals have influenced the way in which the show has been received. Overall, this book explores why My Fair Lady continues to resonate with audiences worldwide more than fifty years after its premiere.

The first complete biography of singing legend Tony Bennett Among America's greatest entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Ray Charles, and Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett alone is still here and at the top of his game. For the first time, All the Things You Are tells the incredible story of Bennett's life and sixty-year career, from his impoverished New York City childhood through his first chart-topping hits, from liberating a concentration camp to his civil rights struggles, from his devastating personal and career battles and addiction in the 1970's to his stunning comeback and emergence as a musical statesman, America's troubadour, role model and mentor, and unmatched interpreter of the American songbook. Takes a candid, unvarnished look at the amazing life of one of America's most enduring musical icons Based on dozens of author interviews with Bennett's family members,?agents, musicians, composers and managers, and experts on the last fifty years of popular music Filled with stories involving leading figures and entertainers of the twentieth-century, including Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fiorello LaGuardia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ray Charles, Dean Martin, Billie Holliday, and more Whether you've been a Tony Bennett fan for decades or are just discovering him, this book will deepen your understanding of this hugely gifted entertainer and his music.

In Halfway Home, a beautifully written memoir, Ronan Tynan, a member of the enormously popular Irish Tenors, shares his remarkable story of overcoming adversity and attaining worldwide success in several different areas. Diagnosed with a lower limb disability at birth, Ronan Tynan had his legs amputated below the knee when he was twenty years old. Eight weeks later, he was climbing the stairs of his college dorm, and within a year, he was winning races in the Paralympic Games, amassing eighteen gold medals and fourteen world records. After becoming the first disabled person ever admitted to the National College of Physical Education, he served a short stint in the prosthetics industry and began a new career in medicine. He continued his studies at Trinity College, where he specialized in orthopedic sports injuries. After earning his medical degree, Ronan chose music for the next act in his life. Less than one year after he began studying voice, he won both the John McCormick Cup for Tenor Voice and the BBC talent show Go for It. He went on to win the prestigious International Operatic Singing Competition in France, and in 1998 his debut Sony album, My Life Belongs to You, became a top-five hit in England within just two weeks and eventually went platinum. Later that year, he was invited to join The Irish Tenors, furthering a journey that started in a small Irish village and has brought him to the world's grandest stages. In Halfway Home, Tynan movingly describes his life story, which Barbara Walters called "so amazing you may find it hard to believe."