One Singular Sensation

Pay with

About One Singular Sensation

Product description 1st From Publishers Weekly Basing his biography on tape-recorded interviews with Bennett, his friends, lovers, associates and family members, and often preserving their own words, Kelly, theater critic for the Boston Globe , traces the career of the brilliant young choreographer-director of A Chorus Line , Ballroom , Dreamgirls and other important musicals. Bennett emerges as a complex and driven personality, enormously ambitious, single-minded about show business, ruled by the need to control, addicted to drugs, obsessed by fear of the Mafia and unable to establish lasting relationships. In the end, all of these disturbing characteristics seem insignificant compared to his remarkable accomplishments and the loss occasioned by his death from AIDS at the age of 44. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Hard on the heels of Denny Martin Flinn's What They Did for Love and Ken Mandelbaum's admirable A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett (both LJ 6/15/89) comes the first full biography of the Broadway director-choreographer. Boston theater critic Kelly interviewed those closest to Bennett and explores his personal and professional relationships and love affairs with sometimes brutal honesty. Kelly is never tentative, and his account is far more gossipy and at times more spiteful than the others. Kelly does provide a fine balance between the life and the career, although Mandelbaum goes into greater detail about the shows. Bennett's creativity may have been undeniable, but despite claims of his enormous popularity and charisma, all three books point out his repeated cruelties and immense ego, so that the cumulative effect is an intense dislike of the man on the part of the reader. Kelly's biography should be the talk of Shubert Alley for some time to come; theater collections will need both Mandelbaum and Kelly for completeness. - Eric W. Johnson, Univ. of Bridgeport Lib., Ct. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.