By Peter Lathan - It Happened on Broadway is a collection of interviews with 107 Broadway luminaries, including Carol Channing, Betty Buckley, Joel Grey, John Kander, Fred Ebb, James Hammerstein (son of Oscar), Mary Rodgers (daughter of Richard) and Kitty Carlisle Hart (widow of Moss). It tells the story of Broadway from the point of view of those who were deeply involved in its development as the centre of American theatre. It takes us behind the public faces and into the private thoughts and feelings of the stars, writers, composers, directors, producers, designers, press agents, playwrights, and even the restauranteurs (Vincent Sardi Jr. is there, too). It tells about the great successes (and some of the spectacular flops). It reveals much about the great writers - Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Moss Hart, Irving Berlin, Cy Coleman - and the performers - the portrait of Carol Channing in her own words is stunning. And we see the great directors and choreographers - my own favourite, Bob Fosse, is talked about at length - through the eyes of those who worked with them. I thoroughly enjoyed it. What this book shows very clearly is the deep love of theatre, of live performance, which these Broadway luminaries share with the rest of us. In their words I could hear echoes of myself and all of my theatre friends.

"It Happened On Broadway" is nothing short of living, breathing theatre history. Carol Channing's first appearance on stage at a grammar school in San Francisco; Patricia Neal's subsistence jobs cutting pies and scooping ice cream while waiting for her career to bloom (which really didn't take all that long by today's standards); the advent of the Theatre Guild; Celeste Holm and John Raitt on creating the grand-daddy of musical theatre, Oklahoma; Kim Hunter on Marlon Brando; Donna McKechnie on Michael Bennett; Linda Lavin on Neil Simon and Len Cariou on Stephen Sondheim, it's all in there.

"It Happened On Broadway" is told by those who have spent the past 50 years in the trenches, the actors, designers, press agents, choreographers, directors, and even their offspring. With vintage photos, drawings, posters and Playbills the Frommer's provide us with a look at theatre history from a time when $1.50 would buy you a movie and six or eight vaudeville acts to the impact of the AIDS crisis on the theatre community to the vast corporate culture now responsible for many of today's Broadway shows. An invaluable and engrossing book for anyone interested in an insiders perspective on the business of the Great White Way.

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"Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer have penned their fourth oral history: IT HAPPENED ON BROADWAY. The Frommers are considered the quintessential word-of-mouth authors of modern-day America. In this book they take the reader from the dramatic successes of the years before and after World War II, through heralded rise of the book-musical in the 50s, the great dance musicals, up to the current trend of the long-running mega-hit. Lavishly illustrated with rare photographs, playbills, set designs and tons of hand-delivered memorabilia, the book ultimately finds itself standing alone as the only history of the Great White Way told by those who actually lived it. A narrative historical composite has been drawn with photos and interviews of actors, directors, producers, set designers, stage managers, publicists, composers, lyricists and playwrights (not to mention highlights by well known newspaper and radio critics). Among some of the high points are Kim Hunter's remembering her onstage mishap with Marlon Brando in the original production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Donna McKechnie's discussion of "A Chorus Line," and her backstage relationship with its creator Michael Bennett, and the breaking-in stories of Richard Kiley, Leslie Uggams, Jerry Herman, Betty Buckley and Carol Channing."

To gather material for the book, Myrna and Harvey Frommer conducted over 100 interviews. Among those who contributed their personal recollections are an ex-ticket taker at Ebbets Field, a former Mr. America, a Baptist pastor, a retired garment worker, and an opera star. Their stories evoke a special place and time, a more innocent era when Brooklyn really was the world. Although that world is gone, the Frommers' book brings it all vividly back to life.

The inspiration for the Frommers' new celebratory album came about as they were traveling around the country to promote It Happened in the Catskills. They kept meeting people who, like themselves, were born and bred in Brooklyn. " We could be in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Brenham, Texas, and Canaan, New Hampshire, and invariably we's run into prople from Brooklyn. As soon as the connection was discovered, it was always the same question: What high school did you go to?, followed by memories of that special Dodger game, of trying clothes on the floor of he original Loehmann;s on Bedford Avenue, of eating the shorefront dinner at Lundy's or Nathan's franks in Coney Island, or the incomparable Ebinger's blackout cake. When we finished the Catskill book, which was filled with stories by Brooklynites, we thought it might be a good idea to apply the same interactive oral history approach to a book on Brooklyn, and try to discover what there was about life in the borough at mid-century that still exerts such a powerful pull."

I just finished the book and I enjoyed it so much. Its easy to see why
Brooklyn has been the inspriation for so many novels and movies.

It was so interesting to see how so many different ethnic groups had such
similar stories of growing up. A real shared memory .

Well this book is a treasure and I am so glad to have it.

Satisfies a persistent hunger for details about the inner workings of New York City, shared by the native and outsider alike. Frommer and Frommer have assembled a playful, interestingly arranged, and stimulating collection of extracts from oral histories. Organized topically, the comments span such issues as street life, school life, the not-so-private worlds of Brooklyn apartment dwellers, Coney Island, ethnicity, and assimilation. Over 100 voices include famous entertainers (e.g., Betty Comden, Jerry Stiller, and Marvin Kaplan), obscure teachers and school principals, and ordinary individuals. Asked to reflect on the three decades between World War II and Viet Nam, they offer comments that add up to a mosaic of the life and extraordinary times of a borough.

Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer look back to an earlier period of New York's history in 'It Happened in Manhattan.' Subtitled 'an oral history of life in the city during the mid-twentieth century,' the book covers a period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. Ordinary people and New York celebrities reminisce about the architectural and culinary glories of Manhattan and about the personalities and institutions that dominated business and the arts in those decades. Exclusively black-and-white photographs illustrate this backward glance at New York in the innocent '50s and the adventurous '60s and '70s.

No, this is not a quickie paperback rushed into print after September 11.
The Frommers' book, subtitled An Oral History of Life in the City During the Mid-Twentieth Century, is a loving look at a Manhattan that now seems impossibly distant, a Manhattan whose citizens worried about open admissions at City College and how they felt about the Beatles and whether they could afford to live on the East Side'but never about terrorist bombers. It is a Manhattan now lost to us forever, a Manhattan to be recollected in tranquility and cherished as never before.
The Frommers' mid-twentienth century ranges from the early post-World War II years to the mid-1970s, when the city nearly went bust. Like their earlier books (It Happened in the Catskills, It Happened in Brooklyn, It Happened on Broadway), this one is an oral history, an irresistible collection of interviews with Manhattanites rich and poor, talented and ordinary, famous and unknown, clearly united in their unanimous conviction that Manhattan was, is, and always will be the most exciting place on earth.
Here is a New York in which the Third Avenue el still existed and traffic on Fifth Avenue ran both ways, in which eleven daily newspapers covered the city beat and Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan covered café society; in which proper young working girls still wore hats and white gloves and businesswomen couldn't get bank loans; in which Lincoln Center was going up and Penn Station was coming down and SoHo was still a dream in a gallery owner's eye.
Here are Jewish kids growing up on the Lower East Side, black kids growing up in Harlem, Italian kids growing up in the Bronx with Manhattan only a fifteen-cent train ride away. Here are politicians and performers, priests and rabbis, press agents and jazz musicians, restaurateurs and fashion designers and Tin Pan Alley songwriters, all talking in that excited New Yorker way about what a great time they had in their great city. You can almost see the hands waving.
Not many of these voices will be known to those unlucky enough never to have lived in Manhattan. Jimmy Breslin and Pauline Trigère and Robert Merrill and Jane Jacobs, most likely, but not that many others. Who but a Manhattanite will know Elaine Kaufman as the owner of a restaurant called Elaine's? Who outside of the advertising business will recognize Jerry Della Femina? Who but a New Yorker will remember the political ins and outs that brought us Robert Moses and Robert Wagner, Abe Beame and John Lindsay?
It really doesn't matter. with their tales of chocolate egg creams and 15-cent subway rides and standing room only at the old Met, are as stirring as those of the famous. The content . . . all of it is so fascinating.
As for that other thing that happened in Manhattan on September 11, there is one tiny reference to the World Trade Center toward the end of the book by Daily News sports cartoonist Bill Gallo: 'I always thought of buildings like heavyweight champions. The Empire State Building was the champion. Then the Twin Towers came up, and you felt sorry for the Empire State Building. That was still your champion.'
And is once again.

Contrary to the popular notion, nostalgia is pretty much what it's always been, judging by the latest offering from the Frommers ('It Happened on Broadway' 1998, etc.). The professors Frommer (Liberal Arts/Dartmouth) have gathered interviews with iconoclastic New Yorkers Jerry Della Femina, Robert Merrill, Jimmy Breslin, Monte Irvin, Elaine Kaufman, Saul Zabar, and 57 others. They recall life in Manhattan from the end of World War II to the mid seventies. The New York of wonder is evoked once more with as in Proust, the reference to indigenous food (e.g., entrees at Le Pavilion or classic egg creams). And from Harlem to Wall Street, Washington Heights to Greenwich Village, there are old churches and delis gone by, the surviving Guggenheim and the lost Automats, Lincoln Center newly built and Lewisohn Stadium since gone. There are shopkeepers with pencil stubs behind their ears and practitioners of the rag trades, artists, sportswriters, and gossip columnists. The memorists speak with the distinct flavor of Yiddish or of Italian. And there's a Hispanic rhythm and that of Lenox Avenue too. Study the ladies in gloves, the gents in fedoras, the haberdashers' billboards, the movie marquees, the street furniture. Self-congratulatory oral history, garrulous nostalgia, and great fun for those who recall the days of Tin Pan Alley and three baseball teams in one small, favored place

: Compilers of two previous oral histories, the Frommers (It Happened in Brooklyn) here mix the experiences of some 100 interviewees-a good fraction of them writers or Jewish community officials-into a rich mosaic portrait. They cover much ground, from life in New England ("a benignly non-Jewish environment"), the isolating South and the comforting frenzy of New York. Interviewees discuss politicization, the impact of the Holocaust, the effects of Zionism and the ongoing tensions about assimilation and anti-Semitism. Some anecdotes are arresting, and all are quite short. Thus, this book is an accessible introduction to the varieties of the American Jewish experience.

The book provides a fascinating look at Jewish life. We learn about families, school activities, religious life, and anything else the people felt like discussing. All areas of the country are represented as well as all aspects of Judaism. Hundreds of personal photos add much to to the histories. A good glossary explains the various Yiddish terms used throughout."

===Growing up Jewish IN AMERICA

THIS IS a fine book for goyim. Being gentile, as far as I know, I can say that.

One never knows exactly what one's roots might include. As Leon Toubin comments on a Texas community in this entertaining oral history, "We were probably all Jewish once, but we're Lutheran now." The complexities of American life make this book fun and often pure poetry. Some vital turning points come to life in a just few sentences. Zipporah Marans, whose father was an Orthodox rabbi in Raleigh, N.C., during World War II, recalls G.I.s "would have three days' leave before being shipped overseas. Their girlfriends would come down, and my father would marry them in our living room. My mother, sister, a soldier friend and I would each hold a corner of the chuppa, the wedding canopy."

St. Louis Jews - really, all Jews west of the Appalachians - might feel a bit slighted in this study. David Bisno talks about the divide between Jews of German and Russian descent in St. Louis, but he doesn't offer many details. Ansaie Sokoloff recalls his family leaving St. Louis for Cheyenne, Wyo. Other communities in the chapter about the Midwest and West include Detroit, Duluth, Omaha, Pittsburgh and San Fernando. It reminded me of a gas station attendant in New Jersey who noticed my Missouri plates and said, "I have a cousin who went to school in South Dakota." New York and environs get the bulk of attention here. That's fine, but what I find particularly fascinating are more detailed accounts of unique or remote communities and families struggling to maintain traditions.

The Frommers' book has many moments, too, where one senses the effort necessary to maintain tradition and faith in our time. Though no characters develop in this text, one hears many fragments of fascinating memories, which together present an insightful portrait of vibrant communities and individuals.

In their heyday in the 1940s and '50s, the Catskills, in New York's Sullivan and Ulster counties, were less a place than a state of mind, according to the Frommers. In their wonderful collection of reminiscences by those who worked and played the mountains, anyone who ever vacationed there will find something between nostalgia and heartburn - or, perhaps, just hunger for borscht, the red-beet soup that became a staple at the region's most famous resort, Grossinger's.

This exuberant oral history of what Jewish comedians used to call the Borscht Belt re-creates a world now gone--a New York State vacation haven in the middle decades of this century primarily to New York City Jews. The Frommers, who collaborated on The Games of the 23rd Olympiad, have transcribed reminiscences of owners, executives, workers, entertainers and guests of establishments like Grossinger's, the Concord and the Nevele, which lured visitors as diverse as Nelson Rockefeller and an Indian maharajah and served as a proving ground for the developing talents of Milton Berle, Red Buttons, Neil Sedaka, Tony Martin and even opera star Robert Merrill. Besides stories of life in glamorous hotels, the coauthors recount adventures in the more modest bungalow colonies and smaller spots among the 500 resorts that populated the area. A wealth of ethnic jokes and photos also fill this unqualified treat.

While working at the Nevele Country Club, one of the many legendary Catskill resorts covered in this magnificent document, I briefly met Myrna and Harvey Frommer while doing their research. They probably don't remember me, I was too young at the time to offer the kind of history they were looking for, but the pair's enthusiasm and obvious love for the area's resorts and their unique (now long gone) familial atmosphere was readily apparent. When I finally got to read this book, it provided me with a sense of pride for being a part of its history. There's even an ancient picture of my father playing sax in the old Art Kahn Orchestra! But aside from personal connections, this book stands as a definitive oral history of an era. The people interviewed are true insiders, some of them legends in their own right among Catskill lore. And while the book provides some deep sociological perspective concerning its ethnic background, the authors know how to balance this with charming, amazing and often sidesplitting anecdotes. If you ever spent a weekend at Grossinger's, The Concord, The Nevele or one of the dozens of small bungalow colonies, this book will wash you in warm memories. And if you didn't have the chance, it will make you wish you did.