Customer Reviews

The Actors Studio: A History (Performing Arts)

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the complete review is listed as written by Herb Siegel.

Never before has a book revealed such complete and intimate details about the birth pains of what today we know as the modern theater. Mr. Frome introduces us to the creative geniuses who experimented with writing, directing and acting. We learn of their conflicts, motivations and final breakthroughs to greatness.

We follow their lives as they hone in on their acting methods. Their egos are examined, revealing how weakness becomes strength, which in turn can sometimes topple greatness.

The Actors Studio presents an all-star cast of the best creative talent available and how they struggled to make it! From the early years of the Russian theater and into the forties and fifties when experimental theater groups competed to find the true "method acting" techniques.

As a onetime student of the highly exteemed Sandy Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, I prize this book as a captain his log, noting an exciting journey around the world. One day it will be a major movie or play. But it will require only the best actors to portray the lives of greats like Adler, Brando, Cliff, Dean, Garfield, Kazan, Miller, Odets, Winters, Stanislavsky, etc. These names easily fill a book and it is called "the Actors Studio".

This is a book for anyone with a serious interest or involvement in film and theater. It will make both intriguing reading and invaluable reference material for students, teachers, people in the business (or those hoping to be) and dedicated movie- and theater-goers.

Professor Frome, who teaches dramatic arts at the University of Connecticut, really knows his stuff. In his new book he shows how Stanislavsky's introduction of "Realism," followed by collectives such as the legendary Group Theater and especially the Actors Studio, exerted their massive influence on the style and quality of acting and production in America. It's a story in which two seemingly incompatible elements, conflict and synergy, transfigured the face of drama.

There are fascinating insights into the characters of such icons as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and many others. Frome, who can be quite acerbic when he wants to be, doesn't hesitate to debunk some of the PR-inspired legends of this hugely formative era, and is pretty snitty about Lipton's TV series of the same name. Take a close look at the many photos, not one of which is a posed studio still.

Frome's five-page bibliography in small type, and his painstakingly inclusive index, bear witness to the mountain of research on which this impressive book is based.