The savvy reader’s favorite website BookFilter.com chooses the best theater book of the month just for Broadway Direct.
MY FIRST HUNDRED YEARS IN SHOW BUSINESS
By Mary Louise Wilson
Here it is, the dishiest, funniest, chattiest, and most soul-baring theater book of the year. Tony winner Mary Louise Wilson captures her life and career in this delightful memoir. Pick it up and its slim nature (less than 200 pages) might disappoint. But then you start to read it and soon realize, “Oh, she only put in the good stuff!” Wilson tells her story in a charmingly scattershot style, but the through line is the eight year journey of turning a memoir by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland into the career-peak triumph Full Gallop. Otherwise, she’ll jump from her crazy family to sharing horror stories about auditions to life on the set of the hit sitcom One Day At A Time while enduring the glassy stare of Bonnie Franklin to winning the Tony for Grey Gardens. Wilson could have written an entire book about the making of Full Gallop or an entire book about her family or an entire book about the nightmare of being in that all-female version of The Odd Couple, to name a few highlights. Instead, she boiled it all down and just gave us the good stuff. Learn more.
