An invaluable guide to the traditions and best practices of the professional stage actor, from first rehearsal to final curtain.Professional stage actors are expected to have ready knowledge of a multitude of unwritten yet well-established protocols. Traditionally, this knowledge was passed along from one generation of stage actors to the next via word of mouth, or were learned by having one’s missteps corrected—until now.In The Stage Actor’s Handbook

Based on the popular workshop of the same name, Audition Psych 101 takes a detailed, unvarnished look at the mental gremlins that can make auditioning stressful. With frankness, humor, and a pro-actor sensibility, professional working actor Michael Kostroff (The Wire, The Deuce, Luke Cage, The Blacklist, Law & Order: SVU, etc.) explodes commonly accepted mythologies and offers a fresh, more logical, and more effective approach to the whole process. Speaking directly to other professional a...

For nearly a decade, Jackie Apodaca and Michael Kostroff shared duties as advice columnists for the actors’ trade paper, Backstage. Their highly popular weekly feature, "The Working Actor," fielded questions from actors all over the country. A cross between "Dear Abby" and The Hollywood Reporter, their column was a fact-based, humorous, compassionate take on the questions actors most wanted answered. Using some of their most interesting, entertaining, and informative colu...

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a real working actor? Wonder no more! Michael Kostroff is here to reveal, in hilarious detail, just what it’s like to travel with the road companies of The Producers and Les Miserables. His firsthand account of the exciting, funny, and sometimes bizarre highlights of his journey includes working at a temp job when his agent calls to say, You got the part!”; singing on a revolving stage while lugging a dead body; seeing ghosts in haunted theaters; and much ...

From superstar Shania Twain, a poignant, heartfelt, and beautifully told account of her hard-scrabble childhood, rise to worldwide fame, and personal tragedies.THE INSPIRING, HEARTSTIRRING MEMOIR FROM THE MUSIC ICON—NOW WITH A NEW FOREWORDThe world may know Shania Twain as many things: a music legend, a mother, and recently, a fixture in the news for her painful, public divorce and subsequent marriage to a cherished friend. But in this extr...

The New York Times Bestseller“Cable TV's dishiest guy at his dishy best. . . a glamorous, goofy look at 365 days of a charmed showbiz life.” — Kirkus ReviewsThe Andy Cohen Diaries chronicles a year in the whirlwind life of the beloved pop icon, in his own cheeky, candid, and irreverent words**.**As a TV Producer and host of the smash late night show Watch What Happens Live, Andy C...

Rue McClanahan, best known for her portrayal of Blanche Devereaux on the Emmy-award winning series The Golden Girls reveals her life in and out of the spotlight in a laugh-out-loud funny memoir about love, marriage, men, and getting older that is every bit as colorful as the characters she played.Raised in small-town Oklahoma in a house “thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town,” Rue developed her two great passions—theater and men—at an e...

Legendary singer, songwriter, actress, and activist Cyndi Lauper offers a personal account of the journey that led her to become an international superstar in this “moving story of an American musical original” (Kirkus Reviews).Icon Cyndi Lauper offers a poignant account of the journey that led her to become an international superstar—from her years growing up in Queens, New York, to the making of enduring hits like “Time After Time,” “Girls Just Want to H...

The star-studded and sidesplitting follow up to The Andy Cohen DiariesThe megapopular host of Watch What Happens: Live and executive producer of The Real Housewives franchise is back, better than ever, and telling stories that will keep his publicist up at night.Since the publication of his last book, Andy has toured the country with his sidekick Anderson Cooper, hit the radio waves with his own Sirius station, Radio Andy...

"You have to bear in mind that [Questlove] is one of the smartest motherf*****s on the planet. His musical knowledge, for all practical purposes, is limitless." --Robert ChristgauA punch-drunk memoir in which Everyone's Favorite Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art...

The Project Runway judge and New York Times–bestselling author of Style Strategy shows the essential items every woman needs in her fashion arsenal.In the wildly popular The Little Black Book of Style, fashion authority Nina Garcia showed women how to think about personal style in an entirely new way. Encouraging readers to creatively assert their style identities, Nina showed women of all ages how to hone and self-edit a distinct...

From Monty Python legend Eric Idle comes this wicked and enthralling comedySet during the glorious days of the Bush Empire before they finally invaded and killed irony, The Writer's Cut follows Stanley Hay, a joke writer. He has a girlfriend, a writing partner and a career going nowhere in particular. Wisecracking, ambitious and horny, Stanley decides that he is going to change that by writing a novel. This is where things start to spiral out of control.Caught up i...