Friday 5ive- April 1, 2023

April Fools! Event though it's Saturday, welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly-ish post featuring five things that caught my eye this week.

1)  I went to see MJ: The Musical on Broadway this week. Myles Frost, who plays Michael Jackson, won the Tony last year for his portrayal, and this is his last week in the show so I wanted to him. The show revolves around Michael Jackson rehearsing for his Dangerous tour, and we see him and the dancers and singers working to make the show perfect. Frost is magnetic in the role, you literally can't take your eyes off him when he is on stage. He sounds and moves just like Jackson and it appeared that audience members felt like they were seeing the actual Michael Jackson on stage. There were flashbacks to seminal moments in Jackson's career, from his beginnings with the Jackson 5 to his Thriller days, and all of the Michael Jackson hits are here. If you like jukebox musicals like Jersey Boys and A Beauiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, you'll like this one too.

2)  I visited the Museum of Broadway in Times Square this week before MJ, and it is so wonderfully done. They start with the beginnings of Broadway through each era of shows and iconic shows like Hair, A Chorus Line, Wicked have displays with costumes, sets and cast photos. At the end they have a huge section dedicated to the behind-the-scenes jobs- set designers, stage managers, public relations and marketing people. My only criticism is that the font for the captions on the photos is so small you have to be right on top of the photos to even read them. I will be returning when I can spend more time there, it is a must-see for every Broadway fan.

Original Ziegfeld Follies costumes found in a trunk

Doc's Drug Store from West Side Story

Costumes from Hair

Auburnian Thommie Walsh from A Chorus Line

Broadway Cares AIDS Quilt

The set from The Producers

3) While doing a little spring cleaning I found a box with cards from my sons, and this one from my older son JD made me laugh because it is ironic, because we have found out there is something scarier. It's from well before 2016 (maybe 2012 or so?).

Not so funny now, is it?

4)  Ted Lasso is back for its third and supposedly final season on Apple TV+. The first three episodes are available and they haven't lost a step. I laughed so hard in episode three when Ted is trying to slide out from behind Richmond's newest player international star Zava during their locker room pep talk (Jason Sudekis is a comedic genius). The lines come fast and furious, you really have to pay attention. On a serious note, Ted is dealing with his worsening panic attacks, and I like how the show has brought attention to that. This is appointment television on Fridays. 

5)  I read a memoir and an upcoming novel from one of my go-to authors this week. Alisha Fernandez Miranda's memoir My What If Year shares her experiences going from CEO of a consulting company to interning in three different jobs in one year. Alisha is the daughters of immigrants, the kind of driven, hardworking woman who graduated from Harvard University and the London School of Economics and always followed the rules to succeed. When she found herself yearning for something more, she decided to try her hand at learning three different careers that always interested her. She left her husband and two young daughters in London and headed to New York City to intern for two different Broadway productions- Flying Over Sunset and a revival of Assassins- in the early months of 2020. Just as things were proceeding in rehearsals and production and Alisha was enjoying her internship, COVID hit and Broadway shut down. She headed back home to London and moved onto her next internship with an art dealer, where she was offered a permanent position. She finished her What If Year at a resort in Scotland near her home. This one proved to be the most arduous one yet; working as a waitress was physically exhausting for the 40 year-old. I enjoyed that section the most.  The premise was so interesting, although her timing of doing all this during COVID was unfortunate. She does acknowledge how lucky she was to have great connections that allowed her the opportunities that most don't have. I found my copy in the gift shop at the Museum of Broadway, the last signed copy they had. If you like memoirs (and Broadway!), this is a must-read. 

One of my all-time favorite authors, Alice McDermott, has a new novel publishing in November titled Absolution. This one has a different setting than most of her New York based books. The setting is Saigon in the early 1960s. Tricia is a young newlywed whose husband is a naval engineer stationed in Vietnam. When she meets Charlene, another American wife, she finds herself drawn into Charlene's charitable plans to help the Vietnamese people, going against her husband's wishes. McDermott brings us into a time and place we don't know much about as seen through these women's eyes, and her writing is exquisite. It reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible , a book that resides on my Favorites Shelf. I already preordered a physical copy for November, I'm going to make an early call that it will be one of my best reads of 2023. 

I think spring is here (right?) Stay safe and healthy all.

Diane

Book Expo 2017- Book Covers

Once I return from the annual Book Expo, I love to go through the books I picked up and check them out. There are so many ways to organize them- by publication date, by author name, or by subject.

This year I took notice of the covers. Book cover art has gotten increasingly more intricate and interesting over the years. It's fun to see what clever art directors come up with to catch the reader's eye.

Women looking away from the camera is something that has been popular. This photo shows three books that feature the protagonist looking away from the camera, giving the effect of longing. I'm patricularly interested in reading Sujata Massey's The Widows of Malabar Hill, about a female lawyer in 1920's India, and these three books are all historical fiction.

From woman facing away on the cover, we have covers where we only see the backs of our protagonists here. Need to Know, about a female CIA agent involved in Russian intrigue seems to be a timely read. (I believe Charlize Theron has optioned this for a movie.) Thrillers tend to like to use this on the cover.

This next one is a new one- covers featuring people with no faces. I guess this can be interpreted as protagonists who are enigmatic?

Then we get the covers with the faces up close and personal, like these two striking books. 

Instead of people, these covers feature buildings on their covers. Brendan Mathews' debut novel The World of Tomorrow, with its Irish immigrant story set in 1939 New York City, looks to be this year's We Are Not Ourselves. Speaking of Irish,  I can never resist a Alice McDermott novel, an Oswego State graduate.

Trees and branches without their leaves will be very popular in the coming months. I'm really looking forward to reading Tayari Jones' An American Marriage. Her previous novel Silver Sparrow was just phenomenal. Eleanor Henderson's The Twelve-Mile Straight is another one I can't wait to read, as I loved her Ten Thousand Saints.

From trees, we move to birds on these covers. Sarah Schmidt's See What I Have Done retells the Lizzie Borden story and I am intrigued by that one.

This vibrant red color is sure to catch the eyes of readers perusing bookstore shelves. Leni Zumas' Red Clocks is geared towards readers of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and will surely benefit from the Hulu adaptation of that book.

These books capitalize on the Gone Girl familiarity by putting girl in the title, but none are of the thriller genre. The Radium Girls is a narrative nonfiction book that will appeal to readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the cover of The Girls in the Picture is just stunning.

Married women seems to be a lively topic as these three book titles suggest. I can't wait to read Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher as I have been a fan since Little Children. (And his HBO series The Leftovers just knocked me out.)

Future Book Expo post will discuss some of the events that took place at the Expo. If you attended Book Expo, what were your favorites? Beth Fish Reads has highlighted some of the books she is looking forward to here and here. 

Someone by Alice McDermott

Someoneby Alice McDermott
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 978-0-374-28109-0
Hardcover, $25, 240 pages

No one writes about the Irish American experience better than Alice McDermott. Her National Book Award winning novel, Charming Billy, is the perfect example of that.

Her latest novel, Someone, tells the story of Marie, an ordinary Irish American girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Marie waits on her stoop everyday for her beloved father to come home from work, watching the activity on the block- the boys playing stickball, Billy Corrigan, blinded from the war, umpiring the game, and the men and women walking home from the subway.

Someone is all about an ordinary life- Marie's life. She goes to Catholic school, has a good friend Gertie, and a brother Gabe who is studying for the priesthood. The book goes back and forth in time, so we see the entirety of Marie's life- childhood, young adulthood, marriage, motherhood, sickness, health, births, deaths, growing old.

One thing that makes Marie stand out is that she has a problem with her eye. It affects not only her vision, but her outward appearance as well. When she finally gets a boyfriend, she feels elated. That balloon is burst when he dumps her for a woman who is prettier and comes from a wealthier family.

The title of the book comes from an exchange she has with her brother over this heartbreak. He tells her that the world is filled with cruelty and when she asks Gabe "Who will love me?", and he says "Someone-someone will."

And someone does. She meets Tom, who was abandoned by his vaudeville parents and nearly became an orphan train boy until a nun sent him to live with her widowed sister who just lost her son in a drowning. They build a life and a family together.

McDermott fills her beautiful novel with quiet moments of life- a mother brushing lint off the jacket of her son in his coffin, waiting to be picked up by family members at the airport, a baby sleeping warmly on his mother's shoulder.

Her language is gorgeous too. She speaks of aging as "a precarious ledge life carried you to, the ledge you lived on when you were an old woman alone, four good children or no." Of her husband, Marie said "he had the kind of face you wanted to put your palm to, like a child's."

After reading Someone, it would hard to pass by a person on the street and not wonder what his life story is. Everyone has a story and Marie was lucky enough to have Alice McDermott conjure up hers. And I was lucky enough to read it. I put Someone on my list of Most Compelling Reads of 2013.

I had the honor of meeting McDermott at the Book Expo of America last year and we chatted about attending SUNY-Oswego, and the snowy, cold weather neither of us misses. In addition to the book, we also received a CD filled with music that corresponds to the book. It is the perfect accompaniment to read with the book.

Alice McDermott signing books at BEA 2013

rating 5 of 5