Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

In Show and Tell, John Lahr, "probably the most intelligent and insightful writer on theater today" (The New York Times Book Review), reinvents the celebrity profile to get at the essence of performance. Lahr's utterly winning and incisive profiles probe some of the most compelling, elusive, and irresistible public personas of our time, among them: Woody Allen, David Mamet, Ingmar Bergman, Frank Sinatra, Roseanne, Irving Berlin, Bob Hope, Mike Nichols, Wallace Shawn, Arthur Miller, and Neil LaBute. In these, and the moving autobiographical portraits of his father, Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, and his mother, a former Ziegfeld girl, Lahr charts the geography of fame.

Lahr's gift is to get inside both the art and the artist, to show how the work and the life intersect. He has had unusual access to his subjects who talk to him with rare candor. In prose "as lively as good conversation" (Robert Brustein), he arrives at truths of uncommon clarity, a claim seconded by Arthur Miller, who said that Lahr's essay on him is "by far the best thing about my stuff I've ever read". These very special profiles, the product of eight years' work at The New Yorker, deepen our understanding of their subjects and the culture that they profoundly reflect. Show and Tell, like the icons whose lives and work it so meticulously chronicles, corrupts an audience with pleasure.