Magic Time, A Memoir, Notes on Theatre & Other Entertaiments

by Edwin Wilson

Overview

If you had the chance, would you be interested in meeting British theatre director Sir John Gielgud and actor Jason Robards? Would you like to have been in Vieques, Puerto Rico with director Peter Brook making the film Lord of the Flies? Would you enjoy being at the first ever performance of the musical My Fair Lady? Would you like to be the co-producer of a Broadway play directed by the legendary George Abbott? Perhaps you would enjoy going to London once or twice a year to see new plays and classics at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company or in the West End. Maybe you would find it interesting to journey to Tokyo, Japan to enjoy the avant-garde theatre there or the more traditional Noh, Kabuki or Bunraku performances.

If your taste is more personal you might prefer a one-on-one interview with actresses Colleen Dewhurst, Claire Bloom, Julie Harris, or Gwen Verdon, or with playwrights Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, or August Wilson. You could do all this and more if you join Ed Wilson in the lively, personal journey he takes in his new memoir Magic Time. Enjoy the moments, relive the excitement-they are all there in this entertaining, provocative book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781575259420
Publisher:	Smith & Kraus, Inc.
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Pages:	311
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Author, teacher, critic, Ed Wilson began his career in theatre as the Producer's Assistant of a Broadway play directed by John Gielgud and the film Lord of the Flies directed by Peter Brook. He directed a season at the Barter Theatre in Virginia and produced plays off-Broadway and co-produced the Broadway play Agatha Sue, I Love You directed by George Abbott. He also produced the film The Nashville Sound. Educated at Vanderbilt, the University of Edinburgh and Yale, he received the first Doctor of Fine Arts degree awarded by Yale. From 1972 to 1995 he was the theatre critic for The Wall Street Journal for 23 years and for 45 years he served on the faculty at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center for nearly half a century. During that time he became the pre-eminent author of college theatre textbooks in the U.S. His previous activities also included serving as President of the New York Drama Critics Circle, Chairman of the Theatre Development Fund and several Pulitzer Prize juries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he conducted 90 half-hour television interviews with virtually every important theatre figure of the late 20th century from George Abbott to Jerry Zaks. Called Spotlight, the series appeared on CUNY-TV in New York and more than 200 PBS stations nationwide. It can be seen today on YouTube. In his noteworthy memoir Wilson gives us a penetrating, engaging, witty, incisive account of his singular adventures in and out of the theatre.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - The Early Years

CHAPTER TWO - New Haven

CHAPTER THREE - Brooklyn Heights and Broadway

CHAPTER FOUR - Directing and Producing

CHAPTER FIVE - Quogue/The Coffee House/Trips Abroad

CHAPTER SIX - The Accidental Author, Part I

CHAPTER SEVEN - The Accidental Author, Part II

CHAPTER EIGHT - The American Theatre Emerges

CHAPER NINE - High Drama and Low Comedy

CHAPTER TEN - Theatre in the 21st Century

THEATRE REVIEWS

Plays

Musicals

Revivals

Profiles and Interviews

Special Pieces

Editorial Reviews

06/19/2020

Teacher, writer, critic, and theater producer Wilson looks back on his life and work, including travels around the world with his wife, Chic, who passed away in 2016 after almost 50 years of marriage. Wilson began a nearly 40-year teaching career at Hunter College in 1964, and in late 1972 stumbled into the role of theater critic for the Wall Street Journal, a post he held for more than two decades. He produced multiple plays and a few films, including the 1968 documentary The Nashville Sound, which was released only after Ken Burns purchased the rights to several segments for inclusion in his 2019 series Country Music. Wilson's legacy as a writer may be tied to The Theatre Experience, a college textbook currently in its 14th edition and a standard resource for theater appreciation classes. Concluding this work are Wilson's theater reviews and articles originally published in the Wall Street Journal between 1972 and 1990, and while they serve as a fine capstone for the volume, they don't add much appeal for the general audience. VERDICT A pleasant yet unremarkable story of a well-lived life in the world of theater.—Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Library Journal

"Ed Wilson has educated more people about the theatre than Stella Adler, Lee

Strasberg, and Uta Hagen combined. Through his books, lectures, and reviews,

Wilson has enthused generations into the limelight and enlightened the mysterious

darkness that surrounds the stage. Now comes afoot Wilson's own drama, the

picaresque memoirs of a young man who charms the fates and doubles down on

every break to become one of America's leading men behind the scenes. Reading

Magic Time is like joining a grand weekend house party where one's fellow

guests amuse themselves writing, directing, producing and reviewing a great

Broadway play."

- Glenn Young: Word Doctor, and Founder of Applause Books

"In Magic Time, Edwin Wilson chronicles the joys of a life well-lived in the theater.

By turns captivating and informative, this compelling memoir demonstrates why

Wilson remains in my experience the most inspiring playwriting teacher I had the

good fortune to encounter."

- John Guare, author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation,

Landscape of the Body; Theatre Hall of Fame

"I have had many memorable nights, together with Ed Wilson. Congratulations

on that Magic Time. And thanks for the memories, all in one book!"

- Pia Lindstrom, Emmy winning TV theatre critic

A wonderfully engaging journey through the glory days of the theatre by someone

who saw it all. Ed Wilson has carved out a unique path as memorialist of the art

he loved."

- Molly Haskell, Film critic, author of From Reverence to Rape, Gone with

the Wind Revisited, My Brother My Sister

"Grab a front row ticket to Wilson's engaging, colorful career in the theater-as a

noted director, revered teacher, distinguished playwright and esteemed critic. Go

backstage and savor a rare glimpse into the glamour and glitz of many of Broadway's

legendary stars and playwrights. Raise the curtain and let the show begin . . .

It's magic time, indeed!"

-Adam Van Doren, artist, writer, author of An Artist in Venice, Homes of

American Presidents

From the Publisher

2020-05-23
A critic's expansive take on modern American theater.

From more than 50 years of experience as a playwright, teacher, director, and critic, Wilson has much to offer readers who care about the theater in the U.S. As a young man in the early 1950s, the author appeared headed to a career with a small coffee company in Nashville. But New York theater junkets with his parents to see landmark plays—e.g., Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Oklahoma!—had planted the idea of becoming a playwright. In 1954, that pursuit sent him to the Yale School of Drama, where, eventually, he earned a doctorate. George Bernard Shaw’s essays on Shakespeare, which Wilson researched for his dissertation, shaped his straightforward, lucid prose style, much in evidence here. After graduation, the author taught at Hofstra while also assisting a Broadway producer. The latter work found him working for British stage director Peter Brook in helming a film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. The film’s failure prompts Wilson’s illuminating observations on fundamental differences between film and theater, which he feels Brook couldn’t bridge. A brief stint teaching playwriting at Yale followed by a long tenure at Hunter College teaching theater yielded a text, The Theatre Experience (1976), that remains in print today. A golf outing with a Wall Street Journal writer eventually led to Wilson’s 23-year career as the paper’s theater critic. The assignment afforded him a look at what may have been the modern American theater’s final flowering, as evoked in Wilson’s articulate, entertaining reviews of stellar productions such as The Elephant Man, A Little Night Music, A Chorus Line, and many more. Now in his 90s, the author laments Broadway’s current state, with theatregoers “dressed as if they were about to go into a picnic” while herded “like refugees” to see jukebox musicals and Disney spectacles. Magic time in American theater, it seems, has vanished.

A fifth-row center seat for a perceptive look at a vital time on the Broadway boards.

Kirkus Reviews