The Untold Stories of Broadway

Tales from the World's Most Famous Theaters, Volume 1

By: Jennifer Ashley Tepper

Narrated by: John David Farrell, Rebecca Surmont

Length: 18 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Do you wish you were in the audience during Barbra Streisand's final performance of Funny Girl on Broadway? Do you wonder how far Jonathan Groff was willing to go to score tickets to Thoroughly Modern Millie? And are you dying to know which beloved TV star and Tony Award winner was caught with his pants down in front of a movie legend?

From opening nights to closing nights. From secret passageways to ghostly encounters. From Broadway debuts to landmark productions. Score a front row seat to hear hundreds of stories about the most important stages in the world, seen through the eyes of the producers, actors, stage hands, writers, musicians, company managers, dressers, designers, directors, ushers, and door men who bring The Great White Way to life each night.

You'll never look at Broadway the same way again. This is the first audiobook in a multi-volume series that will tell the stories of all of the Broadway houses. Volume 1 includes the Winter Garden, the Richard Rodgers, the Marriott Marquis, the Al Hirschfeld, the Neil Simon, the August Wilson, the Mark Hellinger, and the Lyceum: eight Broadway theaters that light up New York City.

©2013 Dress Circle Publishing (P)2014 Dress Circle Publishing

Enjoyable

Good stories and well narrated, although some odd choices, like having the male narrator read Daryl Roth, which makes you wonder if they realize she is a woman since he is only reading all the men.

Great Broadway book!

Would you listen to The Untold Stories of Broadway again? Why?

Listened to Untold Stories on my long flight to New York City. I landed feeling like I had a new appreciation for the great white way. If you are heading to New York or just a fan of Broadway this is the book for you.

Have you listened to any of John David Farrell and Rebecca Surmont ’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I liked how there were two narrators. The book is a compilation of hundreds of interviews and two readers made it easy to keep track of who was telling the story.

Thoroughly enjoyable!!

What a treat to listen to this. Thank you for keeping it clean so that theater loving kids can listen as well.
PLEASE bring the next two volumes to Audible. It feels so intimate having it read to you aloud.

Made My Trip to NYC More Fun!

I listened to this book on the drive to NYC and knowing about everything that had happened in these historic places gave me an even greater appreciation for them. While the rest of my family was focusing on the stores in Times Square, I just wanted to walk down the side streets!

The book was written based on a lot of interviews so it is very conversational. It's very accessible but I imagine that it could occasionally be easy to stumble over some of the more colloquial phrases while reading. I liked the audiobook because hearing the narrators (one male and one female) read those sections made it just sound natural.

Under-edited :(

Yowza. I wanted to like this so much. By the 113th Merrily We Roll Along reference I grew numb. I also love Merrily. And I was bored.

Cheesy tag-team "Man reads male; lady reads female" production does not help.

Such potential.

Can’t wait for the rest!

As an educator, actor and director, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It provides so much life and history to some of Broadway’s most famous theaters. Would definitely recommend.

The book that led me to cancel Audible membership

This book is so bad, it caused me to cancel my Audible membership for nearly a year. Would have returned it, but Audible wouldn't let me.

it's not that the topic isn't rich for storytelling. it certainly is. But the story reads like some kind of sophomore year project that was rushed together at the last hour, with a series of apparently unedited first-person accounts of life in the Broadway theater business. The biggest problems are 1) Because the stories are unedited, we hear the same thing over and over from different characters. How many times are we told that the Richard Rogers theater used to be called the 46the Street Theater? i lost count at about ten, and that's with only making it about a quarter of the way through the book before giving up. 2) Because the book employs different narrators, it seems, for each of the stories, and the book is mostly stories, it's hard to keep track of who's talking.

The writer would have been better served by actually writing a narrative that included relevant short quotes from the primary sources, not just including pages/hours of unedited verbatim text from them.