Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater

At age 11, theater journalist Shapiro (coauthor, Queens in the Kingdom: The Ultimate Gay and Lesbian Guide to the Disney Theme Parks) became a lifelong lover of the Broadway musical and the women who made them special. As an adult, over the course of five years, he interviewed 21 actresses whose names instantly evoked "Broadway musical" to the reader or listener. It was also important to Shapiro to speak with some of the performers "of a certain age" while they still lived—both Elaine Stritch and Angela Lansbury were 83 when he met with them. Each of the interviews runs between 18 and 24 pages, and the women selected are outstanding: Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy, Audra McDonald, Judy Kaye, Bebe Neuwirth, and Betty Buckley are only some of the great dames included. Some readers may be surprised at the inclusion of Lansbury, longtime star of the TV series Murder, She Wrote, but her first love was the theater, where she got her start. Shapiro states that he wanted to create a tapestry, an oral history, of the last 60 years of American musical theater, and he has succeeded.