An international success at thirty-two, Michael Bennett created such Broadway blockbusters as
Seesaw,
Dreamgirls and the longest running musical in history,
A Chorus Line. Often compared to superstar director/choreographers such as Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins, he worked with scores of sensational talents: Katherine Hepburn, Tommy Tune, Neil Simon and Stephen Sondheim. His public battles with producers made front page news and his frenetic private life was the stuff of steamy backstage gossip.
Yet, despite his incredible fame, Bennett was a lonely, tortured man, craving intimacy but never allowing himself to accept it. One Singular Sensation is the brutally honest, moving portrait of the Michael Bennett behind the glittering Broadway legend. In this acclaimed theatrical biography, Kevin Kelly, Boston Globe drama critic, reveals the dark obsessions that fueled Bennett's meteoric career and contributed to his early death at the age of forty-four. At last, here is the electrifying inside story of this creative genius and his legacy of what he did for love.
Basing his biography on tape-recorded interviews with Bennett, his friends, lovers, associates and family members, and often preserving their own words, Kelly, theater critic for the Boston Globe , traces the career of the brilliant young choreographer-director of A Chorus Line , Ballroom , Dreamgirls and other important musicals. Bennett emerges as a complex and driven personality, enormously ambitious, single-minded about show business, ruled by the need to control, addicted to drugs, obsessed by fear of the Mafia and unable to establish lasting relationships. In the end, all of these disturbing characteristics seem insignificant compared to his remarkable accomplishments and the loss occasioned by his death from AIDS at the age of 44. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Hard on the heels of Denny Martin Flinn's What They Did for Love and Ken Mandelbaum's admirable A Chorus Line and the Musicals of Michael Bennett (both LJ 6/15/89) comes the first full biography of the Broadway director-choreographer. Boston theater critic Kelly interviewed those closest to Bennett and explores his personal and professional relationships and love affairs with sometimes brutal honesty. Kelly is never tentative, and his account is far more gossipy and at times more spiteful than the others. Kelly does provide a fine balance between the life and the career, although Mandelbaum goes into greater detail about the shows. Bennett's creativity may have been undeniable, but despite claims of his enormous popularity and charisma, all three books point out his repeated cruelties and immense ego, so that the cumulative effect is an intense dislike of the man on the part of the reader. Kelly's biography should be the talk of Shubert Alley for some time to come; theater collections will need both Mandelbaum and Kelly for completeness.
- Eric W. Johnson, Univ. of Bridgeport Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
