Loosely based on the plays of Plautus, A Funny Thing... ran for three years on Broadway. The first British production, starring Frankie Howerd as the cowardly slave Pseudolus, ran almost as long and spawned the TV series Up Pompeii!

An entertaining and informative look at the unique culture of crime, punishment, and killing in Ancient Rome In Ancient Rome, all the best stories have one thing in common—murder. Romulus killed Remus to found the city, Caesar was assassinated to save the Republic. Caligula was butchered in the theater, Claudius was poisoned at dinner, and Galba was beheaded in the Forum. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered. But what did killing mean in a city where gladiators fought to the death to sate a crowd? In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Emma Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside Ancient Rome's darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.

“I’ve been single for so long, I’ve started having sexual fantasies about my vibrator," riffs Karla for her captive, cancer-ward audience. The patients—her mother, who’s recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer, and her roommate behind the curtain, aren’t laughing—or even awake—but there’s someone else in the room . . .In Halley Feiffer’s “ painfully irresistible" (The New York Times) new play, a foul-mouthed twenty-something comedian and a middle-aged man embroiled in a nasty divorce are brought together unexpectedly when their cancer-stricken mothers become roommates in the hospital. Together, this unlikely duo must negotiate some of life’s biggest challenges . . . while making some of the world’s most inappropriate jokes. Can these two very lost people learn to laugh through their pain and lean on each other when all they really want to do is run away? In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City, Halley Feiffer slays in a work that’s dark and disturbing and yet totally hilarious. The acclaimed world premiere at MCC Theater featured Beth Behrs, Erik Lochtefeld, Lisa Emery, and Jacqueline Sydney, and was directed by Trip Cullman.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Titled after perhaps Stephen Sondheim's most autobiographical song, from Sunday in the Park with George—Finishing the Hat not only collects his lyrics for the first time, it offers readers a rare personal look into his life as well as his remarkable productions. Stephen Sondheim’s career spanned more than half a century; his lyrics are synonymous with musical theater and popular culture. Sondheim—the winner of seven Tonys, an Academy Award, seven Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize and more—treats us to never-before-published songs from each show, songs that were cut or discarded before seeing the light of day, along with the lyrics for all of his musicals from 1954 to 1981, including West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. He discusses his relationship with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and his collaborations with extraordinary talents such as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Angela Lansbury, Harold Prince and a panoply of others. The anecdotes—filled with history, pointed observations and intimate details—transport us back to a time when theater was a major pillar of American culture. Best of all, Sondheim appraises his work and dissects his lyrics, as well as those of others, offering unparalleled insights into songwriting that will be studied by fans and aspiring songwriters for years to come. Accompanying Sondheim’s sparkling writing are behind-the-scenes photographs from each production, along with handwritten music and lyrics from the songwriter’s personal collection. Penetrating and surprising, poignant, funny and sometimes provocative, Finishing the Hat is not only an informative look at the art and craft of lyric writing, it is a history of the theater that belongs on the same literary shelf as Moss Hart’s Act One and Arthur Miller’s Timebends. It is also a book that will leave you humming the final bars of Merrily We Roll Along, while eagerly anticipating the next volume.

In the tradition of TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE and THE LAST LECTURE comes an inspiring book of life lessons from Michael J Fox. Michael J Fox didn't finish high school, but he has gone on to receive honorary degrees from several universities and has achieved the highest accolades for his acting, as well as his writing. In his new book, he inspires and motivates his readers to work hard, achieve the most they can and maximise their abilities – all with his trademark optimism, warmth and humour. From moving to Los Angeles fresh from Canada, without a high school degree and learning to live on a wage to taking on roles in 'Family Ties' and the 'Back to the Future' movies and nearly crashing and burning and then learning to cope first with the death of his father and then with his own diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, MJF shares what he's learned about life, work, love, family and happiness and everything else along the way.

Slipknot and Stone Sour singer Corey Taylor's New York Times bestselling journey into the world of ghosts and the supernatural Corey Taylor has seen a lot of unbelievable things. However, many of his most incredible experiences might just shock you. For much of his life, the Grammy Award-winning singer of Slipknot and Stone Sour and New York Times bestselling author of Seven Deadly Sins has brushed up against the supernatural world. Those encounters impacted his own personal evolution just as much as headlining at Castle Donington in front of 100,000 people at Download Festival or debuting at #1 on the Billboard Top 200. Since growing up in Iowa, his own curiosity drew him into situations that would've sent most people screaming scared and running for the hills. He's ballsy enough to go into the darkness and deal with the consequences, though. As a result, he's seen ghosts up close and personal, whether while combing through an abandoned house in his native Iowa as a child or recording an album in the fabled Houdini Hollywood Hills mansion. He's also got the memories (and scars) to prove it. For some reason, he can't seem to shake these spectral stories, and that brings us to this little tome right here... At the same time, being an erudite, tattooed, modern Renaissance Man, he was never one for Sunday Service. Simply put, he's seen ghosts, but he hasn't seen Jesus. Taylor especially can't find a reason why people do the insane things they do in HIS name. That's where everything gets really interesting. His second book, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven, compiles Taylor's most intimate, incredible, and insane moments with the supernatural. His memories are as vivid as they are vicious. As he recounts these stories, he questions the validity of religious belief systems and two-thousand-year-old dogma. As always, his rapid-fire writing, razor sharp sense of humor, unbridled honesty, and cozy anecdotes make quite the case for his point. You might end up believing him or not. That's up to you, of course. Either way, you're in for a hell of a ride.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, has established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.