“Daddy” is the first word in the book, and it provokes the first of Green’s many illuminating footnotes, which enrich the pages of “Shy” like butter on a steak. And also the mother of six, the wife of two, an occasional adulterer, a credulous participant in an earnest trial marriage to Stephen Sondheim (!) - and the daughter of two of the most vividly (if scarily) rendered parents I’ve ever encountered. Written in collaboration with the New York Times theater critic Jesse Green, who completed it after Rodgers’s death at 83 in 2014, “Shy” relates the life story of a successful songwriter-scriptwriter-television producer-children’s book writer. The book is pure pleasure - except when it’s jaw-droppingly shocking. I’m also a sucker for books about Broadway, books as different from one another as Moss Hart’s “Act One,” William Goldman’s “The Season” and Jack Viertel’s “The Secret Life of the American Musical.” But I’ve never read one more entertaining (and more revealing) than Mary Rodgers’s “Shy.” Her voice careens between intimate, sardonic, confessional, comic.
Entwined with you next book full#
Let’s start with a full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Broadway - one of those theater fans who will see five different productions of the same show, who genuflect before cast albums from the ’50s, who inhale theater gossip as if it really mattered. SHY: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green
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