Joe's View

Will even the most rabid Barbra Streisand fans shell out 65 dollars for the superstar’s first book, “My Passion for Design” (Viking)?

Instead of a memoir about one of the great careers in modern show biz, Streisand has delivered a profusely illustrated coffee-table volume that details her mammoth renovation/construction projects on the beautiful seaside property in Malibu that the actress shares with her husband James Brolin.

The book landed in stores last week and the star has also produced a special $500 signed and numbered edition that includes a DVD tour of the property.

Even by the grandiose standards of Hollywood, “My Passion for Design” is a jaw-dropping ego trip.

Streisand takes us through each minute phase of the decorating project that appears to have taken months (years?) of the star’s time only to result in one of those bizarre movie community film-set homes. The actress moved heaven and earth to produce an upscale, neo-18th century, half Connecticut/half Nantucket home and garden and guest house.

Of course, movie stars have always had the time and the money to do this sort of thing — rather than simply buy a nice piece of property in Connecticut — but reading about it in detail is a headache-inducing experience.

For page after page after page, we hear Streisand’s side of a long story involving armies of inadequate architects and craftsmen who didn’t quite understand her “vision.”

Yes, we’ve all known for many years that Streisand sees herself as a “perfectionist” who some of her collaborators have viewed as a control freak — or worse — but the matter has never been laid out in such numbing detail before. By the star herself.

A reader is put in the position of being on the scene when hand-made sheets of wallpaper don’t match up the way they should and when the Early American “milk paint” has to be refrigerated in between applications.

You could write a pretty effective horror movie about being one of the un-celebrated toilers who had to keep fixing and fixing and fixing all of those small details until they looked right to their famous boss.

I can still remember the kick I got as a teen reading the first big Arthur Hailey novel, “Hotel,” in the summer of 1966.

Hailey would go on to have a very lucrative career as a formula novelist exploring such American institutions as banks (“The Money Changers”) and the automobile industry (“Wheels”), but what made “Hotel” so much fun to read was its novelty at the time.

Instead of a human protagonist, the book was about a building and the people in it — the venerable St. Gregory Hotel in New Orleans and its staff and guests — and Hailey told us just about everything you might want to know about how a hotel operated in the 1960s, from security to elevator safety to how hookers get up to clients’ rooms.

Since I had never stayed in a hotel at that time — we were a middle-class motel family — everything about the book was exotic and interesting.

A movie version came out in 1967, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me now, I never had a chance to see it — even on television — until I looked at the new Warner Archive DVD version last night.

The movie came and went without making anywhere near the impact that the film of Hailey’s “Airport” did three years later, and that’s probably because Warner Bros. decided to pinch pennies and go for a B-list ensemble headed by Rod Taylor as the manager.

Taylor was a perfectly capable 1960s film actor — best known for supporting Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” — but the role of the hotel manager is so thin that it desperately needs a big star to jazz it up.

The cast backing up Taylor was probably more suited to a 1960s TV movie than a feature film — Karl Malden as a hotel thief, Michael Rennie as a visiting Lord from England, Kevin McCarthy as a hotel chain owner who wants to buy the St. Gregory, and a long forgotten ’60s European starlet Catherine Spaak as McCarthy’s mistress (who falls for Taylor at first sight).

The best actor in the cast — Melvyn Douglas — is wasted on the small, totally undeveloped role of the owner of the St. Gregory, who occupies the penthouse and who fails to convince us that his fight to keep McCarthy from taking over is worth winning.

The inferior casting means that “Hotel” doesn’t exactly scintillate in terms of charisma, but it is fun to watch as a glimpse back at hotel life before the chains took over and began standardizing the experience.

The movie takes us back to a time when keys were still used to get into rooms — so that the thief character could steal a few and have total access to guest rooms — and people didn’t show up in classy hotels in sneakers and sweatsuits, dragging their own suitcases around on little wheels to save a few bucks on bellboy tips.

The movie was made right on the cusp of the style and content revolutions that were about to change Hollywood movies forever. “Hotel” appeared just a few months before “Bonnie & Clyde” and “The Graduate,” but it looks as square as anything made in Hollywood a decade earlier.

The time capsule value of this forgotten adaptation of a forgotten novel makes it worth a look.

Some people take vitamins every day.

I do, too, but they don’t seem to do much for my mental health.

For the past few weeks, I’ve found the perfect daily picker-upper — a chapter or two from the recently published “My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space” (St. Martin’s Press), by Lisa Scottoline and her daughter, Francesca Scottoline Serritella.

Scottoline is, of course, the best-selling author of a series of fabulous crime novels featuring Philadelphia women much like herself — smart and very funny and very connected with their families and friends.

Work tends to take precedence over the love lives of Scottoline’s women, but it never interferes with their tight friendships or their family bonds.

There isn’t a lot of sex in novels such as “Think Twice” and “Look Again,” but they are chock full of love.

Scottoline writes genuine page turners, but it’s the personal relationships in the books that linger after you put them down.

A few years ago, The Philadelphia Inquirer did a very wise thing and asked one of their city’s most notable native daughters to write a Sunday column called “Chick Wit.”

The 700 or so words a week eventually resulted in a terrific 2009 collection “Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog” — “My Nest Isn’t Empty…” is the sequel.

Scottoline writes about whatever crosses her path — Pennsylvania highways that are “sponsored” by strip clubs, going to the movies on Christmas Day (it’s a good thing!) — but has also allowed readers a peak into her own family life, with mother Mary and brother Frank (who live together in Miami).

Beloved daughter Francesca is now on her own in New York City, but she and Lisa remain BFFs, and that “nest” in Philadelphia is the scene of many column reunions.

(Father Frank Scottoline died a few years back, but his presence remains  strong in Lisa’s life, and in the column — he still rules over “the flying Scottolines.”)

Somewhere along the way, Lisa came up with the great idea of having Francesca write the column from time to time (in between her own work on a forthcoming novel). The result takes us deeper yet into the Scottoline clan, but also affords “Chick Wit” a neat multi-generational perspective.

Francesca’s voice is entirely her own, but she shares Lisa’s ability to turn borderline TMI into memorable humor and insights (i.e. her column called “The Lady Business”).

The result is one of the best double acts in the newspaper (and book) business.

Because I generally read the column week by week on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, I decided to check out the audio book of “My Nest Isn’t Empty…” as well as the hardcover collection and I’m not sure which version I like more.

It’s great to have the columns in a book you can pull down from the shelf, but the audio edition feels even more personal as Lisa and Francesca tell you what’s been going on in their lives.

The columns sound the way they read (something that is not always the case with authors and their audio books) and at the end there is a delightful bonus interview where the two women talk about the challenges of turning your own life into column fodder.

How great it is that Stephen Sondheim has lived to be 80 and to witness his transition from being a Broadway cult figure to a full-fledged national treasure.

2010 has been a year-long celebration of Sondheim that has included a star-studded Broadway revue (“Sondheim by Sondheim”), the naming of a Broadway theater after him, and the publication of “Finishing the Hat,” the first of two books that collect all of his lyrics.

It’s nice when an innovative artist lives long enough to be appreciated while he is still with us.

When Sondheim was at his peak — in the 1970s — there was no shortage of admirers for his ground-breaking musicals (with director Harold Prince) such as “Company” and “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd.”

But in their initial runs, those shows were only modest commercial successes — with mixed reviews — and Sondheim kept getting hit with the (baseless) charge that while he might be a great lyricist his melodies were not as memorable as the work of such peers as Jerry Herman and John Kander.

With the passage of time, nearly all of Sondheim’s shows have been revived on Broadway — some of them more than once — and his ability to create memorable melodies is now unquestioned.

Wednesday night PBS is broadcasting an episode of the “Great Performances” series that truly lives up to the title, “Sondheim! The Birthday Concert,” which was taped earlier this year at Lincoln Center.

The show features some of the best interpreters of Sondheim, from old timers like Elaine Stritch to relative newcomers like Joanna Gleason, Donna Murphy and Marin Mazzie.

Put together with great skill by director Lonny Price (who was in the original cast of Sondheim’s 1981 flop “Merrily We Roll Along”), the show serves up one sensational performance after another — a veritable Sondheim orgy.

The show includes tunes from musicals for which Sondheim only did the lyrics, such as “West Side Story” as well as numbers that were cut or revised on the way to Broadway.

The centerpiece of the event is a long sequence (below) in which some of Broadway’s biggest female stars — all dressed in red — take their seats near each other on stage, and then get up, one by one, to deliver incredible performances.

Donna Murphy (top) does a stunning rendition of “Could I Leave You?” from “Follies,” Patti LuPone has the guts to do “The Ladies Who Lunch” with the originator of that “Company” song (Elaine Stritch) sitting a few feet away, and Bernardette Peters does a powerhouse rendition of “Not a Day Goes By” from “Merrily We Roll Along.”

Every number in the show is memorable, and it is to Price’s credit that he includes rising young talent such as Matt Cavenaugh and Jenn Colella (above, left) among the singers. Nathan Gunn also visits from the world of opera.

If you’re not going to be home Wednesday night, find out when your local PBS affiliate is airing this bit of stage history and be sure to DVR it. This is one of the best Broadway specials I’ve ever seen.

The play’s style might be traditional, but there’s nothing old-fashioned in the subject matter or the performances in the Broadway production of Donald Margulies’s “Time Stands Still,” now on at the Cort Theatre.

The play takes place now — or as close to “now” as a work of art can get — and is powered by an excellent quartet of actors, led by Laura Linney in a smashing performance as a photojournalist recovering from an explosion while on assignment in a war zone.

Sarah Goodwin has suffered facial damage from shrapnel and her leg is bound with a brace that makes it a challenge for her to get around in the Brooklyn loft she shares wirth James Dodd (Brian D’Arcy James), a writer who often covers the same assignments as Sarah.

James and Sarah have lived together for almost a decade but have never bothered to get married.

The only other characters in the play are Richard Ehrlich (Eric Bogosian) — who edits the general interest magazine that publishes a lot James and Sarah’s work — and his new girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Christina Ricci), who works as a party planner and isn’t much more than half Richard’s age, but is much sharper than James and Sarah think the first time they meet her.

“Time Stands Still” is about the tug between a difficult professional life and a comfortable home life; the good that journalism can do in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; how we respond to the reporting of brave writers and photographers in places like that; and a whole host of other contemporary issues. The bottom line in the play is: what “good” does the documentary work of Sarah and James do, and is it worth the personal trade-offs they’ve made? 

Margulies keeps the story moving along smoothly — and engagingly — without ever making it seem he is being too slick. The play is beautifully constructed — with a very satisfying ending — but the writer never tries to smooth out his roughest edges.

The way that the play entertains an audience and sustains brilliant actors recalls classics of yesteryear by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams who knew how to introduce potent material within the commercial restrictions of the Broadway theater.

All of the acting in “Time Stands Still” is very fine, but Linney is especially good as the woman who is so committed to her work that she isn’t sure what role James can play in her life. The actress has the presence of a real stage star — including a voice that carries every line to every theatergoer in the Cort — but her film work can be discerned in the wonderful way she reacts to the other actors on stage and the small physical details that bolster the richness of the writing.

The play opened for a limited run last season under the auspices of the non-profit Manhattan Theatre Club. Luckily for those of us who missed it then, “Time Stands Still” has returned for an open-ended commercial engagement.

Whether you page through it for fun or put it on your theater reference shelf, “The Playbill Broadway Yearbook” is the best annual account of what happens on those fabled few blocks in midtown Manhattan where masses of people see great — and not so hot — shows 8 times a week, 52 weeks a year.

The new Volume Six of this indispensable series covers Broadway from June 2009 to May of this year and contains almost 500 pages of hard data and wonderful color pictures of every show on Broadway last season — from “Million Dollar Quartet” (above) to “Memphis.”

What makes the series really special is that it covers both new shows and old, so that we get updates on the cast changes in such long-running blockbusters as “Phantom of the Opera” and “Mamma Mia!” as well as the cast and crew rundowns on shows that opened and closed last season, such as the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway revival of “The Royal Family.”

The book is done in the spirit of a high school yearbook with each show assigned a “correspondent” who reports on backstage activities like celebrity sightings, notable cell phone interruptions and other down-to-earth things that don’t often make it into traditional reference books.

Editor Robert Viagas also includes coverage of every major annual benefit and awards event from the great “Broadway Bares” burlesque show (below) at Roseland in June — which raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS — to the Tony Awards.

“The Playbill Broadway Yearbook” also includes group pictures of the crews and box office staffs and ushers at every one of the Broadway houses, dramatically illustrating how many people it takes to produce those eight shows every week.

For more information on this terrific book, go to www.playbill.com

Vanessa Redgrave is back on Broadway starring opposite James Earl Jones in a well-received revival of “Driving Miss Daisy.”

The 73-year-old Redgrave has spent much of her life moving back and forth between stage and film roles in London and New York.

The actress was already a star of the London stage by 1966, but that was the year she became an international movie star as a result of her breakthrough performances in “Morgan!” and “Blow-Up” (below).

It was a double-barreled triumph similar to the one-two punch Julie Christie scored a year earlier in “Darling” and “Doctor Zhivago.”

England was as much a center of pop culture as New York or Los Angeles in those wonderful days of The Beatles, James Bond and “Tom Jones” (the 1963 Tony Richardson film that startled some Hollywood folks by winning the best picture Oscar).

“Morgan!” is one of the most fondly recalled pictures of that fervent era, a mix of satire, romantic comedy, politics and fashion about the free-spirited Londoner of the title, Morgan Delt (played by David Warner), a would-be artist and devout believer in Karl Marx who is dismissed as being crazy by some people. (In England, the film was subtitled “A Suitable Case for Treatment”).

Redgrave plays Morgan’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Leonie, a woman who adored her husband but wants an easier, more conventional life among the rich people she was raised with.

The actress faced the challenge of playing a rather shallow society type who might have been repellant (and unbelievable) if played by a less charming and talented performer.

Because we can see Leonie’s doubts about her new beau (a rich rotter played by Robert Stephens), we root for Morgan as his romantic quest becomes crazier (and even violent).

The picture is in the same spirit as another ’60s inmates-running-the-asylum cult classic, “King of Hearts.” These days, Morgan probably would be diagnosed and medicated and wouldn’t even think about winning his wife back with over-the-top theatrics.

As the times changed, David Warner went from being a romantic icon to a villain in countless films of the subsequent 40 years, but Redgrave was launched on one of the great film careers of our time (“Morgan!” earned the actress her first of many Oscar nominations — she won one in 1978 for “Julia”).