Michael Cerveris

Unlike the boat it's named after, this show truly rose from the bottom. Despite detractors predicting doom before it had even opened, Titanic overcame hectic previews and endless technical problems to win a Tony for best musical and turn into a commercial success. Despite the fact that favorite performers like Judith Blazer or Victoria Clark disappear in the crowd and don't get solos of note, the show still manages to bring to life affecting characters. Maury Yeston's (Grand Hotel) score has the required majesty without ever being turgid, and the choral work he coaxes from his ensemble is eminently powerful. Though it requires a fair amount of attention on the listener's part, Titanic is also surprisingly emotional--its majestic finale packs more punch than 3 hours of Leonardo DiCaprio. --Elisabeth Vincentelli

No Description Available.Genre: Original Cast RecordingsMedia Format: Compact DiskRating: Release Date: 1-JUL-1997

Mystery Street Records and Threadhead Records are proud to present "Nine Lives - A Musical Story of New Orleans" by Paul Sanchez and Colman deKay, a two CD collection of 39 original songs. This musical adaptation is based on the book "Nine Lives" by Dan Baum. Over 130 musicians (mostly from New Orleans) perform on the album, including Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint, John Boutte, Lillian Boutte, Bryan Batt, Wendell Pierce (from HBO's Treme), Broadway star and Tony Award winning actor/singer Michael Cerveris, Kevin Griffin, Michelle Shocked, Harry Shearer, Shamarr Allen, The Dixie Cups and Mayor Mitch Landrieu. The Nine Lives album is a musical adaptation of the New York Times bestselling book "Nine Lives" by Dan Baum (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009). The non-fiction book is a remarkable oral history of New Orleans in the forty years (1965-2005) between the twin catastrophes known as Betsy and Katrina as seen through the eyes of nine of its citizens. The album includes the 39 songs imagined for a theatrical production and is anticipated to become a Broadway musical.

Part road movie, part romantic comedy, part thriller, and a whole lotta fun, The Mexican could get by on star power alone, but it offers Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and a clever plot full of delightful surprises. It's a thoroughly enjoyable shaggy-dog story in which the downtrodden Jerry Welbach (Pitt) copes with a dual dilemma: his girlfriend Samantha (Roberts) has just dumped him to pursue solo ambitions in Las Vegas, and a manipulative mobster has ordered Jerry to Mexico to retrieve a coveted antique pistol (the "Mexican" of the title) that carries a legacy of legend, death, and danger. Jerry soon has his hands full with bandits, bloodshed, and a grizzly hound dog that vanishes and reappears with amusing regularity. En route to Vegas, Samantha's taken hostage by a burly assassin (James Gandolfini) who's attached to the gun-fetching scheme and is, in more ways than one, not who he seems to be. Like a good magic act, J.H. Wyman's original screenplay distracts you from its gaps of logic, using unexpected revelations to fuel its strategic vitality. It also provides a wealth of character development, and director Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt) gives his stellar cast equal time to shine. It hardly matters that Pitt and Roberts spend most of the film apart; their time together is worth waiting for, and the machinations that separate them play out like a cross between vintage Peckinpah and Romancing the Stone. And why is the accursed pistola so valuable? That's just another surprise, setting the stage for the arrival of yet another big-name star, whose motivations are pure in a film full of double-crosses and darkly shaded humor. With a giddy plot like this, star power is just icing on the cake. --Jeff Shannon

Teleportation, mind control, astral projection, invisibility, precognition, spontaneous combustion, reanimation: these are among the peripheral sciences--or "pseudo-sciences," as one skeptic puts it--examined during the first season of Fringe, a Fox network TV drama debuting on DVD with the full first season (twenty episodes) offered on seven extras-laden discs. The notion that those phenomena could have a genuine scientific basis is intriguing enough. But co-creator J.J. Abrams (whose bulging resume as a director, writer, and producer includes Lost, Alias, and the 2009 Star Trek feature film) has even more on his mind. Along with the weird science, the series features a multi-agency task force investigating related acts of terrorism that may very well add up to a threat of unimaginable global proportions; people who are exactly what they appear to be (i.e., insane) and others who are anything but; plot twists galore; family drama, interpersonal relationships, corporate evil, cop chases... There's a lot in play here, and while it doesn't always hold together (and like any new series, it takes a while to hit its stride), Fringe is rarely boring, and never less than impressively ambitious. The pilot introduces us to the main characters, principally FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv, good but not great in the show's central role) and others on the task force brought in to investigate some gross goings-on aboard a jumbo jet (a "self-eradicating, airborne toxin" reduced everyone to blood and bones). Seems this is but one part of "The Pattern," a series of synchronous, similarly shocking events that unfold as the show progresses; in subsequent episodes, lots of people are killed in graphic fashion by all manner of horrors, including scary monsters (slugs as big as a football, teethed parasites that can crush your heart), a gas that freezes a busload of passengers "like insects trapped in amber," people so radioactive they can literally make your brain boil… it goes on. Helping Dunham and the rest of the force figure it all out are scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (an appealing John Noble), who's spent the past 17 years locked up in the loony bin and whose research may be responsible for some of the crimes we witness, and his son-babysitter Peter (Joshua Jackson). As for the "fringe" element, Dr. Bishop and other, less benign geniuses jump-start a dead man's brain, photograph another victim's cornea in order to access the last thing she saw before death, connect Dunham to her boyfriend so she can experience his memories of the incident that left him comatose, use high-frequency vibrations to enable bank robbers to pass through a solid vault wall, and much, much more. As for where and how all of this ends up, let's just that inquiring minds will have to hang in for the long, complicated run. Bonus features are many and varied; among the best are "Deciphering the Scene" (brief explications of key scenes in every episode) and "The Massive Undertaking" (detailing how certain special effects sequences were pulled off). --Sam Graham

Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 09/08/2009 Run time: 1272 minutes Rating: Nr

FRINGE:COMP FIRST SEASON - Blu-Ray Movie

Teleportation, mind control, astral projection, invisibility, precognition, spontaneous combustion, reanimation: these are among the peripheral sciences--or "pseudo-sciences," as one skeptic puts it--examined during the first season of Fringe, a Fox network TV drama debuting on Blu-ray with the full first season (twenty episodes) offered on five extras-laden discs. The notion that those phenomena could have a genuine scientific basis is intriguing enough. But co-creator J.J. Abrams (whose bulging resume as a director, writer, and producer includes Lost, Alias, and the 2009 Star Trek feature film) has even more on his mind. Along with the weird science, the series features a multi-agency task force investigating related acts of terrorism that may very well add up to a threat of unimaginable global proportions; people who are exactly what they appear to be (i.e., insane) and others who are anything but; plot twists galore; family drama, interpersonal relationships, corporate evil, cop chases... There's a lot in play here, and while it doesn't always hold together (and like any new series, it takes a while to hit its stride), Fringe is rarely boring, and never less than impressively ambitious. The pilot introduces us to the main characters, principally FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv, good but not great in the show's central role) and others on the task force brought in to investigate some gross goings-on aboard a jumbo jet (a "self-eradicating, airborne toxin" reduced everyone to blood and bones). Seems this is but one part of "The Pattern," a series of synchronous, similarly shocking events that unfold as the show progresses; in subsequent episodes, lots of people are killed in graphic fashion by all manner of horrors, including scary monsters (slugs as big as a football, teethed parasites that can crush your heart), a gas that freezes a busload of passengers "like insects trapped in amber," people so radioactive they can literally make your brain boil... it goes on. Helping Dunham and the rest of the force figure it all out are scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (an appealing John Noble), who's spent the past 17 years locked up in the loony bin and whose research may be responsible for some of the crimes we witness, and his son-babysitter Peter (Joshua Jackson). As for the "fringe" element, Dr. Bishop and other, less benign geniuses jump-start a dead man's brain, photograph another victim's cornea in order to access the last thing she saw before death, connect Dunham to her boyfriend so she can experience his memories of the incident that left him comatose, use high-frequency vibrations to enable bank robbers to pass through a solid vault wall, and much, much more. As for where and how all of this ends up, let's just that enquiring minds will have to hang in for the long, complicated run. High-definition bonus features are many and varied; among the best are "Deciphering the Scene" (brief explications of key scenes in every episode) and "The Massive Undertaking" (detailing how certain special effects sequences were pulled off). Exclusively on Blu-ray are expert scene analysis and BD-Live writer-producer commentary. --Sam Graham

Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 03/28/2006 Run time: 123 minutes Rating: R

Part road movie, part romantic comedy, part thriller, and a whole lotta fun, The Mexican could get by on star power alone, but it offers Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and a clever plot full of delightful surprises. It's a thoroughly enjoyable shaggy-dog story in which the downtrodden Jerry Welbach (Pitt) copes with a dual dilemma: his girlfriend Samantha (Roberts) has just dumped him to pursue solo ambitions in Las Vegas, and a manipulative mobster has ordered Jerry to Mexico to retrieve a coveted antique pistol (the "Mexican" of the title) that carries a legacy of legend, death, and danger. Jerry soon has his hands full with bandits, bloodshed, and a grizzly hound dog that vanishes and reappears with amusing regularity. En route to Vegas, Samantha's taken hostage by a burly assassin (James Gandolfini) who's attached to the gun-fetching scheme and is, in more ways than one, not who he seems to be. Like a good magic act, J.H. Wyman's original screenplay distracts you from its gaps of logic, using unexpected revelations to fuel its strategic vitality. It also provides a wealth of character development, and director Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt) gives his stellar cast equal time to shine. It hardly matters that Pitt and Roberts spend most of the film apart; their time together is worth waiting for, and the machinations that separate them play out like a cross between vintage Peckinpah and Romancing the Stone. And why is the accursed pistola so valuable? That's just another surprise, setting the stage for the arrival of yet another big-name star, whose motivations are pure in a film full of double-crosses and darkly shaded humor. With a giddy plot like this, star power is just icing on the cake. --Jeff Shannon

4.5 oz 100% cotton jersey knit, ring spun and preshrunk for softness and silk screened, front and back, on black Gildan Soft Style T.

James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell: Author One-on-One In this Amazon exclusive, we brought together blockbuster authors James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and asked them to interview each other. Find out what two of the top authors of their genres have to say about their characters, writing process, and more. Patricia Cornwell is the former Director of Applied Forensic Science at the National Forensic Academy, and a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital's National Council, where she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She is the author of sixteen previous Kay Scarpetta mysteries, five non-Scarpetta novels (including At Risk), and Portrait of a Killer. Read on to see Patricia Cornwell's questions for James Patterson, or turn the tables to see what Patterson asked Cornwell. Cornwell: James, your questions were so good, I'm going to ask you similar ones. Let's start with why you write? Do you love it or love having done it? What motivates you? Patterson: I truly love writing. I sometimes think about my grandfather when I reflect on this. When I was a boy, I lived in a town on the Hudson River. During the summers, my grandfather would take me once a week on his frozen food and ice cream delivery route. We'd be up at four in the morning packing up the truck, and by five we'd be on our way. Driving a delivery truck isn't the most glamorous job in the world, but every morning, my grandfather would drive over the Storm King Mountain toward West Point, and he'd be singing at the top of his voice. And he told me this: "Jim," he said, "when you grow up, I don't care if you're a truck driver or a famous surgeon—just remember that when you go over the mountain to work in the morning, you've got to be singing." Writing stories keeps me singing. Writing to me isn't work, and I like that a ton. Cornwell: What is your routine when you're facing your next novel? What is the process like for you, and what is your favorite part of it? Least favorite? Patterson: I like to have a lot of ideas in the air at one time. I've got around 20 manuscripts sitting in my office right now, in some degree of completion. It's a lot of material, a lot of stories. My least favorite part? Hmm. Maybe sharpening pencils? Actually, I’ve always kind of liked sharpening pencils. I don’t mean to seem too over the top about this, but I really wouldn’t change any of it. Cornwell: What do you and Alex Cross have in common? How are you different? Patterson: We're both family-oriented guys. I think it's a real treat to be able to get along with your wife every day, which I do; my wife and I really have trouble being apart for very long. And I think readers will agree Alex is generally doing better in the romance department. One difference between us would be that I'm much more content to sit around and write. I think Alex would get a little bored on a "ride-along" with me. Cornwell: What inspired you to create Alex Cross? Patterson: Hardly anyone knows it but when I started the first Alex Cross novel, Alex was a woman named Alexis. After 100 pages or so, I changed the character to Alex. When I was a kid growing up, my grandparents had a small restaurant and the cook was an African-American woman who eventually moved into our house. All through my growing up period I spent a lot of time with this woman's family. They were funny, wise, the food was great, so was the music, and the family is at least part of the inspiration for the Crosses. Cornwell: What's the one thing a reader has said that you've never forgotten and perhaps found startling? Patterson: I'm sure you've had this, too, Patricia, but the one comment that gets me every time is hearing people say my books have them reading again. I know sometimes you and I get some heat for being as popular as we are, and are saddled with that old equation that says if you're a bestseller, you must be lowbrow. But I frankly don't think there’s anything more meaningful than hearing that I've turned a person back into a reader (or in the case of younger readers, got them started). Cornwell: How about you? You're the one with all the movies! Good experience or not? Patterson: Sounds like we're on the same page there, Patricia. I definitely feel like some past projects didn't quite live up to their potential. And I likewise have hopes for a couple of movies in the works: the third Alex Cross movie, and the very first Maximum Ride movie, which has Avi Arad (producer of Spider Man), Catherine Hardwicke (director of Twilight), and Don Payne (writer for The Simpsons) on board. There's also a very promising TV series based on a new book I've written that's being developed with CBS and Imagine.

You can't runDetective Alex Cross is pulled out of a family celebration and given the awful news that a beloved relative has been found brutally murdered. Alex vows to hunt down the killer, and soon learns that she was mixed up in one of Washington's wildest scenes. And she was not this killer's only victim.You can't hideThe hunt for her murderer leads Alex and his girlfriend, Detective Brianna Stone, to a place where every fantasy is possible, if you have the credentials to get in. Alex and Bree are soon facing down some very important, very protected, very dangerous people in levels of society where only one thing is certain--they will do anything to keep their secrets safe. Alex Cross is your only hope to stay aliveAs Alex closes in on the killer, he discovers evidence that points to the unimaginable--a revelation that could rock the entire world. With the unstoppable action, unforeseeable twists, and edge-of-your-seat suspense that only a James Patterson thriller delivers, I, Alex Cross is the master of suspense at his sharpest and best. (2010)

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2011: Don DeLillo, a master of using exactly as many words as he needs to paint the sharpest possible picture, has published his first story collection. Written between 1979 and 2011, the nine short pieces in The Angel Esmeralda sketch a handful of moments--the arc of a circumstantial affair, the explosion of a friendship between two teenagers--with the author’s trademark economy. DeLillo knows his context and characters so well, a sliver of them is enough to engage us completely. As one man puts it, floating through space in the collection opener, “The emptier the land, the more luminous and precise the names for its features.” DeLillo’s short fiction is a series of pointillist landscapes; entire worlds spring from the section of the canvas he chooses to frame for us. Lean in and pay attention--every glimpse counts. --Mia Lipman Amazon Exclusive: Sam Lipsyte Reviews The Angel Esmeralda Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive and The Ask. A note about The Angel Esmeralda: this collection of stories by America's best living novelist is not only an immense joy to read, but it grants one a chance to reflect on something often underappreciated: Don DeLillo's versatility. If you count yourself a DeLillo fan, then you are already intimate with the power, scope and heady, subterranean humor of novels like Underworld, Players, Libra, and White Noise, (well, really, any of his novels apply). You are probably also quite familiar with his wonderfully inventive plays. You've also read his short stories as they appeared infrequently over the years, been dazzled by their surfaces and depths, but maybe overlooked DeLillo's real achievement in the form. I admit I was dazzled, and that I partook in some egregious overlooking, but reading this collection confirms DeLillo as one of our very best short story writers. It's scary. All of these pieces possess the same cunning, grace and laser-guided prose of his novels, and touch on the great DeLillo themes. "Human Moments in World War III" depicts some pilots in a futuristic fighter during an age when "the banning of nuclear weapons has made the earth safe for war." As the ship describes its orbit the narrator describes his frightful observations about the world, while clinging to "homey emotions" summoned by the voices of old radio shows and a shipment of brightly packaged broccoli. Meanwhile he practices his firing protocol for the devastation to come. Other more recent fictions include "Baader-Meinhof," a brilliant meditation on terrorism, or our perceptions of it, as well "Midnight in Dostoevsky," which captures the sensitivity and intensity of young philosophy students at a remote college: "At the gym I did my dumb struts on the elliptical and lapsed into spells of lost thought. Idaho, I thought. Idaho, the word, so voweled and obscure. Wasn't where we were, right here, obscure enough for her?" The startling "Hammer and Sickle," about a cellblock of white-collar convicts, and "The Starveling," a heart breaker about obsessed, lonely moviegoers, round out this stunning book. There is no ignoring the collections subtitle, "Nine Stories," with its nod (and wry challenge) to J.D. Salinger's classic. It's strange to put DeLillo and Salinger in the same sentence. They are so vastly different, except they both, in their respective eras, hugely shaped the sound and direction of American literature. I've read Don DeLillo over and over for more than half my life (it's always more than half, DeLillo might point out, for he has one of the finest ears for the patterns of American speech). The richness of his work, the pleasures on offer--intellectual, visceral, poetic, comic–-are unrivaled. The connections he makes from the data of our lives, and the way he renders these connections into sly, steely, grieving song, remain incomparable. Which is just to say that, in the parlance of this e-commerce context, customers who like writing that stretches and reinvigorates their consciousness, that delivers them bravely to places of fresh feeling and leads them thrillingly through the mysteries and moods of contemporary existence might also enjoy The Angel Esmeralda. --Sam Lipsyte

From one of the greatest writers of our time, the first ever collection of brilliant short stories, written between 1979 and 2011; chronicling—and foretelling—three decades of American life. Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white collar prison, and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused sentences of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories. In “Creation,” a couple at the end of a cruise in the West Indies can’t get off the island. In “Human Moments in World War III,” two men orbiting the earth hear American radio, a half century ago. In the title story, nuns working the violent streets of the south Bronx, confirm the neighborhood’s miracle, the apparition of the dead child, Esmeralda. Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists, and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLillo’s sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great American writer—and are a perfect introduction to the author whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.

Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David Foster Wallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. On occasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, as the author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates into the wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictional fancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latest collection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put out by the many readers who want to ride along with him, if he'd only slow down for a second. The intellectual gymnastics and ceaseless rumination endure (if you don't have a tolerance for that kind of thing, your nose doesn't belong in this book), but they are for the most part couched in simpler, less frenzied narratives. The book's four-piece namesake takes the form of interview transcripts, in which the conniving horror that is the male gender is revealed in all of its licentious glory. In the short, two-part "The Devil Is a Busy Man," Wallace strolls through the Hall of Mirrors that is human motivation. (Is it possible to completely rid an act of generosity of any self-serving benefits? And why is it easier to sell a couch for five dollars than it is to give it away for free?) The even shorter glimpse into modern-day social ritual, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," stretches the seams of its total of seven lines with scathing economy: "She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces." Wallace also imbues his extreme observational skills with a haunting poetic sensibility. Witness what he does to a diving board and the two darkened patches at the end of it in "Forever Overhead": It's going to send you someplace which its own length keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without even thinking.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. Of course, not every piece is an absolute winner. "The Depressed Person" slips from purposefully clinical to unintentionally boring. "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" reimagines an Arthurian tale in MTV terms and holds your attention for about as long as you'd imagine from such a description. Ultimately, however, even these failed experiments are a testament to Mr. Wallace's endless if unbridled talent. Once he gets the reins completely around that sucker, it's going to be quite a ride. --Bob Michaels

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.