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One of my favorite lunches as a child was cuddurune, or Sicilian fried breads. My mother never made them very […]
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I’ve been a life-long admirer of Stephen Sondheim. Through my years of correspondence with him, he has given me invaluable […]
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For years I corresponded with Stephen Sondheim, who was helpful, encouraging, and influential in my career as a composer. Some […]
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Swiss Steak: 1950s Retro Comfort Food Many outdated foods do not necessarily deserve their untimely deaths. Swiss Steak, a 1950s […]
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When Priest Abuse Is Verbal We are bombarded almost daily by instances of sexual abuse perpetrated by religious leaders, and […]
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Pennsylvania-Dutch Chocolate Cake Despite my love for elaborate European pastries, my favorite dessert will always be this Pennsylvania-Dutch Chocolate Layer […]
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One hot summer day when I was seven years old, I was bored and couldn’t find anything to amuse myself. […]
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My mother’s recipe for Open-Faced Hot Pork Sandwiches has become one of my favorite wintertime comfort foods. Although many cuts […]
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Irene Sharaff, Costume Killer In the summer of 1968, I was hired as a dancer to perform two numbers in […]
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Raspberry Marbled Cheesecake Raspberry Marbled Cheesecake with a chocolate-crumb crust was the prime specialty at Miss Grimble’s, a wonderful bakery […]
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Chicken Croquettes With Velouté Sauce Chicken croquettes with velouté sauce rank near the top of my list of delectable dishes. […]
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Why I Wrote My Memoir I’ve been telling stories about my Sicilian-American family and my career in musical theater all […]
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I love chestnut-filled crepes with chocolate. However until the last few years, making sweetened chestnut purée was an ordeal. It […]
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Scene from La Lupa When I read Giovanni Verga’s four-page novella, La Lupa, I knew I had to turn it […]
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Meatballs With Garlic-Mint Sauce I love fried meatballs. They are tasty and easy to make. So I paired them with […]
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Chicken Cacciatore a la Norman My chicken cacciatore recipe differs rather dramatically from the traditional recipe. Generally, the tomato has […]
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Red-Currant, Bavarian-Cream Cake This is a perfect cake for the end of summer, when red currants are plentiful. The tart currants […]
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Ye Are Many—They Are Few In 2012, I wanted to write a piece of music that would address what I […]
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Stracotto di Cucuzza Cucuzza is the long, pale-green squash so beloved by Sicilians for its slightly sweet cream-colored flesh. Technically […]
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Drone: Excerpt From My Play Drone addresses one of the most serious moral issues of our time: the human cost […]
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Cream of Vidalia Onion Soup From April through August, the large crop of Vidalia onions provides a myriad of opportunities […]
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In the following scene from my one-person musical play, You Might as Well Live, Dorothy Parker has just married her […]
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For some time, I’ve been experimenting with various kinds of panini (hot pressed sandwich) in a quest to find one […]
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My Sicilian grandfather (Nonno), Ignazio Cangialosi, was an excellent cook. Although he made his living working in a factory foundry, […]
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Excerpt from The Wrong Side of the Room: The 4-Year-Old Rebels at First Dance Class My mother decided that […]
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Critical Acclaim for The Wrong Side of the Room
“The book’s second half is fully stocked with accounts of stage shows galore—not to mention impressive name-dropping (Barbra Streisand, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Gene Kelly). These anecdotes from the theater’s social scene glide alongside vivid imagery from the author’s performances and other successes. The book also has a delightful, chatty sense of humor with moments of wry wit that make it exciting to read.
In the end, it effectively celebrates a life of artistic inspiration alongside the giddiness and glory of live theater.”
—Kirkus Review
Read the entire Kirkus Review here.
Readers’ Favorite Review
by Asher Syed
The Wrong Side of the Room: A Life in Music Theater by Norman Mathews is an autobiography chronicling the author’s life as he transitions from a confusing and often abusive childhood, born in a sleet of uncertainty (literally, as it turns out). Masked by imagination and written with a humor that most would not be able to apply to such situations, Mathews is able to harness this creativity and hitch it to his own ambitions as a rising star. When an injury threatens to derail an ascent that defies all odds, Mathews is forced to reinvent and reignite himself once more, and does so amid a whole host of personal and professional turmoil, scandal, and the kind of stories that are all the more shocking – and inspiring – because they are actually true.
Norman Mathews delivers a riveting memoir with The Wrong Side of the Room that opens with a contentious genesis and powerfully surges through to its finale. This is the ultimate tale of a man who is knocked down seven times and gets up eight, except in this case our tenacious narrator is struck to the ground far more than that. But he does continue to rise and appears to have carved out a genuine niche for himself until, “I woke up one morning with a strange pain in my back and running down my right leg. In a few days, it got much worse, and I began limping.” With the support of his partner Todd, he buys a Steinway, dives into formal education, and…well, at first that all implodes too. But Mathews is the consummate phoenix and, much like he displays in the writing of this book, skillfully maneuvers the trajectory of his life’s own narrative into a story that we are fortunate enough to have shared in The Wrong Side of the Room.
Impressively candid, exceptionally informative, deftly written, organized and presented, “The Wrong Side of the Room: A Life in Music Theater” is an extraordinary memoir that will have special and particular appeal for anyone with an interest in show business. . .very highly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary American Biography collections.
—Midwest Book Review