A Comic Odyssey from Brooklyn to Dubai to Qatar to London to Bratislava and Back Again...Alive!
by Stephen Cole
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Twenty years ago, Award-winning musical theatre writer Stephen Cole met his first camel…and he hasn’t been the same since. Stephen tells his hilarious story of writing a musical for the Emir of Qatar. Picture this! Two Brooklyn Jews, some Middle Eastern producers, a Qatari movie star, flying carpets, Croatian acrobats, Russian ballet dancers, an Italian opera director, a Lebanese Valley Girl, the desert, camels (a lot of camels!) and, of course, music. You will laugh and you will cry (from laughing) in this outrageous, once-in-a-lifetime, unbelievable-but-true tale of how Stephen and his collaborator wrote the first American Musical to premiere in the Middle East. Critic Kurt Ganzl called CAMELETON "the hilarious book of the musical of the musical ...Stephen Cole of CAMELTON is hilarious. How could he not be?: the musical that this book deals with was staged in Qatar in the earliest decade of the century and, yes, anything you can imagine DID happen. But the story doesn't end there. Because Cole and his musical partner, David Krane, later turned the incredible history of the making of their Arab spectacular into ... a musical! Where, years ago, I got to know it ... And now THE ROAD TO QATAR, as that piece was titled, has become a one-man-show and a memoir as CAMELTON. Well, I'm sure that I'm not the only one who gets much more enjoyment out of reading such as the vivacious and veracious theatre stories of Cole and Krane (with very few names dropped), fresh, different and original, than one more book of ten-times-told and dubious Broadway tales. I have read the whole 240pp of this one in one sitting .. and CAMELTON takes its place on my 'A' shelf."
