Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Inspired by Ropes’s own experiences as a performer, 42nd Street “reads less like a novel than like a documentary about the lives of New York’s theatre people and, above all, about the practicalities, the personalities, and the sexual politics that go into the making of a show,” according to Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Why did Ropes’s body of work--which included a trilogy of backstage novels--and consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into obscurity? Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the “Proper Bostonian” life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. Greasepaint Puritan follows Ropes’s successful career as both a performer and the author of the backstage novels 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance. Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropes’s career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and ’40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Street—but Greasepaint Puritan restores the “forgotten melody” of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.

Body painting, decoration, depilation, mutilation, scarification around the world with examples from Australian Aboriginal cultures and social, sexual and religious associations (totemic, mourning, passage rites)

Bradford Ropes' scandalous original novel is back after decades out of print! Here's the original adult potboiler about the needy, seedy, slangy side of that grimy gulch called Broadway, once upon a time, a twisted comic valentine to musical comedy and to every one of the human vices. It's Valley of Dolls decades before Valley of the Dolls. If you only know the film or stage musical versions, you know only the last part of this wild, outrageous novel. Now you can get the rest of the story... In Ropes' original novel, Billy Lawlor is the half-closeted boy toy of British director Julian Marsh. Leading lady Dorothy Brock is still sneaking around behind her millionaire boyfriend's back with Pat Denning, but this time, Pat is also romancing Peggy Sawyer, while also having an affair with the wife of Marsh's dance director Andy Lee, who has a succession of chorine mistresses of his own. Everybody's drinking, drugging, and screwing so much it's amazing they can get Pretty Lady ready for opening night! You won't be able to put it down. Especially if you've ever done a musical. Also included in this volume is an essay by musical theatre historian Scott Miller exploring the novel, the film, and the stage musical.