In Show and Tell, John Lahr reinvents the celebrity profile to get at the essence of performance. Lahr's utterly winning and incisive profiles probe some of the most compelling, elusive, and irresistible public personas of our time, including Woody Allen, David Mamet, Ingmar Bergman, Frank Sinatra, Roseanne, Irving Berlin, Bob Hope, Mike Nichols, Wallace Shawn, Arthur Miller, and Neil LaBute. In these, and in the moving autobiographical portraits of his father, Bert Lahr, and his mother, a former Ziegfeld girl, Lahr charts the geography of fame.

Introduction
Woody Allen
David Mamet
Frank Sinatra
Arthur Miller
Liev Schreiber
Roseanne
Irving Berlin
Wallace Shawn
Eddie Izzard
Neil Labute
Bob Hope
Ingmar Bergman
Mike Nichols
Bert Lahr
Mildred Lahr
Index

Praised by the New York Times Book Review as "probably the most intelligent and insightful writer on the theater today," John Lahr has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, most recently for his work at The New Yorker, where he has written about theater and popular culture since 1992. Mr. Lahr has written sixteen books, among them the novels The Autograph Hound (1973) and Hot to Trot (1974); Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theater (1996); The Orton Diaries (editor, 1996); Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr (California, 2000); Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation (California, 2000); and Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (California, 2000).

"Lahr is the greatest drama critic of my generation, indeed the best I've read here or in America since Tynan…. Not since Tynan published his celebrated accounts of Richardson and Gielgud (and of course Nicol Williamson at Nixon's White House) has there been showbiz writing on this level of quirky insight and brilliant observation."—Sheridan Morley, The Literary Review

"A compilation of John Lahr's insightful and highly readable profiles for The New Yorker magazine, among them pieces on Arthur Miller, Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman."—Financial Times (UK)

"What a talented, wonderful, and complete writer."—Mel Brooks

"By far the best thing about my stuff I've ever read."—Arthur Miller

"These are wonderful portraits."—Edna O'Brien

"The high-water mark of theatrical reportage. Exhilarating! Smart! Lahr gives as much thunderous pleasure as the great entertainers he writes about."—Richard Avedon

"There's never been an American critic like John Lahr. His writing exalts, honors, and dignifies the profession and, more importantly, the art."—Tony Kushner