“Among the greatest Broadway producers ever. . .Nugent has the aura

of a 1940’s movie star.” – NY Times

Sixty Broadway, touring, off-Broadway and West End productions; winner of five Tony awards; 13 Tony nominations; two Obies; two New York Drama Critics Awards. . . A sampling of the plays produced by Nelle Nugent : Dracula; Sherlock Holmes; Habeas Corpus; The Gin Game; The Elephant Man; Mornings At Seven; Home; Amadeus; Crimes of the Heart; The Dresser; Mass Appeal; ‘night, Mother; Cyrano De Bergerac; Nichoals Nickleby; American Buffalo; Trip to Bountiful; Love Letters; M. Butterfly; Latin History for Morons; For Colored Girls . . .; The Roommate...

Come on along and listen to Nelle Nugent as she discusses her extraordinary work on Broadway – the productions, the scripts, the writers, the directors, actors, designers; the real estate; the backers, the awards; the road shows; the out-of-town tryouts; the near misses; the surprise hits; the “hip hooray and bally hoo . . the hidee hi and boopa doo” . . .of Nelle Nugent’s “Everything the traffic will allow” Broadway.

A conversation not-to-be-missed.

Join us and watch the eighth event in the Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch that takes place monthly at the Salmagundi Art Club in New York City.

A Portrait of the Artist and the Woman

“Technically speaking,  [Graham’s] is the single largest contribution in the history of Western dancing."             - Agnes DeMille

Time Magazine called her the “Dancer of the Century.”

Martha Graham believed that movement could express inner feeling.

Out of emotion comes form,"  said Graham, and out of form Graham was able to re-create emotion onstage.

She gave "visible substance to things felt" and set out to "chart the graph of the heart," ideas that were central to her art.

The Martha Graham technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to classical ballet. Her pioneering movements—powerful, dynamic, jagged, edgy, forthright—and her system of training, were the essence of American modernism; of performance as art.

Graham was a true revolutionary in the arts of the 20th century as an American dancer and choreographer. Her name was, and remains, synonymous with modern dance and has been in the company of the giants of modernism - - Picasso, Stravinsky,  James Joyce - in developing a form of expression that broke the traditional mold.  Her genius was universally recognized as she became the most honored figure in American dance as well in her choreographic masterworks and in her invention of a whole new dance language, producing, 181 works during a period of 60 years.

 Neil Baldwin’s acclaimed biography of Martha Graham (“majestic”- John Guare; “mesmerizing”-PW) - the first in three decades - gives us the artist and performer, the dance monument who led a cult of dance worshippers as well as the woman herself in all of her complexity, whose life, beset by conflict, competition, and loneliness—was filled with fire and inspiration, drive and passion, dedication and sacrifice in work and in dance creation.

Join us as we discuss with Neil Baldwin, biographer and cultural historian, the life and work of Martha Graham whose unyielding vision upended dance and propelled the art form into the modern age.

The Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch takes place monthly at the Salmagundi Art Club in New York City.

Chaim Grade, his last novel, Sons and Daughters, ten years in the writing, from the 1960’s to the 1970’s and serialized in Yiddish newspapers; the novel secreted away by Grade’s wife for decades following the author’s death in 1982; the manuscript thought lost and re-discovered among the 20,000 books and papers left behind; a translation from the Yiddish into English that took eight years; two years in the editing and a long-awaited publication, sixty years in the making.

“One of the great—if not the greatest—contemporary Yiddish novelists.” - Elie Wiesel

Chaim Grade’s long-awaited novel, Sons and Daughters (“Monumental” —Kirkus, starred review; “A melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny” - The New York Times), is explored in all its aspects by Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch in conversation with Rose Waldman, the novel’s acclaimed translator from the Yiddish to English, and Altie Karper, esteemed former editor, Alfred A. Knopf, and Editorial Director of Schocken Books.

Sons and Daughters is set between the First and Second World Wars; a moving, haunting portrait of a tumultuous decade; a world coming to an end as it succumbs to the forces of modernity.

“The writer inside me is a thoroughly ancient Jew,” writes Grade, ”while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.”

The novel tells the story of an Orthodox rabbi of an imagined Lithuanian shtetl – the vanished Vilna of Grade’s youth, then the center of Jewish intellectual and cultural life - whose children, drifting away from the religious traditions he so venerates, are drawn to a more secular life of success, sexual expression, Zionist pioneering in Palestine and cultural freedom in the United States.

“Sholem Aleichem writes about that world like Mark Twain,” says Altie Karper. “Chaim Grade writes about it like Dostoyevsky. Hanging over the novel,” she says, “ is the knowledge that in ten years, these people will all be gone.”

“Quite possibly the last great Yiddish novel.” — Adam Kirsch

Join us and watch the seventh event in the Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch that takes place monthly at the Salmagundi Art Club in New York City.

Set design (Above): “St. Louis Woman” by Lemuel Ayers

An astonishing, never-before-seen collection of set and costume designs for the original productions of Broadway, Off Broadway, and West End musicals of the last 125 years - from 1900 to 2025. The collection consists of more than 400 designs by 150 artists. In this riveting TALK OF THE TOWN conversation with Douglas Colby, Master collector, Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch discuss the who, what, where, and why of the costumes, the sets, the shows; the designers, the actors, directors, playwrights, composers, and lyricists. Colby reveals the ‘how,’ as well, as he tells of this collector’s adventures of happenstance, coincidence, obsession, and plain old luck, on the hunt for these magnificent renderings; show by show, set by set, designer by designer.

With more than 30 illustrations of the original designs and costumes of specific shows, from Miles White’s Oklahoma to Cecil Beaton’s My Fair Lady, Adrian’s Camelot, and Irene Sharaff’s Candide.

Here also are Robert Edmund Jones’ set design for "Lute Song", one of his few musicals; Freddy Wittop’s "Hello Dolly", Robin Wagner’s inspired set for "A Chorus Line", and William Ivey Long’s "Nine". A conversation not to be missed on design, theater history, and a collector’s quest for the longed-for, elusive rendering to complete the never-completable theatrical puzzle.

Douglas Colby is the grandson of the former owners of the Algonquin Hotel (the “Gonk,” as Dorothy Parker called it). Colby’s earliest memory was seeing, at the age of 2, the original production of "My Fair Lady" with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and he has never stopped going to the theater.

Alice Quinn, former editor at Alfred A Knopf and The New Yorker, Executive Director of the Poetry Society for almost two decades, beloved adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts for thirty-five years, with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch talks about her large, exuberant life as a devoted reader-editor; about her fifteen years at Knopf, first as assistant to the legendary, singular, adored, advertising genius Nina Bourne (“no one wants irony in the desert, lovey”), then as editor of Deborah Eisenberg, Jane Smiley, Ann Arensberg,  Steven Millhauser, and Adrienne Kennedy along with seminal writers on American folk art. Quinn talks about the founding of the Knopf Poetry Series and furthering the major careers of  Amy Clampitt, Edward Hirsch, Marie Ponsot, Sharon Olds, and many more; about being hired by Mr. Shawn of The New Yorker as an editor at the magazine and becoming in Robert Gottlieb’s tenure and that of Tina Brown and David Remnick poetry editor, as well, one of the most influential positions in the world of poetry,  publishing more than two thousand poems by (among hundreds of others) Joseph Brodsky, Louise Glück, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Zbigniew Herbert, Elizabeth Alexander, and Eavan Boland.

Quinn discusses her almost twenty years as head of the Poetry Society, producing more than 700 programs, many of them innovative, acclaimed multi-arts programs with actors, musicians and artists celebrating  poetry in partnerships with major cultural organizations including The New York Botanical Garden, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, as well as advancing the restorative and spirit-saving Poetry-in-Motion series for transit systems across the country, chief among them, New York City.  

Quinn, Wilson and Hirsch discuss the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (“A stupendous event.” ―John Ashbery) as well as her poetry anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (“Quinn’s collection covers remarkable ground . . .” —Clare Bucknell, The New Yorker).

In this inspiring, endearing, rousing conversation, Alice Quinn enchants, teaches, informs and weaves a spell through the power of language and passion to bewitch and transform space and time.

Edna Ferber, Her Best-selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film

Biographer Julie Gilbert with Victoria Wilson (Gilbert’s editor) and Foster Hirsch (cultural historian) discuss Gilbert’s Giant Love ("An extraordinarily illuminating account of the making of an essential literary and cinematic work and a vital portrait of brilliant, righteous, and gutsy Ferber.”—Booklist).  

In this fascinating conversation, Gilbert, Wilson and Hirsch explore up-close, Edna Ferber’s decade-long evolution that resulted in her generational saga about the Lone Star state, and about love, power, and the fight between land-loving cattle barons and newly rich oil tycoons.  Gilbertdiscusses Giant’s fraught, explosive publication that shook both the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and one of America’s largest publishers, and tells the story of the making of the Academy Award-winning epic film from director George Stevens that followed in the wake of Ferber’s best-selling novel.

 The fourth event in The Talk of the Town series of conversations with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch at the Salmagundi Arts Club in New York City.

Author, art historian, biographer, Nicolas Fox Weber, with Victoria Wilson (Weber’s editor) and Foster Hirsch discuss Weber’s long-awaited, acclaimed biography ("A treasure-chest for art historians . . .”— ​Hilary Spurling, The Wall Street Journal) of the extraordinary and surprising life of Piet Mondrian (Knopf), part of the Wilson/Hirsch Talk of the Town series of conversations at New York’s Salmagundi Art Club.
 
Weber, cultural historian, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, has written many books, among them on modernism, on the founders and artists of the Bauhaus, on each of the Albers themselves, on Corbusier, the Clarks of Cooperstown, on Balthus, on the evolution and making of the iPhone.  

In this fascinating, inspiring conversation, Weber talks of the artist who revolutionized modern painting, architecture, graphic art, fashion design and more, and who created some of the most recognizable abstract paintings of the 20th century, and in so doing changed the course of modern art forever.

Weber, Wilson and Hirsch talk about the piecing together and writing of this difficult, pure life and the life-long quest of this transformative artist whose work is still reverberating almost a century after Mondrian’s time.

The Legendary Rose Styron discusses her rich and fascinating memoir, Beyond This Harbor (Knopf).

 Styron talks about her life as poet, international human rights activist, founding member of Amnesty International USA, journalist, hostess; as mother of four; grandmother of eight; as friend to politicians, movie stars, the legendary; discoverer of Philip Roth, and longtime wife of Bill Styron, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist. 

Here discussed are the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with and played with, and the decades-long friendships with everyone from Truman Capote, George Plimpton and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, John Hersey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lillian Hellman and many others.

“[Rose Styron] has lived a life in interesting times, among legendary characters, a life well worth telling—and reading about.” 

                            —The Washington Post