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    Anything Goes
    Anything Goes
    Anything Goes
    Audiobook10 hours

    Anything Goes

    Written by Richard S. Wheeler

    Narrated by Richard Poe

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Those Western towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in them. All that is about change. August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, once queen of the boards but now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences with just one side of his face while needling them with acerbic dialogue; Harry the Juggler, who went from tossing teacups to tossing scimitars; Mrs. McGivers and her capuchin monkey band; and the Wildroot Sisters, born to show business and managed by a stage mother who drives August mad. Though the towns are starved for entertainment, the Follies struggles to fill seats as it grinds from town to town. Just when the company is desperate for fresh talent, a mysterious young woman astonishes everyone with her exquisite voice. The Wild West will never be the same. They've seen comics, gorgeous singers, scimitar-tossing jugglers. Now if the troupers can only make it back East . . . alive! RICHARD S. WHEELER is the author of more than fifty novels of the American West. He holds six Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime contribution to the literature of the West. He makes his home in Livingston, Montana, near Yellowstone National Park.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 1, 2016
    ISBN9781501903861
    Anything Goes
    Author

    Richard S. Wheeler

    Richard S. Wheeler is the award-winning author of historical novels, biographical novels, and Westerns. He began his writing career at age fifty, and by seventy-five he had written more than sixty novels. He began life as a newsman and later became a book editor, but he turned to fiction full time in 1987. Wheeler started by writing traditional Westerns but soon was writing large-scale historical novels and then biographical novels. In recent years he has been writing mysteries as well, some under the pseudonym Axel Brand. He has won six Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the literature of the American West.

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    • 3/5
      Right up to the end of his prolific career, Richard S. Wheeler wrote western novels that didn't seem like western novels. They were more about the real West than the fantasy West. His 2015 novel (he died in 2019), “Anything Goes,” must be one of those least like a typical western novel. Not among his best, it nevertheless offers a rich reading experience.The West has been all but tamed early in the 20th century when a small vaudeville troupe braves harsh winter weather to bring entertainment to towns in the upper Rockies. The Beausoleil Brothers Follies is run by August Beausoleil, who has no brother and has put together a variety show composed of singers, dancers, comics, an animal act and a juggler. The show barely breaks even, but keeps going and usually finds an audience starved for entertainment.Then troubles come, one after the other. The lead singer dies. One of the monkeys in the animal act dies because of the cold weather. Several of the performers get sick. Then the Orpheum Circuit, which has taken over the best theaters in the East, starts doing the same in the West, spelling doom for this independent group of performers. Prominent theaters begin canceling August's bookings.Then there's Ginger, an 18-year-old girl who has run away from home, or more specifically, from her dominating mother who wants her to become an opera star. Ginger, who has also changed her name, has other ideas. She joins the Follies and soon becomes its star, but then forced changes in the schedule take her unwillingly back to her hometown in Idaho.Wheeler's story may be weaker than usual, but his characters are vivid and memorable. Show business novels usually turn me off, but not this one.