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Mike Nichols’s Brilliant Career Mike Nichols in 1966Credit...Sam Falk/The New York Times Buy Book ▾ By James Wolcott By Mark Harris Individual genius is a group accomplishment, and don’t let Flaubert tell you different. Mike Nichols, whose name stands alone on the marquee of Mark Harris’s gleaming, teeming biography, possessed wit, cunning, icy clarity, ravenous ambition and a knack for mimicking the qualms and quavers of neurosis, but none of that would have been set free if he hadn’t lucked upon the right tribe. Image Mike Nichols with Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel ...

Mark Harris's incisive new biography, "Mike Nichols: A Life," reflects on the celebrated director's early years in Chicago as it takes full measure of the man.

Penguin Press, 688 pages, $29.99 After six days on the S.S. Bremen in 1939, the little Berliner fleeing the Third Reich disembarked in New York. Igor Michael Peschowsky was seven, “a self-contained, unsmiling child,” and bald as an egg – the unexpected result of a whooping-cough vaccine. At the time, said his brother, they had never seen the inside of a synagogue and were about as un-Jewish as it’s possible for Jews to be. In terms of distinguishing characteristics (no hair, no brows, no lashes) and identity (not Russian like Dad, not fully German like Mom, and not yet American), Igor...

In the cabaret nightclub, enter your theater in the home. >> the big schools of improv right now are the groundlings, ucb, second city. and what they all have in common is their roots in 1955 from the compass players in chicago. >> the compass theater was the precursor to what became the second city. and they were basing their structure on a woman named viola spolin. and her motif was not comedy necessarily such as improv games and exercises for actors to generate scenes. >> from there, this revolution happened. >> the bird does have a toe in the back of the foot there. and as you probably kno...

Structure on a woman named viola spolin. and her motif was not comedy necessarily such as improv games and exercises for actors to generate scenes. >> from there, this revolution happened. >> the bird does have a toe in the back of the foot there. and as you probably know, man has no toe -- >> yes, yes, i do know that. >> second city is a revue style show that has songs, two acts, two-person, three-person, four-person cast scenes. the first part of show is two acts, scripted material, a third act of improvised material. >> we need suggestions from the audience. we'd like for you to suggest a c...