MY FAVORITES
A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke: (2021) The undeniable parallels between both the author’s tabloid divorce from his movie-star wife Uma Thurman and his portrayal of Hotspur in Lincoln Center’s starry 2003 production of Henry IV may be what draw readers to this novel but the real delights are the dynamic prose and obvious passion for the craft of acting that Hawke packs into this winner. He also obviously had fun narrating the audiobook version of this roman à clef and listening to him read it puts the cherry on top of a very yummy sundae.
The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin (2010). Novels about the theater tend to divide into two camps: backstage mysteries or comic romps, the latter often centered around a gay protagonist. This one is something different. It’s a lovely literary novel about a promising young actor trying to break into the New York theater scene in the mid-‘70s when groups like Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout Theatre were just starting up. The plot centers around a romantic triangle but the true love affair here is with the theater itself.
The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble (2014). No doubt borrowing from her own early years as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and 15-year marriage to an actor, Drabble tells the story of Emma, a restless young mother with two small children who is forced to leave London when her husband is hired for a season with a celebrated repertory company in residence in rural Hereford. Emma encounters all the usual backstage suspects, as well as the temptation of an affair with the company’s charismatic leader. This deliciously high-brow soap, which first came out in 1964, was out of print for a while but it’s now available as a download on both Amazon and iTunes.
Next Season by Michael Blakemore (2010). Theater lovers already know that he's a terrific director and now it turns out that Blakemore, whose stage credits range from City of Angels to the recent revival of Blithe Spirit, is also a wonderful novelist. His story of a moderately talented actor who gets a job in a summer-stock type repertory company focuses not on the above-the-marquee names but on the journeymen who play the character roles and bit parts not for money or glamour but for love of the craft. It’s one of the best theater novels I’ve ever read.
Playworld: A Novel by Adam Ross Drawing on its author’s experiences growing up in the ‘80s as a child actor in a family on the fringes of show business (mom teaches ballet, dad does vocal coaching) and as the prey of lecherous adults, this wonderful coming-of-age tale deals with sex, money, ambition and finding one’s place in the world.
She’s a Lamb!: A Novel by Meredith Hambrock (2026) If Norma Desmond and Tom Ripley had a child, it would be Jessamyn St. Germain, the main character in this oh-no-she-didn’t thriller about an actress with delusions of grandeur who is willing to do anything to land the starring role of Maria in a regional Canadian production of The Sound of Music
Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel (2025) It begins with an actor dropping dead onstage, an early victim of a pandemic that will wipe out most of the earth’s population. But among the survivors in this award-winning novel (and later acclaimed HBO series) are a troupe of actors and musicians who travel the countryside offering hope that art can save civilization.
Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls: (2021) An amateur production of Romeo and Juliet provides the background for this bittersweet novel that flashes back to the love story between two teens who are trying to figure out who they are and then returns to the present to look at who they’ve become. Along the way it makes small detours into the lives of their troubled parents as well as those of the eccentrics and misfits who make up the theater company putting on their show. They’re all good company and give good testament to the power of art.
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (2011). The question of who really wrote Shakespeare is an evergreen in scholarly circles and with mystery writers looking for a good MacGuffin. But no one has mined the subject to better effect than Phillips, who has not only written a real romp of a novel but included a complete faux Shakespeare play as well.
Vamp Until Ready by James Magruder. (2022) It would be hard to find a lovelier collection of theater-related short stories than this one. These five are linked by a group of people—gay and straight, theater professionals and amateurs—who are connected to a summer stock theater company in Ithaca, New York during the Reagan-Bush era and by the ways in which theater can change and expand lives. Supporting characters in one story become the leads in others, a sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant reminder that we’re all the stars in the tales we tell ourselves.
CLASSICS
Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (2020): A bestseller in the 1950s, this door-stop of a novel tells the story of a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a Broadway actress but some of its best scenes take place at a summer resort where hopefuls hone their skills by putting on weekly shows just as folks like Carol Burnett, Jerome Robbins and Neil Simon once did at the legendary Camp Tamiment.
Show Boat by Edna Ferber (2024) I don’t know why it took me so long to read this 1926 novel that inspired Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's genre-defining musical because the book is steeped in its love for the theater, particularly the titular variety that traveled the nation's waterways during the 19th century taking shows to isolated parts of the country. Hammerstein made some tweaks but the familiar characters are here, as well as the themes of romance and racial intolerance. And so is the Mississippi River, which, as every theater lover knows, just keeps rollin' along.
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (2019): First published in 1900, this novel from the American canon isn’t really a theater book but it provides a fascinating look at the theater world during the Gilded Age as its determined titular heroine transforms from a poor insecure shop girl into a celebrated leading lady of the stage, blithely ruining the lives of several men as she makes her ascent.
Wise Children: A Novel by Angela Carter (2026) People have been telling me for years that I should read this novel about an eccentric theatrical family whose members include multiple generations of twins who become famous performers, a Hollywood script writer-turned oil mogul, a game show host and the leading Shakespearean actor of his generation and now I'm telling you that you should read it
OTHER LITERARY FICTION
Actress: A Novel by Anne Enright (2020): In this elegant novel a grown daughter looks back at the life of her actress mother Norah O’Dell, a great star of the Irish stage, from the 1940s when Norah breaks into Hollywood movies through the ‘70s as she declines into bit roles back in Ireland and a kind of madness that will leave a stain on both their lives.
At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón. (2014) Four summers ago, The New Yorker named Alarcón one of the 20 most promising writers under 40 and so this novel sits high up on the literary food chain. Alarcón, who was born in Lima, Peru, but grew up in Birmingham, Ala., centers his tale around a young South American actor who joins a guerrilla theater troupe that travels through the countryside performing a politically provocative play. Then, unexpectedly, he finds himself playing a different kind of role in a real-life drama. The writing is languid, the narrative is quixotic but the belief in the power of theater is spellbinding.
Audition: A Novel by Katie Kitamura (2026) A finalist for several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this literary brain teaser centers around the unsettling interactions between an actress in a major stage production and a young man who may or may not be her son but the author's central theme is the ways in which all of us are always performing for one another
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (2022) This novel about the celebrated 19th century acting clan was written by a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize and so can be added to your calorie count for literary fiction. Beginning in 1822 and ending with the aftermath of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln (an avid theater lover) it is both a family saga and a historical chronicle of the events leading up to and through the Civil War. But the best parts are the vivid details—the constant and uncomfortable travel, the fierce rivalries that animated audiences, the declamatory style that exhausted its practitioners—that defined the theater world of the Antebellum era.
Bring the House Down: A Novel by Charlotte Runcie (2026) Written by an arts journalist, this delightful story about two critics for a major London paper who find themselves in the midst of a firestorm after one of them pans a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe fans out into a timely meditation about the role of criticism, an incisive debate on cancel culture and a witty satire about the festival itself
By Any Other Name: A Novel by Jodi Picoult (2025) The debate over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays fuels this story set in two time periods: the 1600s when it imagines that the real-life Emilia Lanier—who is believed to have been the first woman to publish poetry in England—was an unacknowledged ghostwriter for the Bard; and the present in which a woman playwright who has written a drama about Lanier faces contemporary misogyny.
City of Girls Elizabeth Gilbert (2019). Although best known as a non-fiction writer and the author of the you-go-girl bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love," Gilbert has also written several novels and her latest is centered around an off-Broadway theater in the 1940s that is home to a motley crew of misfits led by a lesbian version of Auntie Mame. Or at least that's what the best half of the book is about. The story peters out whenever the location shifts but the hard-partying show girls, moody writers and show-must-go-on actors make for good company and an easy summer read.
Cyclorama by Adam Langer (2023) If you read and liked Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” (which I recommended back in 2019) then you’ll probably like this new novel about a group of high school kids in the Chicago suburbs and the dangerously charismatic drama teacher they had in the 1980s. But this isn’t just a rip-off of Choi’s National Book Award winner, Langer has a lot to say about current politics, the environment and most especially about how teachers can affect the lives of their students for years after they graduate.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (2023) A company working on a play is a familiar subject for theater-themed novels and this one offers the usual rivalries between actors and the stressful events that threaten to jeopardize the production. But what sets this version apart is that the play, Hamlet, is being readied for a performance in the Israeli-controlled West Bank by an all-Palestinian cast. It’s told through the experience of a British-Palestinian actress who, fleeing London after a bad love affair, tries to reconnect to the homeland she left years before and to the art that defines her true identity.
Flashout: A Novel by Alexis Soloski (2026) Using the knowledge she’s gained during her two decades as a New York Times critic and culture reporter, Soloski has written a tense literary thriller about a woman forced to look back at some unsolved mysteries that occurred in her youth when she got swept up by a cult-like avantgarde theater troupe in the 1970s
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo: (2021) Drawn from Evaristo’s experience as the co-founder of Britain’s Theatre of Black Women in the 1980s, these interlocking stories center around 12 characters, many of them actors, directors and playwrights, as they grapple with such societal issues as racism and patriarchy and such intimate ones as friendship and gender identity. Although it won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction in 2019, some critics have complained about Evaristo’s unconventional punctuation but once again I listened to the audio version and I was inspired by these stories of women determined to succeed on their own terms.
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood (2017) This retelling of The Tempest is the first book I read in the Hogarth Shakespeare series that commissions leading authors to write novels that reimagine the Bard's plays in modern-day settings. And I couldn't have picked a better start. Attwood's book in which a disgraced theater director stages a prison production of Shakespeare's revenge tale about an exiled sorcerer and his daughter is part witty satire of the theater world, part brilliant analysis of Shakespeare's final play, part celebration of the power of theater and a complete delight.
Hamlet, The Prince of Denmark: A Novel by David Hewson and Richard Armitage. (2014) Rewriting Shakespeare has become a cottage industry; Amazon lists at least a half-dozen novelizations of Hamlet alone. But this latest one is so cleverly done I almost forgot that I knew how the story ends. Not all of the backstories the authors devise—turning Polonius from a foolish busybody into a Machiavellian manipulator, making Hamlet and Ophelia secret lovers—worked for me but this is fan fiction of the highest order. It’s only available as an audiobook but A.J. Harley is an elegant narrator and who doesn’t like to hear a good story well told?
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2021): Only the bare facts are known about William Shakespeare’s personal life but this lush, literary novel imagines the love story between him and his wife Anne Hathaway (called Agnes here, as the author says Hathaway’s father called her in his will). At the tale's center is the grief the couple shared over the loss of their only son and the subsequent creation of one of the Bard’s greatest works. Also included is a bravura set-piece tracing the journey of the bubonic plague from an Egyptian port city to the village of Stratford-upon-Avon that eerily echoes our own recent pandemic experience.
The House is On Fire by Rachel Beanland (2024) The devastating fire that killed 72 people after a theater curtain accidentally caught fire during a performance in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811 really happened. But the true drama in this excellent historical novel centers on the aftermath of that tragedy and its effect on four characters whose fates will be determined by their class, their gender and their race.
The Hypocrite: A Novel by Jo Hamya (2025) This very literary novel muses on the before and after events that occur when the playwright daughter of a world-famous novelist invites her unsuspecting dad to see a play she’s written exposing his shortcomings as a father, a husband and even as a writer.
If We Were Villains: A Novel by M.L. Rio (2025) If you’re a fan of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” you’re likely to love this thriller even more because the group of precocious college students at its center are all theater kids at an elite arts school where the drama program is devoted entirely to Shakespeare and their final year is filled with poetry, rivalry, sex and a mysterious death.
In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin (2012). The main characters in this literary novel are Catherine, a young heiress trying to make a name for herself in the New York theater world; and Harry, a former OSS officer struggling to save his family business from the mob after returning home from World War II. Their love affair plays out over 700-pages and the parts devoted to the theater are smaller than I wanted them to be but the writing is gorgeous. If beautiful prose is your thing, this could be an enchanting way to while away lazy summer afternoons.
The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller (2011). Some people will see this as a 9/11 novel but those of us who love theater will cherish this story about a young playwright whose lover died in the attacks and an actor whose wife is terminally ill as a sensitive portrayal of the connection that every great artist draws between art and life.
Leading Men by Christopher Castellani (2019). Tennessee Williams wrote many of his greatest plays during the time that he and Frank Merlo, a working class guy from New Jersey, were a couple. And although far from monogamous, their 15-year relationship may count as one of the midcentury's greatest love stories. Castellani’s novel offers a fictionalized version of a pivotal summer in their lives and its aftermath. I got impatient with chapters devoted to a character inspired by Williams’ longtime confidante and literary executive Maria Britneva but when the book focuses on Williams and Merlo, it’s terrific.
Lucky Break by Esther Freud 2012). Good contemporary novels about actors are hard to come by. So it’s great to have this collection of interlocking stories that follow a group of British actors from their first day in drama school into the mid-career choices of their 30s. The author, who is the daughter of the painter Lucien Freud and the great granddaughter of Sigmund, eschews the psychological explorations that are her patrimony, but having been an actress, and now married to one, she still knows how to plumb the theater world and the result is a fun beach read.
The Marvels by Brian Selznick (2015) London's Theatre Royal provides the backdrop for this graphic novel about a 13-year-old boy who runs away from school and seeks refuge with his uncle who lives in a mysterious house that is believed to have been owned—and is perhaps now haunted—by a legendary family of actors. Selznick won the Caldecott Medal for "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," which John Logan adapted for the 2011 movie directed by Martin Scorsese and so the artwork is superb. And the narrative, which begins in 1766 and ends in 1990, is surprisingly moving, even for people like me who don't usually read illustrated books.
Mister Monkey by Francine Prose (2017) A collection of linked stories by one of the country's most celebrated fiction writers, this novel centers around various people connected to the hapless performance of a children's theater production. They range from a Yale Drama School-trained actress who yearns for a more distinguished career to a super fan who so loves theater that he has seen even this inept show dozens of times. All 12 vignettes are both funny and touching.
Mona Acts Out: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski (2025) The title character is a self-centered pain in the ass but the novel itself is a fun look at the downtown theater world, a smart tutorial on some of Shakespeare’s major female characters and a meditation on what to do with someone whose great talent has made good art but whose bad behavior has justifiably gotten him canceled.
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth (2010). Short-listed for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, this Medieval mystery centers around a monk who joins a band of traveling players in 14th century England. It’s a terrific re-creation of the theater world at the time when some daring actors were beginning to move away from performing Church-sanctioned Bible stories in favor of plays that dealt with more secular concerns. A film version starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe, and blandly renamed “The Reckoning,” came out in 2003 and is available on DVD. But the book is far better, especially at conveying the almost religious calling that so many actors feel about their craft.
The Mother Act: A Novel by Heidi Reimer (2026) I actually found it kind of hard to like either of the main characters in this novel about a famous feminist actress and the daughter she abandons for the sake of her career but I also couldn’t resist being drawn in by the important questions it poses about the personal cost of making art and how those choices affect the art that gets made
The New Boy by Tracy Chevalier (2017) The most recent addition to the Hogarth Shakespeare series of novels that update the Bard's plays sets Othello in a Washington, D.C. grade school in the 1970s. In this version, the Moor becomes Osei, the 11-year-old son of a Ghanaian diplomat who has transferred into an all-white suburban school. His Iago is the class bully and his Desdemona a girl with blonde pigtails who is beguiled by the exoticism of the dark-skinned boy. The plot unfolds in just one day and although it's a little unbelievable that sixth graders would develop such passionate feelings in that short a time, Chevalier, the author of such acclaimed historical novels as "Girl with a Pearl Earring," is a fine writer and clearly a lover of this tale.
The New York Stories by John O’Hara (2015) The midcentury writer John O'Hara wrote novels, a newspaper column, screenplays and even a couple of plays but he's probably best known for his short stories and this wonderful collection of tales centers around characters who are actors, musicians and their fellow travelers, some successful, most not but all desperate for a moment in the limelight. The audiobook version is an extra treat because the stories are read by a who’s who of terrific stage actors including Dylan Baker, Bobby Canaveral and Jan Maxwell.
Our Evenings: A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst (2025) One of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists charts the five-decades-long relationship between a mixed-raced actor and a Boris Johnson-like conservative who first meet in one of the country’s elite private schools and how their interactions over the years reflect the changes in that country’s political, social and theatrical life.
Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies. (2012) The acclaimed Canadian writer's first novel, written back in 1951, is the droll tale of an amateur theater group’s production of The Tempest. It’s filled with familiar types from the bossy ex-actress who leads the group to the Walter Mittyish accountant who dreams of a starring role to the dotty old makeup woman who can no longer see. People who love “Slings and Arrows,” the terrific Canadian TV show about a theater festival, should really get a kick out of this book.
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters (2020): Class and gender issues come into play in this lesbian Bildungsroman about a working-class girl who falls for a closeted Victorian music hall star. Their love story manages to be simultaneously instructive about Victorian mores, inspiring about female empowerment and erotic as all get out.
Tom Lake: A Novel by Ann Patchett (2024) While she may be most celebrated as a top literary novelist, Patchett clearly knows her way around the theatrical canon too. She’s set this story in a cherry orchard, albeit one in northern Michigan, where three sisters have come home during the pandemic to help their parents harvest the crop and save the family farm. As they work, their mother regales them with the story of her days as a young actress and how being cast in a summer stock production of Our Town changed her life. It’s a lovely tale about love and art and family. And having Meryl Streep read the audiobook version is, well, the cherry on top of an already very satisfying sundae.
Too Soon: A Novel by Betty Shamieh (2026) The struggles of three generations of Palestinian women both in their homeland and here in the U.S. are framed by the efforts of the youngest, an American-born theater director, as she tries to stage an avant-garde production of Hamlet in the West Bank
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2019). Centered around a group of students who attended a performing arts high school in Houston during the 1980s, Choi’s coming-of-age novel, inspired in part by her girlhood experiences at such a school, won raves when it came out earlier this year. As might be expected, it features a charismatic but slightly mysterious teacher who serves as a mentor to the students who all compete to win his favor. But the narrative, which extends into the students’ adulthood, veers from the predictable and ends up posing significant questions about the role of art, friendship, memory and revenge.
Up With the Sun by Thomas Mallon (2023) The actor Dick Kallman won a Theater World Award for his performance in the 1951 musical Seventeen and he starred in the short-lived TV sitcom “Hank” a decade later but Kallman’s career never really took off, in part because of his abrasive personality. In 1980, he achieved the kind of fame no one wants when he became the victim of a gruesome murder. All of that is compellingly recounted in Mallon’s fictional version of Kallman’s life's story but the best part of the book may be its vivid portrayal of how young Broadway actors came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s.
The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén (2025) Two very attractive actors enter into an unconventional marriage, get caught up with a pill-pushing Dr. Feelgood-style shrink and become entangled with the mob as it moves its illicit businesses west in this 1950s-era melodrama that is just begging to be a streaming series.
MORE POPULAR FICTION
Act Like It by Lucy Parker (2017) What's a summer reading list without a good beach book? There's admittedly not much tension in this romance novel about two gorgeous-looking West End actors who get together as a publicity stunt and then fall in love. And the behind-the-scenes theater stuff falls off in the second half of the book. But Parker is an amiable writer and her rom-com goes down as easy as an icy drink on a sultry day.
All the World’s A Stage Fright: Misadventures of a Clandestine Critic: A Novella by Bob Abelman (2024) This humorous roman a clef is about a theater critic who secretly embeds himself in a local company’s production of As You Like It with actors he’s previously panned as his co-stars. It's theater critic Bob Abelman’s sly way of showing his appreciation for the people and the work that go into making theater at every level. It also offers a pretty smart analysis of what makes Shakespeare so special.
Better Nate Than Ever and Five, Six, Seven, Nate! by Tim Federle. (2014) These are really YA novels but more and more adults are reading kids’ books and this series is tailor-made for us grown-up theater geeks. They chronicle the adventures of Nate Foster, a middle-school misfit with a passion for musicals and a more than passable singing voice. With the help of his best friend Libby, he sneaks away from his small Pennsylvania hometown to a New York audition for a musical version of “E.T.” In the process, he meets all kinds of showbiz types, learns what goes into making a Broadway show and finds the courage to be himself. The result are books that are equally heartwarming and hilarious.
Broadway Melody by Jack Viertel (2024) Few people know the inner workings of Broadway better than the producer Jack Viertel, who spent 34 years at the Jujamacyn theater company and 20 years heading up the Encores! series. Now he’s put all that knowledge to work in this novel that covers seven decades in the lives of two Broadway insiders—a musician and a stagehand—and the female singer they both love. The book was inspired, in part, by the career of Viertel’s and my mutual late friend the legendary musical contractor Seymour Red Press. But it’s so readable that I’d be recommending it even if I hadn’t known and loved Red.
The Chelsea Girls: A Novel by Fiona Davis 2020): Set against the backdrop of the Red Scare, this story centers around the friendship between two ambitious young women, one an actress and the other a playwright. But its true main character is New York's famed Chelsea Hotel during its heyday as a home for artists and other bohemians who became some of the prime targets for Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts.
The Dramatic Life of Jonah Penrose: A Novel by Robyn Green (2026) This enemies-to-lovers romcom about two super-talented and super good-looking British actors who are hot for the same role and for one another is just as steamy and satisfyingly a guilty pleasure as the hit HBO series “Heated Rivalry”
Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles by Mark Russell (2019) This graphic novel tranposes the Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters into the theater world of the 1950s when the House Un-American Activities Committee was on the prowl. Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman make cameo appearances but the titular theater-loving mountain lion steps in for Tennessee Williams and anchors a story about the committee's oppression of homosexuals. It's an offbeat but still moving way to look back at that reign of terror.
Fallout by Sadie Jones (2022) In all honesty, the characters are annoying in this novel about the personal and professional entanglements of four twentysomethings trying to start their theatrical careers. But the glimpses the story provides into the London theater scene of the 1970s is catnip for any theater lover. I don’t know enough about the players in that theater scene but I suspect others who do know it will have extra fun figuring out the real-life inspirations for the folks in the book. Email me if you have any informed guesses on who the villain—the slightly older and sexually ambivalent producer—might be.
Good Company by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (2022) If you’re a fan of the Noah Baumbach movie “Marriage Story,” that starred Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, there’s a strong chance that you’ll love this engaging novel about a couple who, after scrimping and maneuvering to maintain a small New York theater company for 20 years, move to Los Angeles, where they make discoveries about themselves, their definitions of success and their marriage.
I'm Glad About You by Theresa Rebeck (2018) There isn't as much theater as I hoped there would be in this romcom about Alison, a New York-based actress from Ohio trying to get back with her high-school sweetheart. But the book is by the frequently produced playwright Theresa Rebeck and she knows the theater world. The demands put on young actresses in the book ring true, as do the audition scenes in which scores of contenders struggle to stand out from the crowd. As fans will know, Rebeck created the behind-the-scenes TV show "Smash" and was then fired from it and she's even tougher on the TV industry.
Once More With Feeling: A Novel by Elissa Sussman (2024) The main character here is a disgraced pop star who tries to revive her career by going back to her first love: Broadway musicals. The show she signs on to do is written and composed by her longtime best friend whom she met when they were girls in theater summer camp. And, of course, it’s directed by the former boy band member who was one third of the love-triangle scandal that destroyed her singing career. There’s more romcom than musical comedy in this one but it’s still a fun and breezy summer read.
Rhapsody by Mitchell James Kaplan: (2021) If romance novels are your thing, this one which centers around Kay Swift, the great love of George Gershwin’s life, may be for you. It serves up a fictional account of the couple’s 12-year relationship during which Gershwin and his lyricist brother Ira wrote their biggest Broadway hits and their masterpiece Porgy and Bess. Meanwhile Swift, also an accomplished musician, composed four Broadway shows including Fine and Dandy which produced “Can’t We Be Friends,” the breakout song she wrote with her husband the financier James Warburg. The novel also details how Swift eventually divorced Warburg but—80-year spoiler alert—failed to marry Gershwin before his premature death in 1937 at the age of just 38.
Seen It All and Done the Rest: A Novel by Pearl Cleage (2009). The drama in this novel centers around the issue of gentrification in Atlanta’s black neighborhoods but it’s on this list (and in the window of the Drama Bookshop) because its lead character, Josephine Evans, is an African-American actress who has built a 30-year career performing in Europe. The story kicks off when mounting European resentment against the Iraq War and everything American causes Josephine to be fired from her job as the resident star of a classical repertory company in Amsterdam. She returns home to Atlanta until she can force them to take her back or figure out what to do next and she spends most of her time there fighting developers and trying to help her granddaughter who’s become embroiled in a sex scandal. I could have done with less real estate and even less sex in favor of more theater stuff. Even so, it’s hard not to appreciate the fact that there aren’t a lot of other novels where Euripides and Ntozake Shange get equal billing.
Serendipity: A Novel by Louise Shaffer (2009). An Emmy winner for her work in the daytime drama “Ryan’s Hope,” Shaffer has spent much of the last 30 years working on TV soap operas but she got her start as an understudy and bit part player on Broadway and her heart is obviously still there. This family saga’s main protagonist, Carrie Manning, isn’t in the business but her grandmother is a legendary Broadway star (kind of like Mary Martin) and her father was a genius writer and director of shows (kind of like Moss Hart). Their stories—and a lot of family secrets—unfold in a series of flashbacks. The revelations wouldn’t be out of place on one of Shaffer’s old daytime soaps but it’s still fun to read the parts set in the late ‘60s when Broadway stars and their spouses were objects of
Showbiz, A Novel by Ruby Preston (2013). If you’re still in “Smash” withdrawal, this may be the one for you. For Showbiz is a mash-up of fiction (the murder of a theater critic) Broadway legends (an ogre-like producer named Margolies borrows the birth name and personality of David Merrick) and the contemporary Broadway scene (everyone is competing for Hollywood stars to anchor their shows). It follows the professional and amorous adventures of a young producer named Scarlett Savoy as she tries to solve the whodunit and put on her first show. Just as with “Smash,” true insiders may wince at some of the details (I mean does anyone really call the restaurant Angus McIndoe, “The Angus"?) but the story is still a romp and Preston has already written a sequel called Staged
The Show Girl by Nicola Harrison 2022) Set during the final years of the Roaring Twenties, this novel focuses on the personal and professional ups-and-downs of an ambitious young woman who becomes a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies. It’s basically a romance novel complete with a rich and hunky love interest but it’s also a fun behind-the-curtains look at what life might have been like for Sally, Phyllis and the other “girls upstairs” in Follies.
The Sisters Sweet by Elizabeth Weiss (2022) The old sensation-loving vaudeville circuit provides the backdrop for this novel about twin sisters who climb up the billboard when their father, who once had stage dreams of his own, comes up with the idea of them pretending to be cojoined, or Siamese, twins. The deception works until the ambitions of one destroys the act and leads them down separate paths. The story is so redolent of that itinerant showbiz era that I kept expecting Mama Rose to make a cameo.
Someday, Somewhere, Maybe by Lauren Graham (2023) Although she’s now probably best known for starring in the cult TV show “Gilmore Girls,” Graham remembers what it was like trying to break into show business—working low-paying day jobs, sharing cheap apartments, going on endless auditions—and she’s turned all of that into this charming romcom about a young actress who is making one final run at her dreams (including a possible relationship with the hunky movie star in her acting class) before giving up, returning home and settling for marriage to the longtime boyfriend she rarely sees and hardly knows any more. The outcome isn’t really in doubt for attentive readers but Graham makes it fun getting there.
The Summer Set by Aimee Agresti (2020). If social distancing has left you longing for romance, this romcom offers a barrel of it including the on-again-off again relationship of a wild-child actress and the director of a summer theater, the romantic entanglements of some college students apprenticing there, the love stories of two longstanding gay couples and a liaison between a glamorous trans woman and an unexpected suitor.
Temper by Layne Fargo (2019). Fans of David Ives' psychological thriller Venus in Fur will undoubtedly get a kick out of this Fifty Shades of Greyish story about a thirtysomething Chicago actress who gets cast in a new play by the domineering artistic director of a theater company known for doing edgy work. The play is a two-hander about a troubled married couple but the novel's cast of characters include the company's female co-founder, the actress' male roommate and a reporter who covers the local theater scene. Nearly all of them are bisexual and hot for one another, which sets the stage for jealousies, rivalries and some serious S&M entanglements.
A Tender Thing by Emily Neuberger (2023) Set in 1959, this novel is another pastiche of familiar tropes: the young heroine’s passion for Broadway and for a talented theater maker is reminiscent of the classic novel “Marjorie Morningstar;” (which I recommended in 2020); the everyone-hates-him-but-he’s-brilliant director is a nod to Jerome Robbins and their musical about an interracial love affair borrows heavily from West Side Story. Even so, I still couldn’t put this one down. But do avoid the audiobook version because Neuberger, who narrates it herself, takes every opportunity she can to sing numbers from her faux musical, which is fine at first but really annoying by the sixth, seventh and eighth time she does it.
Three Girls and Their Brother: A Novel by Theresa Rebeck (2008). This lively comic novel, which came out earlier this year, has been billed as a satiric look at the culture’s current obsession with fame and it does tell the story of an hilariously tumultuous year in the life of the gorgeous granddaughters of a renowned literary critic after their photo appears in "The New Yorker," leading to their becoming top fashion models and hot commodities on the celebrity circuit. Rebeck, the author of such plays as Mauritius and Omnium Gatherum, which she co-wrote with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, has a lot of fun with the vagaries of fashion shoots, TV interview shows and the movie business but the best part of the book is her also-amusing but totally affectionate look at the off-Broadway theater world when the youngest girl tries her hand at doing a play and falls in love, as Rebeck clearly has, with stage life.
The Understudy: A Novel by David Nicholls (2009). Don’t confuse this novel with "The Understudy," the 1975 book by Elia Kazan, who not only directed the original productions of Death of A Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire but also wrote bestselling books. Kazan’s "Understudy" is a serious, Bellowesque story about the conflicted relationship between an aging actor and his protégé. Nicholls’ book is an amusing Nick Hornby-style romp about an underachieving British actor whose career highlights are playing a squirrel in a series of educational films for kids and serving as stand-by for a Jude Law-like superstar who’s playing the lead in a West End production. The story is part showbiz fairytale (will the understudy get a show-must-go-on break?) part romantic comedy (will the beautiful wife of the philandering star fall in love with our hero?) part slacker-comes-of-age story (can he finally make his young daughter proud of him?) and a total delight.
The Understudy by Ellen Tovatt Leary: (2021) A former actress who spent most of her career in the 1970s as an understudy, Leary conveniently sets her story in a world before cellphones so that just the right kinds of misunderstanding can happen. With one how-did-this-get-into-the-story exception, this is an amiable fantasy version of what every young actress hopes her life will be and it goes down as easy as a gin and tonic on a hot summer’s day.
We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman: (2021) Part of this gentle satire about the agonies and ecstasies of being an artist take place in Los Angeles but the best parts are set in the New York theater world that Silverman, the author of such provocative plays as The Moors and Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties, knows well. And it’s great fun trying to figure out the real-life counterparts to her colorful cast of characters.
GOOD OLD MYSTERIES
Bad Publicity by Joanne Sydney Lessner (2012). Isobel Spice, the heroine of this mystery series, is a struggling actress who makes ends meet by taking temp jobs. As luck would have it—and fiction demands—people keep turning up dead wherever she’s assigned and so, in between auditions, she helps suss out who the killer is. There are more red herrings in this book than you’ll find pickled at a kosher deli but Lessner, herself an actress (and, full disclosure, a friend) has a good time tossing in bits of theater lore as well.
The Best Revenge: A Novel of Broadway by Sol Stein (2009). What if Don Corleone had been a show queen? If he had been, he might have ended up in this backstage story about a Broadway producer who is unable to raise money for a show he is certain will be a hit and so turns to some mafia connections for a favor he knows they won't refuse. It’s written in the hardboiled style of classic crime fiction and it’s nice to find a macho novel about Broadway
The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber (2011). Imagine "The Da Vinci Code," only the object of the mysterious treasure hunt isn’t the Holy Grail but a long-lost Shakespeare manuscript. There are the usual hidden clues and improbable coincidences typical of the genre but this is still a page turner even if you don’t know your Mercutio from your Malvolio.
Every Day a Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim edited by Josh Pachter (2025) Who doesn't love a good mystery? And what theater lover doesn't love Sondheim? So how smart to get writers from both worlds—including my BroadwayRadio colleague Michael Portantiere—to contribute short mysteries inspired by the composer's songs. The result: lots of playful mayhem.
The Fury by Alex Michaelides (2024) All of the main characters are connected to London’s West End in this Agatha Christie-style mystery about a murder that occurs when a group of friends and frenemies who have had varying degrees of success in work and love gather for a vacation on a private and isolated Greek island. The narrator is unreliable, the storyline is twisty and both are even more delicious in the audiobook version because it's read by the always deliciously entertaining British actor Alex Jennings.
Little Did I Know by Mitchell Maxwell (2014) It’s Andy Hardy meets “Chinatown” in this noirish novel about a freshly-minted college grad and his pals who open a summer stock theater in a New England town dominated by a powerful rich man, his floozy wife and a mysterious crime. It takes a while for this novel to get going and there’s more noir than suits my taste but the let’s-put-on-a-show parts provide a fun look a at what makes people fall in love with making theater.
One Good Turn: A Novel by Kate Atkinson (2024) The Edinburgh Festival Fringe provides the backdrop for this whodunnit in which Atkinson's retired detective Jackson Brodie is reluctantly pulled in to help solve a string of murders and attempted murders. And since Atkinson never saw a narrative that she didn’t want to fracture much of the fun—and it is great fun—lies in figuring out how all the suspects and their various larcenies fit together.
Macbeth by Jo Nesbø (2017) Filling the slot for this year's entry in the Hogarth Press series of reimaginings of Shakespeare's plays by major contemporary writers is a brooding version of the Bard's tragedy about unbridled ambition. In this update, set in a drug-plagued Scottish town during the 1970s, Macbeth starts his climb when he's the valorous head of the local police department's SWAT team, his wife owns the local casino and the three sisters are drug dealers. All the familiar double crosses are there and most of the famous lines are interpolated into the text but while Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, this version comes in at over 500 pages and some of the additional plot twists struck me as silly. Still, the book is written by the Norwegian crime novelist who has huge followings among both literary readers and thriller lovers and if you count yourself among either of those groups it might be just the thing for you.
Macdeath by Cindy Brown (2015) Part of a comic-mystery series built around an actress who also works part time as a private investigator, this murder mystery is set backstage at a theater company in Phoenix that is doing a production of the Scottish play. Its tongue sits firmly in its cheek and it's just the kind of easy read that's as yummy as a juicy popsicle on a hot summer afternoon.
Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh (2010). Who doesn’t love a good-old fashioned British murder mystery? This one is set in a London theater run by an Olivier-like actor-manager right after WWII. Shortly after a mysterious ingénue joins the company, an unpopular actor is killed in his dressing room during a performance. Only someone in the company could have done it and just about everyone had motive to do it. Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn arrives to sort it all out. But there is plenty of romance, rivalry and other backstage shenanigans to keep you riveted before he reveals the culprit.
Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George (2017) What could be more enjoyable than a British country house mystery on a summer afternoon? This one, originally published in 1989, deals with the murder of a playwright who has gone to a remote town in Scotland with a group of top London actors to rehearse a play backed by a leading West End producer. George's intrepid detective is Inspector Thomas Lynley, who also just happens to be an earl. His loyal No. 2 is Barbara Havers, a female sergeant from a working-class background, which makes for all kinds of gender and class conflicts. A modern master of the genre, the American-born George is a first-class writer and she's deft with all the tricks of her trade. The result, if you know how these books work, is totally predictable but it's also totally delectable.
Stagestruck by Peter Lovesey (2011). Few things are more relaxing than curling up with a good old-fashioned British mystery on a summer afternoon. This year’s recommendation is an updated spin on the old familiar tropes: the idiosyncratic detective, the isolated group of suspects—each with a good motive for the murder, and the requisite red herrings are all there but so are cell phones, laptops and social networking. Plus, there's a theater ghost.
The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz (2023) This delightful murder mystery is set in London’s Theaterland. And it has great fun blurring the line between fiction and fact with Horowitz inserting a same-named version of himself into the narrative as the prime suspect when a mean-spirited theater critic is murdered after publishing a savage review of the play he’s just opened. The only hope the fictional Horowitz has of clearing his name is if he can persuade the detective who is supposed to have co-authored his previous books to track down the actual culprit.
Untimely Death: A Shakespeare in the Catskills Mystery by Elizabeth J. Duncan (2020). Who doesn't get a kick out of a cozy country-house murder mystery? This one, the first in an ongoing series, is set during the rehearsal period at a summer Shakespeare festival and features a British costume mistress, a hunky local cop, some red herrings and a very obvious suspect. The backstage look at what goes into costuming a play is an extra bonus.
Violencia!: A Musical Novel by Bruce Jay Friedman (2009). Friedman usually writes satirical stories about Hollywood but this time he’s turned the spotlight on Broadway and he’s produced a doozy. The plot centers around an ordinary guy who earns his living writing a newsletter about the homicide unit in a police precinct. He is swept into the glamorous world of show business when a no-talent composer decides the newsletter will make a great musical and drafts him to write the book for it. Their collaborators include a high-strung director, an aging and totally miscast star and a suspiciously funded producer. “Violenica,” the musical they cobble together (“Bi Guys Can Be Nice Guys” is one of its big numbers), is a show that only Max Bialystock could love and Friedman has a ball following its development from meet-and-greet dinners in Broadway hangouts to a disastrous out-of-town tryout. The mounting inanities did wear thin for me after a while but the book’s affection for show people kept me reading.
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