City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert. 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.
Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles by Mark Russell. 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.
Famous Father Girl: Growing Up Bernstein by Jamie Bernstein.
Leonard Bernstein’s eldest daughter offers an intimate look at her dad, warts
and all. And there were plenty of warts including her father’s drug use and
decidedly unMeToo behavior with young men, some even younger than his own
children. But she also recalls his exuberant love for his family and the professional
brilliance that allowed him to create such magnificent scores as the ones for On the Town and West Side Story. Plus there are lots of delicious anecdotes about the family’s
famous friends, a who’s who from the Golden Age of American theater that
included Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Mike NIchols, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim.
Leading Men by Christopher Castellani. 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.
A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins,Nineteenth-Century U.S. American Actor, edited by Amy E. Hughes and Nancy J. Stubbs. It’s never been easy to be an actor but
it was really tough during this country’s Antebellum years when actors had to be
ready to perform as many as a dozen different plays in a week and supply their
own costumes. A well-regarded actor who worked alongside some of the era’s greats
including Edwin Booth and Edwin Forrest, Watkins kept a journal and the best bits are excerpted in this chronicle of his journey from playing
“walking gentleman” parts in traveling companies for $6 a week (less than $200
in today’s money) to becoming an actor-manager. It’s catnip for theater history
buffs.
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser: 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.
Too Much is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood by Andrew Rannells. Theater fans know
Rannells as the original Elder Price in The Book of Mormon and more recently as
Larry in the 50th anniversary revival of The Boys in the Band that featured a
cast of all proudly gay actors. But neither of those shows makes it into this delightful
memoir of selected stories about the actor’s childhood as a boy actor in his
native Omaha, Nebraska, and his first seven years as a struggling actor in New
York. Get the audiobook if you can because listening to Rannells narrate his exploits
is like dishing with a good friend while sipping a well-chilled cocktail.
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. 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.
Temper by Layne Fargo. 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.
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. The one-time theater critic for The New Yorker won a National Book Award for this biography when it came out in 2014 and it’s easy to see why. The book not only provides an intimate (at times too intimate) chronicle of the playwright’s life but also analyzes each of the more than three dozen plays he wrote. As Lahr tells it, Williams drank too much, was sexually obsessive, fretted constantly about his reputation and experienced several nervous breakdowns but he never stopped writing. And although his later plays may suffer in comparison to his early masterpieces, glimpses of Williams' brilliance can be found in those works and in the letters he exchanged with his wide circle of friends and from which Lahr wisely quotes extensively.
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr. The one-time theater critic for The New Yorker won a National Book Award for this biography when it came out in 2014 and it’s easy to see why. The book not only provides an intimate (at times too intimate) chronicle of the playwright’s life but also analyzes each of the more than three dozen plays he wrote. As Lahr tells it, Williams drank too much, was sexually obsessive, fretted constantly about his reputation and experienced several nervous breakdowns but he never stopped writing. And although his later plays may suffer in comparison to his early masterpieces, glimpses of Williams' brilliance can be found in those works and in the letters he exchanged with his wide circle of friends and from which Lahr wisely quotes extensively.
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