Below is a list of theater books to read in 2024, which I divide into three groups:
- Eight theater books (biographies, memoirs, histories, and works of criticism) that I most enjoyed reading in 2023, or found enlightening, and recommend. I considered these the best theater books of 2023, with caveats that I explain in my reviews, to which I link and excerpt below.
2. Four books (all but one published in 2023) that I’ve been meaning to read and might actually do so in the new year.
That’s twelve books. If you’re doing a New Year’s Resolution, that’s one a month.
(If that’s too much, and you have time to read just one theater book in the coming year, I recommend one published in 2020, James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (My review.) And, if two, I also recommend “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers” published in 2022 (My review.) These are two in my list of the 12 Best Theater Books in the Past 10 Years)
3. Then finally, twelve books (scripts and novels) that have been/will be staged in the 2023-2024 season.
Click on the titles to find more information and to purchase these books*
Recommended
Biography and Memoir
Leading Lady:A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy
Charles Busch has always worshipped Leading Ladies, even before he became one. That happened almost four decades ago, thanks to the surprise success of his play “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”
In his terrifically readable new memoir, the celebrated actor and playwright often sounds much like his description of Claudette Colbert at an afternoon cocktail party he attended: “She dangled names in front of us like diamond drop earrings.” Dangled might be too gentle a term for the boundless, and often hilarious, anecdotes he drops, mostly of Leading Ladies, and mostly as an eye witness, in
Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy (Smart Pop Books, 288 pages)…But it would be misleading to sum up “Leading Lady” as simply a collection of entertaining celebrity anecdotes and old movie allusions, just as it would be insufficient to characterize Charles Busch as a drag entertainer, or even more broadly as an entertainer, although he is certainly that. Busch is also a theater artist – a careful and consummate craftsman….
For those who want more details about the theater Charles Busch did with his company Theater-in-Limbo, and its meaning for the culture at large, I avidly recommend another newly published book as a companion volume, Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York (University of Iowa Press, 226 pages), part of a series entitled Studies in Theatre History and Culture. It is written by Kenneth Elliott, a professor at Rutgers University, who was Busch’s college classmate, first New York roommate, and longtime collaborator – actor, director and early producer. Full Reviews
Jack in the Box: Or, How to Goddamn Direct
“I am the director,” a young man protested to Dame Edith Evans as she was giving instructions to the other cast members of a play in which she starred.
“Never mind,” she answered. “We’ll find something for you to do.”
Jack O’Brien offers this (likely apocryphal) anecdote while making two points – that the profession of director wasn’t invented until the twentieth century, and that people still don’t know what directors do.
O’Brien says he isn’t sure either, nor can he spell out how to do it well; he believes it’s mostly a matter of instinct. But the 83-year-old veteran Broadway director promises to try to explain it anyway in Jack in the Box: Or How to Goddamn Direct (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages) Full review.
Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy
There’s a photograph of 23-year-old Stephen Sondheim with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollabrigida on the set of director John Huston’s movie “Beat the Devil,” where Sondheim had gotten a job through a college friend. The caption informs us that he and Bogie bonded with one another by playing chess. It’s one of the odd tidbits in “Sondheim: HIs Life, His Shows, His Legacy” (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 293 pages), a handsome, readable book by Stephen M. Silverman, a longtime editor at People Magazine, who doesn’t pass up any opportunity for a little stargazing, if the stars are even a little bit relevant…“Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy” offers far less about his life or his legacy than about his shows. Most of the fourteen chapters focus on the individual musicals (and one straight play) in which Sondheim was involved… it’s a useful introduction for Sondheim novices and full of welcome reminders for the Sondheim-is-God crowd. Full review
August Wilson: A Life
What turned high school drop-out Frederick August Kittel Jr. into the revered and consequential playwright August Wilson?
That’s the question at the heart of “August Wilson: A Life” (Simon and Schuster, 544 pages), billed as the first major biography of the playwright. Author Patti Hartigan, a former arts journalist at the Boston Globe, attempts to answer in several ways — one of which feels especially relevant, even urgent.
Although August Wilson is one of only three American playwrights to have a Broadway theater named after them (the others are Eugene O’Neill, to whom he is sometimes compared, and Neil Simon, to whom he’s never compared), he is probably not as well-known as he should be. Full review
History and Criticism
Blanche
Vivien Leigh said it tipped her over into madness. It left Ann-Margret “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze.” For Jessica Lange, “I don’t think there is anything more emotional and physically exhausting than this part for a woman.” Says Patricia Clarkson: ”I’ve never underestimated the power of Blanche.”
They all portrayed Blanche DuBois, a character in “A Streetcar Named Desire” who has “fascinated generations of audiences – and actresses – around the world,” Nancy Shoenberger writes in her book “Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation” (Harper, 240 pages). Full review
What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
For his ninetieth birthday, Sir Stanley Wells, considered one of the world’s greatest authorities on William Shakespeare, was asked to deliver four lectures to answer the following questions:
What was Shakespeare like?
How did he write his plays?
What does the body of his work tell us about his personality?
What made him laugh?
The pandemic having prevented him from delivering the lectures in person, he presented them online instead, and at age 93, has now gathered them together in What Was Shakespeare Really Like? (Cambridge University Press, 164 pages.) Full review
Broadway Bodies
“This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever been told they were too fat,too short, too gay, too disabled, and otherwise too much or not enough to be in a musical,” Ryan Donovan writes in Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford University Press, 336 Pages)
Donovan, a former dancer who tried to increase his chances of being cast by adding an inch to his height on his resume, argues that Broadway and society at large have made insufficient progress at being inclusive, both in representation and in hiring practices….Donovan, now Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Duke University, focuses most of his book on the challenges for… three groups: fat people, LGBT people and people with disabilities. Full Review
Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory
Theater may be an ephemeral experience on stage, but the ways we have presented and attempted to preserve American musicals everywhere else – the printed page, photographs, the cast album, film, video, online — have helped determine what the public wants to see on stage.
This argument explains the title of Doug Reside’s new book, “Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory” (Oxford University Press, 216 pages.)
When Reside, the curator of the much-beloved Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, talks about technologies “fixing” musicals, he doesn’t mean they repaired a broken Broadway. His argument is more sophisticated; he’s using “fixed” the way a creative team for a Broadway musical talks about how the show becomes “frozen” right before opening night: “Fixed” as in “the definitive version.” Full Review
Books I Hope to Read in 2024
Chita: A Memoir (HarperOne, 315 pages)
My Name is Barbra (Viking, 992 pages !)
True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work and Times (Crown, 443 pages)
The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, 2022, 501 pages).
On Stage
Scripts of plays produced on stage in 2023 or 2024
Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard, ran on Broadway until July 2023
The Wanderers by Anna Ziegler, ran Off-Broadway Jan-Ap 2023
Plays for the Plague Years by Suzan-Lori Parks ran Off-Broadway in April 2023
Purlie Victorious by Ossie Davis, opened on Broadway Sep 27, 2023
Dig and I Need That by Theresa Rebeck; both plays opened in 2023, “I Need That” on Broadway.
Appropriate and two other plays by Branden Jacob-Jenkins. Appropriate opened on Broadway in December.
Doubt A Parable by John Patrick Shanley, opening on Broadway Feb 29, 2024
My Son’s a Queer But What Can You Do by Rob Madge, opening on Broadway Mar 12, 2024
Home by Samm-Art Williams, opening on Broadway June 2024
Novels turned into 2024 Broadway musicals
The Notebook the debut novel by Nicholas Sparks, which has been adapted into a musical opening on Broadway March 14. (Yes, it was a movie, also based on the book.)
Water for Elephants A Novel by Sara Gruen, which has been adapted into a musical, Water for Elephants, opening on Broadway March 21. (Yes, it was a movie, also based on the book.)
The Outsiders, the novel by S.E. Hinton, which has been adapted into a musical, The Outsiders, opening on Broadway April 11.. (Yes, it was a movie, also based on the book.)
*The scripts and novels were mostly published in previous years. Your purchase through some of the links above may generate a small commission, which helps support my work. Many of these books are available to borrow at the New York Public Library and other local libraries.
