In honor of World Theater Day, celebrated internationally every March 27th since 1962, here are 10 beautiful theaters from around the world, and 10 great books about New York theater.

But first: an excerpt from the 2024 World Theater Day message, translated from the Norwegian, from Jon Olav Fosse, the Norwegian playwright, author and translator who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature:

“All good art, deep down, revolves around the same thing: taking the utterly unique, the utterly specific, and making it universal. Uniting the particular with the universal by means of expressing it artistically: not eliminating its specificity but emphasizing this specificity, letting what is foreign and unfamiliar shine clearly through.

“War and art are opposites, just as war and peace are opposites—it’s as simple as that. Art is peace.”

Click on each photograph to see it enlarged

Theater isn’t just the buildings in which it takes place. The word “theater” comes from a Greek verb meaning ‘to behold’.

Behold these books about New York theater (listed chronologically by publication date, and linked to their page on Amazon)

Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart (new edition St. Martin’s, 464 pages)
Moss Hart’s eloquent, entertaining (and, many say, much fictionalized) chronicle of his impoverished childhood and his long, determined struggle to reach the opening night of his first Broadway hit, originally published in 1959.

Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum (St. Martin’s Press, 1992, 384 pages.)
An entertaining and informative capsule descriptions of hundreds of Broadway failures from 1950 to 1990.

Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (Knopf, 2011, two volumes)
The master lyricist and composer’s annotated lyrics, along with brief history of how each of his shows came to be, and many useful, informed, opinionated digressions about the theater.

Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History by Glen Burger. (Simon and Schuster, 2013, 384 pages.) An instructive history of the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” which broke innumerable records both good and bad (the highest attendance in a single week, the longest preview period, the biggest money loser, etc.), by a writer who with Julie Taymor and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is credited as the author of the musical. “Before something can be brilliant, it first has to be competent” is at the top of his list of lessons learned.

Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr (W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, 764 pages.) Some 40 books have been written about playwright Tennessee Williams since his death in 1983. I haven’t read enough of them to offer an authoritative judgement, but it’s hard to imagine one better-written or more informative than this one, written by the former chief theater critic of the New Yorker.

Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway (Simon and Schuster, 2015, 464 pages)  is the first book by
Michael Riedel, theater columnist for the New York Post from 1998 to 2018 whom theater people loved to hate. But Riedel leaves his withering remarks to himself in this history of Broadway in the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on the Shubert organization, he recounts how the Broadway industry, on the verge of collapse, was reborn, both helping (and helped by) the transformation of Times Square and the city as a whole. But to tell the story, the book ranges nearly the breadth of the 20th century.

The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel. (Farrar, Straus and Girous, 2016, 312 pages.) The wonderfully readable book focuses on the structure of successful musicals, going chronologically step by step from the overture to the finale. But underneath the rulebook, he is arguing persuasively for the importance of the American musical: “If Shakespeare is England’s national theatre, aren’t Broadway musicals ours?”

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future James Shapiro (Penguin, 2020, 286 pages) The Shakespearean scholar who is the author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 and 1599:A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare looks at eight controversial events involving Shakespeare, which he calls “defining moments in American history.” Each chapter focuses on a specific year, a specific play by Shakespeare, and specific issues of the day, which largely remain American issues today — long-standing tensions involving race, class, gender, immigration and other fault-lines in American culture.

“Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created ‘Sunday in the Park with George’” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 416 pages) is an eccentric, valuable and entertaining book, which author James Lapine describes early on as “a mixed salad: one part memoir, one part oral history, one part how a musical gets written and produced.’” It also includes the full script of Lapine and Sondheim’s 1984 Broadway musical, 

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, 480 pages) written with New York Times chief theater critic Jesse Green, based on several years’ worth of twice-weekly interviews, and now published eight years after death at the age of 83 of this composer, screenwriter, and author who was Broadway royalty from birth, as the daughter of Richard Rodgers.