Below is a manageable list of 13 theater books — recently published or soon to be– that look to be good summer reads: six memoirs or biographies, four books of history, recent scripts of three acclaimed playwrights. Plus a bonus theater-adjacent book (because it’s written by a theater critic)

Biographies and Memoirs

Too Funny for Words: Backstage Tales from Broadway, Television, and the Movies by Jerry Adler
The 95-year-old Adler yuks it up about his career as a theater director, producer and actor spanning over 70 years, who didn’t become famous until he portrayed a kibbitzing Jewish gangster in The Sopranos.

Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage by Elizabeth Titrington Craft
The first book in fifty years about the playwright, composer, actor, director, and producer George M. Cohan, who looms large in musical theater. Remembered today for tunes like “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Give My Regards to Broadway,” he has been called “the father of musical comedy,” and his statue stands in the heart of the New York theater district. 

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench
As much an incisive work of criticism as a memoir, Dame Judi Dench opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra. In a series of intimate conversations with actor and director Brendan O’Hea, she guides us through Shakespeare’s plays.

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell
Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born an heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

Affective Memories: How Chance and the Theater Saved My Life by Laurence Luckinbill

On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide by Kevin Winkler 
The author traces the early development of Midler’s performing ethos from New York’s downtown experimental theater scene and examines her impact across media, with chapters on the soaring highs (and occasional cringe-worthy lows) of her stage work, movies, recordings, and television appearances, and considers her influence as an environmental activist and social media presence.

History

The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro
Acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, whose “Shakespeare in a Divided America” is one of my favorite theater books of all time, turns his attention to another theater-related chapter in American history — the glories and the destruction of the Federal Theater Project of the 1930s.

The Group Theatre: An Enduring Legacy by Marc Connelly
This book examines the history and influence of the Group Theatre, the most significant acting company in America. Founded during the Great Depression, the Group presented the first plays of Clifford Odets, Sidney Kingsley, and William Saroyan,and  launched the careers of such stars as John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, and Karl Malden. its former members directed or produced the Broadway plays Brigadoon, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Camino Real, Bus Stop, The Music Man, Equus, and Yentl. 

The American Musical: Evolution of an Art Form by Ben West
The historian who put together the history panels at the Museum of Broadcasting traces the evolution over the course of seven distinct, newly defined eras

The Tony Awards: A Celebration of Excellence by Eila Mell
An authorized guide, with stories, photos from the American Theatre Wings’ archives, and interviews with honorees like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Patti LuPone, and Hugh Jackman

Scripts

Stereophonic by David Adjmi
The award-winning play, currently on Broadway, about the making of a hit rock record in the 1970s

Jocelyn Bioh: Three Plays: Merry Wives; Nollywood Dreams; School Girls, Or, The African Mean Girls Play

 An adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy set in Harlem among West African immigrants, the first in-person New York production after the pandemic lockdown; a look at the film industry in Lagos, Nigeria; e reigning queen bee at Ghana’s most exclusive boarding school, has her sights set on the Miss Universe pageant but must contend with a new student with a better chance.

Plays for the Plague Year by Suzan-Lori Parks
On March 13, 2020, as theaters shut their doors and so many of us went into lockdown, Suzan-Lori Parks picked up her pen and set out to write a play every day. I loved this when she finally got to perform it at the Public Theater.

Theater-adjacent novel

“Great Expectations,” a novel by Vinson Cunningham, who is a theater critic at The New Yorker (a Pulitzer finalist this year in criticism) and co-host of the podcast “Critics at Large.”  The book is not about theater,but a coming-of-age story about the first Obama presidential campaign, based on Cunningham’s own experiences