“Theater kid” revived as an insult; Superagent Ari’s takeover of ATG; AI taking over everything; a controversial casting choice; a eulogy for non-profit theater. There is no dearth of outrage and obsession among theater bloggers/substackers over events this summer. But this is also traditionally a time to relax and read. “Reading is one the most reliable pleasures in my life,” longtime theater writer Don Shewey prefaces his latest “Reading List” entry in his substack Another Eye Open, “Here are some things that it soothed my soul to read this week.” His particular “Reading List” this time around isn’t theater-related, but Jan Simpson’s lists in Broadway & Me are nothing but. So we’ll start with them.

Jan Simpson’s Theater Books for Summer Reading in 2026  recommends and briefly summarizes 16 books. I’ve read and reviewed seven of the books on this list. Here are links to my reviews, in alphabetical order according to title: 

Audition: by Katie Kitamura
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie
Flashout by Alexis Soloski
Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollock-Pelzner
The Mother Act. by Heidi Reimer
Never Mind The Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner by Marc Shaiman
Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy by Daniel Okrent

In celebration of the 20 years(!) she has been compiling these lists, she has put together another list, Bonus: All Kinds of Novels About Theater, 90 books “set in the world of theater” selected from her annual list and organized into five categories: My Favorites. Classics. Other Literary Fiction. More Popular Fiction. Good Old Mysteries.

In David Desk 2, David Sheward dug up from the public library at Lincoln Center two books by his favorite playwright, Christopher Durang, “Turning Off The Morning News,” which has yet to be produced in New York, and “Naomi in the Living Room and Other Short Plays”

In the Library of Congress’s In the Muse blog, archivist Ellie Hart has dug through the the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Papers to discover two cookbooks full of the couple’s recipes (entitled, forgivably, Lucille Has a Ball in the Kitchen), and librarian Heather Darnell recounts her presentation at the World Creativity Conference in Seoul: “Using manuscripts from the Library’s Music Division, we explored the creation of three iconic Broadway songs: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “My Favorite Things,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” and Jonathan Larson’s “Seasons of Love.”” Also, Libby Smigel

In Jaques, Gordon Cox summarizes “the immediate responses to the big-deal news” that superagent Ari Emanuel’s company Mari has bought ATG, which owns 70 theaters, including seven on Broadway: “Matthew Hemley in The Stage asks “Would ATG’s sale create an unfair monopoly?” Over in his own Substack, Jared Harbour crunches some numbers and predicts the further expansion of big-bucks, luxury event packages as the clearest route to making the deal’s math work—with a host of alarming repercussions across the industry. And elsewhere on Substack, Howard Sherman worries that the move “fully establishes Broadway (and for that matter West End) theatres as commodities in a larger sphere of entertainment” that “now must account for itself far beyond Times Square.”

I appreciate Gordon’s summaries, especially of Jared Harbour’s piece, which is simultaneously a dense and vivid read:
“The circus is in town, the debt is compounding, and there’s nothing left to do but buy the ticket, enjoy the ride. But have no fear, there’s no height requirement for this extravaganza; just an easy, breezy $6,000,000,000 payment, drowning in leveraged debt. And for that paltry price, you get 70 playhouses in 3 time zones. 16,000 performances in which actors play zip-zap-zop before the curtain rises. 18m tickets sold.
“Essentially, the whole fucking circus.
“The PR statement from thee corporate overlords assures us that MARI, ATG’s newest owner and Ari Emanuel’s mega fund, intend to act as “long-term custodians,” focusing on “preservation and modernization” for the salvation of both producer and patron alike. As far as publicity statements go, I’ll buy it. But I am cynical enough to assume that a multi-billion-dollar capital structure is completely indifferent to the poetry of an assistant copywriter in a BroadwayWorld article.”

I’ll link once again to Philip Boroff’s reaction in Broadway Journal: “Broadway Stages a Musical Comeback: ATG has a starring role.“

In OnStage Blog, Chris Petersen observes MAGA is Back to Using “Theatre Kid” as an Insult, describing the circumstances that led a White House Spokesman to call U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) “a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama….” This attack would be shocking coming from an official spokesman from any other White House, but Petersen cooly unpacks the phrase, defends theater kids, analyzes the insulters. He doesn’t point out how stupid politically this might be, so I will: There are “theater kids” in every high school and college in every red state in the nation.

OnStage Blog was at the center of a Broadway-centric controversy, when the producers of “Hadestown” cast Geno Segers as Hades, and then rescinded the offer after backlash over Segers’ old social media posts commenting about transgender people. Here are the OnStage posts about it:
Can Hadestown’s Inclusive Reputation Survive Casting Geno Segers?
The Hadestown Casting Controversies Prove Production Teams Need to Do Their Homework
Geno Segers Will No Longer Join Hadestown Following Backlash Over Social Media Videos
Geno Segers Told Men to “Tighten Up.” Maybe He Should Take His Own Advice.
Geno Segers Apologized to “Affected Communities.” That Is Not Enough
Geno Segers’ Apology Appears to Be Gone. That Didn’t Take Long.

Another controversy arose when Oskar Eustis announced that he would be leaving as artistic director of the Public Theater in 2028, and in interviews he said “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over. That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over. But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model. We’ve lost a lot of theaters, and we’re going to lose more. And most of the other theaters, whether they say it or not, will become more commercial.”

Alexandra Meda reacted in Network Ensemble Theaters blog: “I read it on my phone in Boyle Heights and my face went hot. The heat of hearing a eulogy read for people who are sitting right there, alive, passing the rice….when the leader of the best-resourced nonprofit theater in America says the movement is over, he is describing the weather at one altitude. The LA Times took that forecast and rounded up the artistic directors of the biggest buildings in Los Angeles to confirm it, and the big buildings agreed with the bigger building. Somewhere in an entire feature about the death of a movement, no one called a storefront. No one called an ensemble. No one asked a culturally specific theater that has been producing for forty years on one percent of the Public’s budget what dying feels like, or what building feels like either….he was looking from the wrong floor.”

In his blog, Ken Davenport argues that all musicals are about finding your family, using the example of five musicals as evidence (starting with Falsettos)

In Fourth Wall, Matt Rodin debates the good and bad of Artificial Intelligence