MEMOIRS
The Spamalot Diaries
By Eric Idle
$25, Crown
Sonny Boy
By Al Pacino
$35, Penguin Press
Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera
By Ricky Ian Gordon
$32, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Who better than the artists themselves to tell their stories?
Eric Idle gives us the backstage dirt on the making of Spamalot, the musical spin on the classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Any making-of involving a Broadway show can be catnip for a theater buff. But when it’s a Python in charge, you know it will be funnier and more candid and less pompous than usual.
Al Pacino is of course a lauded film actor, thanks to everything from the Godfather movies to Dog Day Afternoon and The Insider, to my personal favorite, Scarecrow. But he’s recharged himself and renourished his soul with theater again and again. From American Buffalo to The Merchant of Venice, he’s a legendary talent who hasn’t spent nearly enough time treading the boards as we would like. On the plus side, he’s directed two insightful documentaries about plays, including Looking for Richard and Wilde Salomé. Now we have his memoir, and excuse us if we skip his childhood and all those Hollywood movies (as good as they are) and plunge right into Pacino’s memories of live theater.
Composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s career is one of the most fascinating in all of opera. His memoir shows Gordon’s tumultuous private life and struggles with addiction — just as dramatic and fearsome as any show. Unlike most operas, it has a happier ending. But no surprise the rough journey is captured by this singular artist with honesty and artistry.
FICTION
By Any Other Name
By Jodi Picoult
$30, Ballantine Books
The Hypocrite
By Jo Hamya
$26, Pantheon
The Wildes
By Louis Bayard
$29, Algonquin Books
Three of the best novels of the year revolve around theater.
In Jodi Picoult’s acclaimed work of historical fiction, Shakespeare is a woman. Or, more accurately, the not-so-talented Will Shakespeare is a front for more talented writers who can’t or won’t put their names on plays, notably the real figure of Emilia Bassano, the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain. She’s friends with Kit Marlowe, faces the brutal reality of life for women in England of the 16th century, and, under the most challenging of circumstances, writes some of the greatest plays and poetry ever known. Meanwhile, Shakespeare himself sometimes has a go at it. Hence, Timon of Athens.
In Jo Hamya’s novel, a father attends a performance of his daughter’s new play. Only then does he realize it’s about him, or, rather, their relationship. He’s a once-lauded novelist whose books have not perhaps stood the test of time. She’s a rising talent. And their differing perspectives of a summer vacation as seen from each point of view and refracted in the play that’s being performed and who exactly is the hypocrite here make for a work critics are dazzled by.
We all know about Oscar Wilde, one of the great wits of his or any age. Wilde’s theatrical career peaked with that masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest. Then he torpedoed everything with an ill-considered lawsuit that brought him infamy, jail time, and exile. But what about his family? What about his wife and children, dragged into ignominy by Wilde’s actions? Novelist Louis Bayard gives them their due in a novel about the impact any artist — a selfish beast by nature — has on those around them.
OFFBEAT GIFTS
Playbill Broadway Trivia
By Playbill
$19.99, Clarkson Potter
The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey
By Carol Verburg
$50, Chronicle Books
The Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot
By Emily McGill
$30, RP Studio
You need a gift for a theater buff? We’ve got you. How about a collection of Broadway trivia gathered by the estimable Playbill? It’s like the best trivia night at your local watering hole, but without the bother of all those questions about sports and science and history. Just theater!
Author Carol Verburg has assembled a coffee-table-worthy book called The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey. She’s a longtime friend and sometime collaborator of the celebrated playwright and artist who lovingly presents Gorey’s stage work, ranging from his Tony-winning Dracula to annotated scripts, photographs, community theater works (a passion in the last years of his life), and more. We’re not remotely done exploring the work he left behind and this is a handsome start.
But trivia and a tribute to Edward Gorey can’t quite provide you with a guide to life. And so, what about The Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot? Al Hirschfeld is of course the beloved caricaturist and illustrator who lived from 1903 to 2003 and seems to have captured every major theatrical star of the 20th century in his inimitable style. A Hirschfeld tarot deck using his artwork? Why, of course.
LADY MACBETH
Queen Macbeth
By Val McDermid
$22, Atlantic Monthly Press
She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said
By Harriet Walter
$20, Union Square and Co.
Lady Macbeth
By Ava Reid
$28.99, Del Rey
The play is called Macbeth, not that you should say it out loud. (Bad luck, don’t you know.) Yet it’s Lady Macbeth who fascinates and dominates, even though Shakespeare doesn’t give her nearly enough lines. In step, three women who breathe new life into one of the Bard’s most vivid characters.
Scottish crime-novel legend Val McDermid brings the story to rip-roaring life with a novel that centers this woman who outmaneuvers countless men to claim the throne. Author Ava Reid delivers a gothic fantasy with Lady Macbeth, a dark reimagining of the story that reveals the weird sisters weren’t the only ones proficient in magic.
And nestled between these two novels is She Speaks! The marvelous actor Harriet Walter is world-famous for her performances in the TV shows Killing Eve, Succession, and Ted Lasso, among many other works. But, oh my, how brilliant she was in all-female productions of The Tempest, Henry IV, and Julius Caesar! Walter entered theater to give women voice, and here she does so with daring. Walter notes how few lines most women in Shakespeare’s plays are given … and remedies that with her own lines. It’s both entertaining on its own and an insight into how this great actor imagines the inner life of these women, such as why Lady Macbeth justified to herself becoming queen by any means necessary.
HISTORY
Straight Acting
By Will Tosh
$32, Seal Press
The Year That Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre
By William A. Everett
$39.99, Cambridge University Press
Hmm, what exactly was going on with William Shakespeare? His plays include an awful lot of cross-dressing, gender fluidity, and same-sex desire. Was Shakespeare gay? Scholar Will Tosh is the head of research at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, a must-see for any theatergoer every time they go to London. And he says first we need to understand the world Shakespeare lived in and how it saw sexual identity, queerness, and the like. In this entertaining dive into history and the plays, Tosh reveals how very modern the world of a privileged man like Shakespeare was when it came to such issues and why he abandoned the rich homoeroticism of his early work in later years. It’s a work acclaimed in the U.K. by everyone from best-selling author Sarah Waters to The Guardian, which calls it “fluent and witty.”
Professor William A. Everett of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, has an admirable track record of coediting and contributing to major resources for theater lovers, such as The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (third edition, with Paul R. Laird), among others. The Year That Made the Musical may be his magnum opus. Everett does two things here. First, he makes the case for 1924 as a key turning point in the development of the musical. (A hinge, as the hipster historians might say.) Musical comedies, operettas, and revues are all covered, along with rising talent, like Fred and Adele Astaire and the Gershwins. Everywhere Everett turns, musicals are boldly innovating and succeeding. Just as important, Everett doesn’t just cover Broadway and the West End. He travels the globe to see how musical theater was exploding and experimenting, from Berlin to Buenos Aires. So, 1924? A landmark year. Musical theater? A worldwide phenomenon. And as Everett shows, any serious work will be better informed (and more fun) if you treat it as such.
ROMANCE
Love Requires Chocolate
By Ravynn K. Stringfield
$12.99, Joy Revolution
Showmance
By Chad Beguelin
$18.98, Penguin Books
Sunrise Nights
By Jeffrey Zentner and Brittany Cavallaro
$19.99, Quill Tree Books
Three works of romance to demonstrate that people who love theater fall in love more entertainingly, more completely, and more dramatically than anyone else.
In the sensibly titled Love Requires Chocolate, Whitney heads to Paris for an epic semester of “Whitney in Paris” delights. French theater and tributes to her idol, Josephine Baker, will inform her budding (okay, soon-to-bud) career as a playwright and director. But, yikes, she’s not quite as fluent in French as she thought, school is a struggle, and Whitney is assigned a jock to tutor her. Of course, he’s awfully good-looking and determined Whitney should experience the real Paris …
In the rom-com Showmance, a Broadway playwright crashes and burns with his new show and heads home to nowheresville Illinois to lick his wounds. Unfortunately, his agent thought it would be really clever to have him restage said disaster at a local community theatre. Whaaa? To make matters worse, his high-school nemesis, Luke, is better-looking than ever, beloved by everyone, and the cast of amateurs actually has some insightful questions? What is going on? Could it be … love?
And Sunrise Nights celebrates the refuge and found home that is summer arts camp. A boy and a girl make like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy on the closing night of camp. They pledge to reconnect only one night a year at the camp’s closing night and do so for the next three years. Is it a brief emotional high that can only survive because it’s so rare? Or are they staring true love in the face and too scared to make it real?
MYSTERY
Cabaret Macabre
By Tom Mead
$26.95, Mysterious Press
There’s No Murder Like Show Murder
By M.S. Greene
$31.99, Crooked Lane Books
Murder Takes the Stage
By Colleen Cambridge
$27, Kensington
A show can kill an audience. A critic can wield a poisoned pen with a vicious review. And backstabbing is never more enjoyable than it is backstage. So it’s no wonder theater and murder go together like Holmes and Watson.
In the historical mystery Cabaret Macabre, the stage magician turned sleuth Joseph Spector faces seeming impossibilities, like a body inexplicably in a frozen lake and a shotgun shooting a man through a closed window … but without shattering the glass! It’s the third in the Spector series.
With There’s No Murder Like Show Murder, author M.S. Greene launches a cozy series dubbed “Backstage Mystery.” When an obnoxious “star” is killed during a local community-theatre production of Annie Get Your Gun, costumer Tasha Weaver needs to save their beloved space from bankruptcy and find the killer, even if it proves to be — as surely it must be! — someone she knows and cares for. Tough, I say! The show must go on.
And in Murder Takes The Stage, Agatha Christie’s housekeeper Phyllida Bright must stalk the killer stalking the world of London’s West End. It’s an ABC-style murder spree (since actors are being knocked off in alphabetical order), which might comfort actors with names like Zero Mostel and Zoë Wanamaker, but has everyone else in a panic. It’s the fourth historical mystery starring Bright in this well-reviewed mystery fans of Christie and The Mousetrap will savor.
Need gift ideas for the theater lover in your life? Check out our gift guide!
Michael Giltz is Parade.com’s bookologist, in charge of overseeing the iconic website’s books coverage and writing its major stories. He also covers all areas of entertainment as a journalist, critic, feature writer, podcaster and analyst. Giltz has written for many outlets, including the New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and The Advocate, among others. When Michael’s not attending theater, he’s reading about it.