Bard Games
by Victor L. Cahn, illustrations by David Smith. Taylor Trade Publishing, Lanham, Md., 2011. 128 pp., $11.95 paper.
A deceptively thin Shakespeare quiz book, Bard Games is a toughie sure to level even the nerdiest of theatre geeks. In 52 tests (including “Death Scenes,” “Insults” and “Potpourri: The First Tetralogy”), author Cahn serves up hefty helpings of trivia and commentary. A practice lightning round: “In which castle is Richard II imprisoned?” “In what year did the first Folio appear?” “In Henry V, who is jilted by Mistress Quickly when she marries Pistol?” Smith’s cute illustrations make for pleasant pauses as you ponder. Cahn’s tone is amusing but daunting: In one soliloquy ID quiz, “Speakers’ names are provided for matching purposes, but you really shouldn’t need this assistance.” Indeed! (The answers, by the way, are Pomfret, 1623, and Nym.)
Ideal for: Masochistic Bard-lovers.
Choice bit: “The universal popularity of Shakespeare remains a phenomenon.”
—Harrison Hill
Sweat, Tears, and Jazz Hands
by Mike Weaver and Colleen Hart. Hal Leonard Books, Milwaukee, Wisc., 2011. 208 pp., $22.99 paper.
Weaver and Hart’s new volume might read like alien correspondence to the uninitiated, but for “Glee” fans and spangle-stitchers, it’s pure catnip. Subtitled “The Official History of Show Choir from Vaudeville to ‘Glee,’” this lushly illustrated volume traces the wholesome journey of show choir from its Fred Waring roots to the bedazzled, bejeweled mega-choruses of today. But history’s hardly the point: The TV smash “Glee” is clearly the raison d’être behind this otherwise patchy survey, and serves as a kind of Hollywood climax to the largely unchronicled, heavily Midwestern phenomenon that started it all. The authors relish giving show choir its moment in the spotlight, but—not to get all Sue Sylvester—the writing veers from trite and fawning to oddly prescriptive. One particularly unfortunate section proposes that programming follow the Golden Ratio, which apparently mandates that ballads appear 61.8 or 38.2 percent of the way through a show. (“It’s not crazy talk. It’s mathematics.”) “Gleeks” won’t care, though—for them it’ll be all about the colorful, uniform-filled group shots of choirs, of which this book knows no limits. Choice production numbers: “Humans Fighting Back Against Technology” and “Matrimony Mega-Mix.”
Ideal for: “Gleeks” everywhere.
Choice bit: A photo caption that reads, “Yes, the bride is on top of a giant wedding cake!”
—HH
The Health and Safety Guide for Film, TV, and Theater
by Monona Rossol. Allworth Press, New York City, 2011. 288 pp., $27.50 paper.
Rossol’s guidebook opens with this cautionary line: “Theatrical, motion picture, television and entertainment productions are hazardous endeavors. In fact, it would be hard to imagine an industry with more hazards.” Rossol compares these industries to construction work—only without the protective masks and safety eyewear. With chapter sections titled “Bad Attitudes, Horseplay: Only for Horses and Jackasses,” “How Chemicals Enter the Body” and “Mold: Nothing to Sneeze At,” Rossol provides an exhaustive, if often grim, compendium for the health risks of making art.
Ideal for: Your hypochondriac professional artist cousin.
Choice bit: Countless charts and graphs telling you how you might get harmed or die.
—Eliza Bent
Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein
by Julie Salamon. Penguin Press, New York City, 2011. 480 pp., $29.95 cloth.
Wendy Wasserstein: the alliterative name that carries Broadway cachet while also conjuring devil-may-care curls and a warm smile. In her biography, Salamon treats her enigmatic subject with respect and shades of subtle nuance, and gives her writing legacy respectful attention. A deeply private person whose work often drew strong reactions, Wasserstein is evoked in a wealth of personal anecdotes into which Salamon inserts a surprising amount of dialogue. Throughout, Salamon tries to remain faithful to her comparison of Wasserstein to the Wendy of Peter Pan. At the opening of the chapter “The Birth of Lucy Jane,” for instance, she quotes J.M. Barrie: “Years rolled on again, and Wendy had a daughter.” Despite this sometimes awkward frame, the glimpses into Wasserstein’s private world illuminate her work while letting her mystery remain delightfully intact.
Ideal for: The zany aunt who wears Birkenstocks no matter the season.
Choice bit: Well-curated photos throughout.
—EB
Wicked: A Musical Biography
by Paul R. Laird. Scarecrow Press, Inc., Lanham, Md., 2011. 358 pp., $39.95 cloth.
The subtitle of this book about the blockbuster musical Wicked should be, “With a heavy focus on Stephen Schwartz.” The original research is predominantly gleaned through papers and notes from Schwartz’s office, and the composer/lyricist also gets his own biographical chapter. Making good use of primary sources, the book traces Wicked’s history from its initial conception through its development and on to Broadway, following that trajectory with tales of its reception thereafter. There is even a short section on Wicked as an empowering musical for women and a handy summarization of how the musical’s plot and music changed throughout the creative process (fun fact: Glinda originally had only a supporting role). Some original interviews would have livened things up, but clear writing and organization, along with some insightful commentary from Laird, make this a fun and brisk, if not exactly an eye-opening, read.
Ideal for: Wicked-heads and Schwartz lovers.
Choice bit: “Writing a musical is not for the lazy or faint of heart: no brainless scarecrow, heartless tin man, or cowardly lion would have wanted to stick with this process, with or without a road of yellow brick.”
—EB
BAM: The Complete Works
Edited by Steven Serafin. QuantuckLanePress,NewYorkCity,2011. 384 pp., $95 cloth.
Prepare for a steady fizz of name recognition as you page through this pricey volume, a testament to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 150-year investment in bringing art from around the world to Kings County. Playwright Charles Mee can’t resist beading his introductory essay with clusters of starry names, and who can blame him? Ping Chong, Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones, Jan Lauwers, Keith Haring, Peter Brook, Philip Glass, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Frank Gehry, Robert Rauschenberg. If this list doesn’t paint a mental picture of Fort Greene as a pulsing center of cultural gravity, not to worry—BAM: The Complete Works doesn’t lack for actual pictures. Some are breathtaking, like a full-spread shot from Pina Bausch’s 1997 Der Fensterputzer, in which a couple in evening dress sinks into a fluffy mountain of scarlet flowers. (Like any chronicle of live performance, the book has a certain you-had-to-be-there bittersweetness; the more stunning the photo, the more keenly you feel having missed out.) Brief essays are interspersed, contextualizing some of BAM’s key visiting artists. Readers fascinated by the role of the arts in urban development can dive into longer, detailed chapters mapping the peaks and valleys of BAM’s evolution from an “academy” founded to boost Brooklyn’s cultural sophistication with “innocent amusements”; to the hall chosen by Edwin Booth for his swan-song Hamlet; to what Mee describes as “a big, old, dark, neglected pile of stones off Flatbush Avenue”; to an institution worthy of a hundred-dollar book.
Ideal for: Theatregoers who know their Lepage from their Wilson; owners of stylish coffee tables.
Choice bit: From Mee, in the intro: “‘Good writers borrow,’ T.S. Eliot once said. ‘Great writers steal.’ At BAM, I knew I had come to the right place: a thieves’ paradise.”
—Nicole Estvanik Taylor
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy
by Richard Paul Roe. Harper Perennial, New York City, 2011. 320 pp., $19.99 paper.
Under the Tuscan Bard this is not. Indeed, this book is unlikely to influence your travel plans, unless your idea of an Italian vacation is driving back and forth between Pisa and Padua trying to divine the route a Renaissance traveler might have taken across the Apennines. There’s a dash of Da Vinci Code intrigue, in fact, in this extensive research project undertaken by Roe, a retired lawyer with degrees in English lit and European history. In multiple forays to Italy, he set out to refute scholarly claims that the 10 Shakespeare plays set there are full of sloppy, incongruous details that betray the playwright’s unfamiliarity with the boot-shaped peninsula. This dovetails—unfairly, Roe asserts—with the common assumption that Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon never left England. Before his death last year, Roe assembled a compelling case that the author of these plays—whosoever you think that might be—went out of his way to display a nuanced and intimate knowledge of Italy by loading them with inside references. Mostly this isn’t thriller material, but Roe’s detective work does sometimes yield a jolt of discovery, as when Roe learns that “St. Gregory’s well,” mentioned in passing in Two Gentlemen of Verona, is no benign fictional landmark but the nearly forgotten nickname for a mass grave of plague victims. This certainly puts Proteus’s suggestion that his rival meet him at this “well” in a macabre new light.
Ideal for: Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theorists; cartography hobbyists.
Choice bit: Roe tracing a seeming throwaway line from Romeo and Juliet about a “grove of sycamores” to the actual grove in Verona.
—NET
Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1950-2000: A Critical Anthology
Edited by Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., and London, 2011. 568 pp., $27 paper.
Right off the bat, the editors of this fat, info-packed, wide-ranging critical anthology align the boundary-pushing theatremakers they’ve collected between its covers with épater-la-bourgeoisie decadence: “Identified with notions of negation, rebellion, attack, destruction, and rupture, the avant-garde takes an adversarial position toward the cultural and political mainstream,” they posit grandly in the volume’s introduction. What’s more fun than trying to figure out just who Mac Wellman or Judith Malina or Hélène Cixous might be aiming to piss off is trying to imagine from their printed texts what the actual performances of their works might have looked and sounded like. A number of seminal essays (both Susan Sontag’s and Charles Ludlam’s essays on camp, for example) are strategically included, and the list of artists and critics anthologized includes many names you’ll recognize as past American Theatre bylines (Richard Foreman, Marc Robinson, Naomi Iizuka, Suzan-Lori Parks, Charles Mee, Charles Marowitz, Anne Bogart, for starters). For those who like this sort of thing (to paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie), this will be the sort of book they like.
Ideal for: Anybody but the bourgeoisie.
Choice bit: The first line of Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr’s classic Turds in Hell, spoken by the Devil: “The play you are about to see is a mortal sin. Any person witnessing this play takes part in that sin and thereby risks his immortal soul.”
—Jim O’Quinn
