Last weekend in Connecticut, Trumbull High School’s Thespian Society presented their fall play. On Monday afternoon, instead of a scheduled informational session for those planning to audition for the spring musical, Rent (the school edition), a full meeting of the Thespian Society was called. At that meeting, the school’s principal informed the students that Rent was cancelled.

Trumbull High School

Describing the meeting, Trumbull High Thespian Society president Larissa Mark said, “There were a lot of tears from the kids because Rent is so precious to so many of us.” As to how the principal explained his decision, Mark said, “I can’t say I know the reason, because it’s still unclear to so many of us.”

Now at this point, you might imagine this is going to be another story about an authoritarian, puritanical school administration squashing the dreams of helpless students. And that’s where you’d be wrong.

On Monday evening, after completing other commitments, Mark got organized and began to organize her peers. Having seen a raft of comments on social media while she was otherwise engaged, many carrying the phrase “Rentbellion,” she recommended a more measured tone. “I didn’t think ‘Rentbellion’ was going to help our case. We had to create an organized response. I said that students should speak with their parents about this and not act brashly.

“On Tuesday morning, “ Mark continued, “I helped organize a bunch of students with petitions to go around. In the course of two days, we collected 1,516 signatures, which is about two-thirds of our school. On Wednesday, I handed [the principal] the original copies of the signature sheets and surveys we’d done to the Trumbull community. We had asked whether people would support Rent and gave them a chance to make comments. We got over 400 responses and an almost overwhelming number of yesses.”

Mark also created a “Trumbull for Rent” Facebook page (which has over 4000 likes as I write), wrote a letter to the local Patch site (where another student was quoted anonymously), was interviewed by the Trumbull Times and Connecticut magazine and, by Wednesday evening (the night before Thanksgiving, mind you), had spoken with the local ABC and CBS affiliates. This is an impressive campaign even by professional standards, all marshaled by a 17 year old high school senior.

To the students, everything happened suddenly on Monday, but in fact there had been behind the scenes discussions going on since late October. Jessica Spillane, a 17-year-veteran of the high school, the English Department Chair, and English and drama teacher and director of the Thespian troupe and the spring musical, said her first conversation with principal Marc Guarino had occurred, spontaneously, on October 23, when they happened to run into one another. By Spillane’s account, Guarino said, “I just heard yesterday that we were doing Rent as the musical. Did we ever talk about this?” Spillane said she replied, “I don’t know but we announced in August. It’s been on our website since then. It had been announced through daily announcements for two weeks at the beginning of the school year. I said that it’s the school edition.” She said the selection of shows has always been autonomous, not requiring prior approval.

“Should I be worried?” Guarino asked, according to Spillane. She replied, “Absolutely not. We’ve got nothing but support. If there are any questions, I’ll handle them.” Spillane says that two weeks later, Guarino met with her to say that the plans to do Rent were “on hold.” Spillane provided him with the script, her conceptual plans for the production, and information on productions at other area high schools, including Amity Regional in Woodbridge and Greenwich High School, as well as the Fairfield Teen Theatre. She also gave him many of the books she had been using as research.

Subsequently, Guarino told Spillane that he had met with his assistant principals and the president of the Parent-Student-Teacher Association. He said he needed to speak with the superintendent. On November 20, Guarino told Spillane he could not support going forward with the production. In an appeal to the superintendent, Spillane was informed that he was backing the principal’s decision. Spillane made the decision to delay informing the students until after the fall play finished over the weekend.

Did Spillane inspire Mark’s campaign? “I told the kids that we [referring to herself and other Thespian advisors] needed to take a step back and not be seen as puppetmasters. The kids said ‘if we’re going to be heard, we need to be rational, respectful, organized and articulate’.”

So where does this all stand?

The first two days of Mark’s campaign resulted in Principal Guarino informing Spillane that he was reconsidering his decision and that he would be speaking with the superintendent when school resumes Monday. Yesterday, Mark said, “We just want to keep people as active as possible because we don’t want to lose any steam over the weekend.”

Now it’s worth noting that Principal Guarino is new at Trumbull High this year. It’s also important to note that he’s not been issuing edicts from on high – after informing the students of the cancellation, he remained with them for an hour to talk about his choice. He is obviously not trying to make this adversarial, and is open to further discussion. No doubt the tone set by the students played a role in this, along with their effective outreach.

I am reminded of a situation in nearby Waterbury a few years ago, when a canceled production of Joe Turner’s Come And Gone was reversed thanks to passionate students and the support of the Yale Repertory Theatre, which helped create educational sessions for students and the community to address the play’s use of “the n-word” multiple times, to place its more difficult themes in a proper educational context. Now the time has come for everyone who loves theatre to lend their voices to the students’ efforts, but with the respect and level-headedness that the students have employed. If you love theatre, like the Trumbull For Rent Facebook page. If you have deep feelings about Rent and its value for students and what it may have meant in your life, share them with Principal Guarino at Mguarino@trumbullps.org. If you are a theatre professional and you are able, offer to go to Trumbull High School and lead workshops for the students and the community. This posting is my offer of that support.  But heed the wisdom of Larissa Mark and act with respect.

“I think the main reason why Rent is so important is that homosexuality, drug use and disease are not ‘issues’ in the twenty-first century,” Mark told me, fittingly on Thanksgiving morning. “They’re part of our lives. It’s not fiction to us, it’s reality. The fact that so many people think of it this way is a reflection on our community. Trumbull is a very accepting community and a production of Rent will only reflect that.”

By the way, remember how I mentioned that Mark had a commitment after the announcement of the cancellation which prevented her from springing to immediate action? It was a government class, and she was at the town hall from 3:30 to 10 p.m. Let’s help her and all the students at Trumbull High School ensure they’re able to do Rent this spring. Then let’s nominate Larissa Mark for public office. Imagine what she could do.

Note: Via e-mail, I reached out to Mark, Spillane and Guarino to request interviews at about 3:45 pm on Wednesday afternoon. Principal Guarino did not respond to my request, as he has not responded to any media requests thus far. Should I hear from him, this post will be updated accordingly.

Update, Wednesday December 4 at 8 am: Last night, at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Trumbull Board of Education, a letter from Trumbull High School principal Marc Guarino was read out. In the letter, Guarino affirmed his decision that Rent should not be produced at his school this year. To date, Mr. Guarino has personally made no public statement about his decision since his meeting with students on November 25, declining all media requests. That he would not personally appear to make his final decision known, and to participate in discussion about how he arrived at his conclusion, sets a poor example for public discourse. What at first seemed like it might yield a beneficial dialogue has taken on the air of an edict.

The August Wilson Cultural Center

If Trip Gabriel, the New York Times reporter who wrote yesterday’s story about the dire straits of the August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, were steeped in Wilson’s writing, he might have noted a sad irony. In August’s final play of his ten-play Century Cycle, Radio Golf, the plot turns on the fate of a decrepit house in the Hill District, the setting for almost all of the Cycle plays. The home of the great Aunt Ester, a seer and guide who reputedly lived for centuries, is standing in the way of urban redevelopment, until one of the men spearheading the project begins to regret the loss of this historic home and fights, at great personal cost, to save it.

That tale was August’s creation. But now two Wilson homes in Pittsburgh are on the precipice. The first is August’s actual boyhood home on the Hill, owned by one of his nephews but long boarded up; the other is the gleaming new downtown cultural center, opened only in 2009, on the verge of being taken by the bank to which it owes the money which funded its construction. It sits without programming and no visitors, used primarily by a megachurch that rents it on Sundays for its predominantly white congregation.

The August Wilson Theatre

With arts organizations like the Minneapolis Orchestra and the New York City Opera all but finished and already buried, respectively, it’s not difficult to understand how a new arts facility that opened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis has failed to succeed, but of course there are countless reasons that contributed both to its construction and its downfall. The story has been followed in detail in the Pittsburgh press; the Times story makes it a matter for national attention at a time when it may already be too far gone. It is nonetheless quite sad, since there deserves to be a commemoration of one of America’s greatest playwrights beyond the Broadway theatre that bears his name, long the home to Jersey Boys, though that honor is not unwelcome in the least.

Radio Golf At Yale Rep (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

In Radio Golf, Harmond Wilks risks his career and faces possible indictment, largely self-inflicted, in order to preserve history and the soul of a lost neighborhood. No doubt many people have made sacrifices and given support in the effort to create the August Wilson Cultural Center and it must be painful to see it failing so very publicly. I cannot help but wonder what his widow and his children must feel to see what was surely a source of emotional support and civic love rise and fall in just a few years time. That this happens just as reports of the precarious state of many of America’s black theatre companies have also gained national attention makes the story even sadder.

I have never believed in the “if you build it, they will come” school of arts promotion; I don’t know the people who led the Center or their specific plans and where they went awry. As no doubt some of them have, I would like to think that at the last minute some deus ex machina, or more specifically some deep pocketed individual or group, might rescue the Center, but that is the heart of a theatregoer speaking, not the mind of an administrator. Yet the administrator dreams that if by some miracle it happens, the Center is put in the hands of people with the commitment and skill to successfully and creatively run it.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at Yale Rep
(Photo: William B. Carter)

I came of age in the theatre just as August burst onto the national scene. I saw Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in a pre-Broadway engagement on the campus of my college, I saw the premiere of Joe Turner’s Come And Gone at Yale Rep; I saw The Piano Lesson in its first reading in the barn at The O’Neill Theatre Center as well as its final dress rehearsal at Yale; I attended the Broadway openings of Two Trains Running, Gem of The Ocean, and Radio Golf. I have seen many other productions of his work.  Though I knew August only casually, I was to have been a guest on a 60^th birthday barge trip on the Nile that he and his producing partner Ben Mordecai had planned together, because my wife worked with Ben, and therefore August; she was ultimately a producer of August’s final Cycle play. The trip never happened because the birthdays fell in 2005, the year that Ben’s cancer recurred, leading to his death in May, followed by August’s passing only months later.

August Wilson in 2004 (Photo: David Cooper)

So my most direct connection to August is one of a great opportunity missed, and I feel the same sense of lost opportunity as I read about the troubles of the Center in Pittsburgh. I wish I could rush out there and lend whatever help I can, but I don’t have the financial resources and it seems as if I would be much too late regardless. Even if Pittsburgh will lose what could have been an extraordinary cultural and community asset, at least America and the world will always have August’s Pittsburgh (and one fateful night in Chicago) through his writing . As I write this, Ruben Santiago-Hudson is sustaining August’s living legacy by enacting August’s words at the opening night of How I Learned What I Learned, a monologue Wilson originally wrote for himself to perform.

There is one bit of positive news that the Times missed. Wilson’s boarded up childhood home may yet see life again, as a plan to reopen it as a coffee shop was announced just over a week ago. Since August was well known for writing in coffee shops, perhaps that will be the truest memorial, rather than the $42 million edifice that never really become anyone’s home.

Rylance’s Richard III

When it comes to Shakespeare, not all plays are created equal. That’s far from a surprise to anyone who pays attention; Hamlet certainly ranks far ahead of King John in the canon, and even Coriolanus and Timon of Athens get more attention than Pericles. A great deal of this situation in recent years, at least in the U.S., is attributable to the educational curriculum, which has a strong hand in creating the “greatest hits.” The hierarchy is also a product of performers’ aspirations, and I daresay that when asked what Shakespeare roles they’d like to play, actors respond more frequently with Lear and Rosalind than Henry VIII and the Countess of Roussillon.

Rylance in Twelfth Night

The choices for the current Shakespeare plays in repertory on Broadway are among the more familiar titles, but they take on novelty for being all-male casts and indeed for being in rotating rep. Had it not been for the coincidence of a competing rep of Waiting For Godot and No Man’s Land in the same season, the Shakespeares would have been the only shows in rep on Broadway since the mid-90s. A key selling point in the Shakespeare rep is actor Mark Rylance, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night (or Twelfe Night as they’re spelling it in ads) and the title role in King Richard The Third.  After his triumphs in Boeing Boeing, La Bête and Jerusalem, one suspects the audiences would flock to anything Rylance chose to perform, except perhaps those poems he reads as award acceptance speeches.

The January calendar of Twelfth Night and Richard III

So while it’s hardly the discovery of a shocking secret, I was surprised today to discover that the Shakespeare rep doesn’t treat its productions as equals: in general there are six weekly performances of Twelfth Night and only two of Richard III. The producers (and perhaps Mr. Rylance) have decided that the market will bear plenty of comedy and not so much tragedy, with the added bonus that Stephen Fry appears only in the comedy, and for some of us, he’s a big draw too. They also may be saving a few dollars by making fewer set changeovers, since labor costs money.

I can’t say that I wouldn’t have lobbied for the same balance, if I’d had a say in the matter. I happen to have a great love for Twelfth Night, due to it having been the first play I worked on when I started at Hartford Stage in 1985. As for Richard III, even though I’ve seen terrific productions with Ian McKellen and Richard Thomas, among others, I always feel a bit lost in the constant realignment of loyalties throughout the play, and I rarely walk away having had an emotional experience, even as I might appreciate the talent on stage. Indeed, my college roommate, who has been my Shakespeare wingman for some three decades, was befuddled when I refused to see Richard III at BAM last year; I just didn’t feel like it and he wasn’t going to change my mind (he took his mother-in-law). By the way, I should note I have not yet seen the current Broadway shows.

Shakespeare scholars and Rylance buffs may be dismayed to learn of this programming imbalance. The former might not cotton to the elevation of a comedy over a history, but the latter may just be realizing that if they wish to be Rylance completists, they’d better hustle up on getting tickets, because the Richard III inventory is much scarcer than the seats for Twelfth Night.  As for whether there’s a deeper meaning to favoring one play over the other beyond gauging the marketplace, I leave that for the academics to debate.

P.S. Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land each play four shows a week. Make of that, you should pardon the expression, What You Will.

November 21, 2013

President Barack Obama

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington DC  20500

Dear President Obama:

There was an anniversary yesterday, and I’m willing to bet that you forgot all about it. You didn’t need to send a card, but it would have been nice if you’d made some gesture of recognition, of concern. Presidents often do that sort of thing, especially when they’re stalling about something. But since you were silent, I’ll remind you: yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the day that Rocco Landesman announced his resignation as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Now I can understand if you don’t remember the letter I wrote you about this in June, expressing my concern about this issue; it might have registered somewhere in your press office, but there are probably lots of bloggers yapping about this issue or that every day. Yet in August, your inaction on this topic was written about on successive days by Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times and Frank Rizzo in The Hartford Courant, and surely those are outlets that your media team pays closer attention to. But months have passed since then, still without a word.

I wouldn’t, as David Letterman says, give your problems to a monkey on a rock, especially with the current Obamacare debacle and the Senate denying hearings on some of your judicial nominations. But as a citizen who places the arts very highly among issues dear to me, your seeming abdication of responsibility or interest in the National Endowment for the Arts and its empty chairmanship has become not only absurd but insulting.  It’s bad enough that the NEA is a frequent and easy target for those who want to carve up the budget willy-nilly or wage some fatuous war on culture, but without the full force of the presidency behind the agency, the government’s commitment to the arts (and the humanities, since the NEH is in the same boat) suggests that they are of no value to anyone at all in Washington, since it is the Democrats who usually speak up most strongly in defense of government funding of the arts.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, if you don’t have the time to have someone on your staff deal with this, then by all means nominate Joan Shikegawa, the acting chair, and let her fully assume the leadership mantle. The agency may be functioning as it stands, but you’re hobbling it by not appointing an officially vested leader. It’s also worth mentioning that in the past few weeks, two key staff positions have also opened up at the NEA, as Ralph Remington, head of the theatre and musical theatre program leaves for a job with Actors Equity, and the agency’s chief of staff Jamie Bennett decamps for ArtPlace America. I’m not saying there’s any connection here, simply that at a time when the agency has important decisions to make very soon, you have proven unable to make one after a full year’s time.

I take no pleasure in watching you struggle these days, but after an almost playful tone in my prior communiqué, my sense of humor on this topic is pretty much gone. I still support you, Mr. President, but I’m impatient now. Surely someone in your staff can vet candidates and get someone appropriate ready for your review. But in the meantime, your silence is sending a very negative message about the future of government funding of the arts and the value of the arts in Americans’ lives. You disappoint me and my colleagues and to be honest Mr. President, when you start making us angry, you’re really chipping away at your base.

Sincerely,

Howard Sherman

Addendum: 20 minutes after I posted this letter, Mark Swed, music critic at The Los Angeles Times, posted an excellent essay about President Kennedy’s one-time role as “arts patron in chief.” It speaks directly to the leadership gap in this area today and throws the problem of the NEA into even greater relief.

When I saw it for the first time last week, I was really struck by the poster for the West End debut of the musical Urinetown. Why? Because it didn’t look like a theatre poster. It looked like a movie poster.

In point of fact, it looked to a certain degree like the poster for Star Trek: Into Darkness, which owed a debt to the poster for The Dark Knight Rises. Many movie posters are endlessly iterative and imitative, as they want to subtly remind you of other successful films in the same genre. I give points to Urinetown UK for evoking dark futures with humanity under threat – completely consistent with the world conjured in the show. Equally apt, it counters the darkness by placing a young attractive couple, reaching for a drop of water, at the center of a spaghetti-tangle of (empty) pipes, and they added a tagline: “A drop of hope can change the world.”

It has taken almost a decade since Urinetown’s Broadway closing for it to reach England, so the opportunity to capitalize on Broadway buzz has long since faded, That certainly suggests one reason why the graphic bears no relationship to the Broadway marketing material, unlike The Producers, The Book of Mormon, Jersey Boys and so many other US to UK transfers. That works in two directions as well, since Mamma Mia! and Matilda ads look the same in both countries, having started in London.

As I pondered the Urinetown UK art, it struck me that one reason the vast majority of theatre ad design looks so different from movie ad design is that while a movie is trying to simply drive sales and pique interest, theatre designs, more often than not, are trying to build a brand. If theatre images emphasize a star, they could be undermining a long run, since eventually stars leave; movies have no such problem. Think of the image of Les Mis’ Cosette: as the show ran and ran, the image became so ubiquitous that they could run ads without the show’s title and you would know what the ad was for. Producer Cameron Mackintosh’s team even could play with the image, running variations on Cosette that honored holidays or welcomed other shows to Broadway. And it was hardly the only show to do that: think of the Phantom’s mask, the eyes of Cats, the Chagall-esque Fiddler on the Roof, Larry Kert running after Carol Lawrence for West Side Story (though that would eventually be supplanted by Saul Bass’ fire escape logo for the film). Colleges, high schools and community theatres use knock-offs of these designs for years and years.

As I’ve said, it’s the lapse in time that has afforded Urinetown UK the chance to go in another direction, since given the relative age of the show, it doesn’t undermine a worldwide branding effort.  The other reason they have that opportunity: in my opinion, the original Urinetown graphic never became iconic. Do you remember it? Perhaps only vaguely, and I suggest that’s because it was only a type treatment, as opposed to an image, a true logo, a brand.

To digress for a moment: when I worked at Hartford Stage, one of my responsibilities was to work with a range of local designers to secure pro bono graphic designs for each of our shows. In addition to keeping expenses down, it insured that each show would have its own feel and look, with the ads held together by a very solid, strong and consistently utilized company logo. In this process, the artistic director had only one edict – there must be some representation of the human in every graphic. He believed that people are at the center of theatre, that audiences come to watch people on stage, and so the human element – sometimes nothing more than an eye or a hand – was a reminder of the unique nature of live theatre. In hindsight, thinking back over 50 shows, I believe he was right and I’ve advocated for this approach ever since. To be fair, not every design was perfect, and some worked better as art than as marketing, but the best remain those that followed the artistic director’s dictum. If you think of great theatre graphics, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find the majority do so as well. That’s why, at least in my estimation, there’s not a graphic image from the Broadway Urinetown that lingers in memory.

But turning back to Urinetown UK, as I have often this week, I continue to applaud the complexity and sophistication of its imagery, which come to think of it also recalls that used for Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.  I was so intrigued, that I took the time to watch a three-minute promo video for the show and, to be honest, it ended up showing me what I think is missing from the Urinetown campaign. A barrage of words flew at me from a variety of speakers, all describing the experience of the show: epic, wackadoo, eco-friendly, apocalyptic, daring, exciting, entertainment, political, adventurous and satirical wit. Director Jamie Lloyd said he hoped it would advance “conversations about climate change, environmental disaster, the moral responsibility of big business.”

But looking at the poster and watching this video, I realized that something has been, if not forgotten, downplayed for this Urinetown, at least as I know the show.

It’s very, very funny. I laughed a lot.

Not only that, it is especially funny to those who know and love musicals, since it’s “satirical wit” is focused, in part, on previous, iconic musicals.

Now if it is Lloyd’s intention to lean heavily on the show’s Brechtian overtones and downplay the humor, then you can probably ignore everything from here on in.  But if Urinetown UK– with all of its topical, political and social overtones – is to retain its irreverent take on both a world without water and its stance as a love letter to musical comedy, then I’d urge the powers that be to tweak the tone of their rhetoric and their imagery, lest they mislead their potential audience – and those who buy. Remember, you’re fighting a title that, for some, carries a whiff of something distasteful, even while it becomes a memorable point of distinction from most other musical theatre.

I’ve heard it said many times that if a show is a hit, its logo – whatever it is – looks brilliant. And perhaps in the long run, if there is in the long run, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when you’re trying to set expectations and lure audiences, every communication is freighted with meaning (it can even effect the advance perception of critics who were previously unfamiliar with the material), and what I remember most of Urinetown was having a darned good time.

It’s not unusual for book releases to be coordinated with a related event taking place elsewhere in the media circus: the autobiography that appears just as a star’s major film is coming out, the personal memoir that primes the public for a political campaign. However, no one can accuse Julie Taymor of engaging in such wanton promotion – she certainly can’t be pleased that Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (Simon & Schuster, $25) debuts just as she returns to the stage with A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. One imagines she’d have been happier if there were no book at all.

Countless people are reading and writing about the book as another chapter in the seemingly never-ending saga of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, the headline generating musical that has been the target of brickbats from arts journalists virtually since the show was first announced. Spider-Man: TOTD seemed to throw raw meat to the media at every turn, ranging from fundraising challenges and production delays to several highly publicized cast injuries which seemed to turn the show into a latter-day Roman arena. It kept Patrick Healy of the Times and Michael Riedel of the Post in competition for breaking tidbits in a manner rarely seen before.

I didn’t find Berger’s book particularly revealing, largely because it covers ground that had been extensively reported elsewhere, and I confess to having consumed the events as they happened. In fact, I made a point of seeing the very final performance of the Taymor version and the opening night of the version reworked without her – and, for the most part, Berger’s – consent, after they had been supplanted by Philip William McKinley and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa respectively. Yes, I watched the show’s travails, as most did, as a theatrical car wreck in slow motion, a modern-day tragedy of creative hubris played played out in benday dots and rock chords.

For all that Berger recounts, the book constantly reminds the reader that it is the story of Spider-Man: TOTD as viewed through one person’s biased eyes – rather than the whole story. Berger goes out of his way to paint himself as a innocent caught up in the maelstrom of vastly more famous, and vastly wealthier, artists than himself. His emphasis on being separated from his family, of his personal financial troubles, of how different his world is from that of his acclaimed and wealthy collaborators Bono and Taymor – they grow tiresome, as if Berger deserves some sympathy or absolution for his role in the debacle by virtue of his less lofty perch. But he’s not exactly Nick Carraway observing the actions of Gatsby and the Buchanans – he’s a willing participant until his own calculations backfire on him, severing his ties forever with Taymor, who he has built up as his own artistic Daisy. To compare him to Faust conveys a grandeur I decline to confer.

The fact is, reading Berger’s book is like watching only one viewpoint from Rashomon, and one is all too aware that others undoubtedly have very different versions of the same events. I can’t help but suspect that the musical might at best be a page or two should Bono write his life story; producer Michael Cohl would no doubt recount the saga as a story of how he rescued a damaged show that most believed was dead on arrival; should Taymor tell her version, it will be of an artist (herself) persecuted by greedy philistines. Whether anyone will care to follow the tale repeatedly refracted through varying prisms is anyone’s guess, though that might be the only way to get the real story.

All of this should not suggest that Berger’s book has no value. It is, at the very least, a superb answer to the perennial question about troubled or failed shows: “Didn’t anyone realize how bad it was going to be?” The book is an encyclopedia of ignorance, ego and self-delusion, a look at how a theatrical property, especially one with such a high profile, almost becomes unstoppable, and the many ways in which it can go wrong, of how perspective is lost when you are so close to the work for so long.  Aspiring producers should read it as a cautionary tale – not about a one-off disaster, but rather about when it pays to just say no, shut a show down, and move on, since Spider-Man may be the most expensive show to date, but there are plenty of complete flops that followed much the same misguided path.

Inevitably, Berger’s book will find its way onto many a theatrical bookshelf, even if it doesn’t have the elegance or educational value of many other books with which it shares conceptual and theatrical DNA. As I read it, I was reminded of a book about a vastly less well known disaster: playwright Arnold Wesker’s The Birth of Shylock, The Death of Zero Mostel, a chronicle of a quick Broadway flop notable mostly for the death of Mostel, its leading actor, who died while the show was trying out in Philadelphia. Like Berger, Wesker seems almost entirely unaware of his own complicity in the show’s failure, even as he repeatedly tells about his taking aside actors to countermand the edicts of the show’s director, John Dexter.  Shylock the show is in the dustbin of Broadway history, whereas the legend of Spider-Man will surely go on; however, the author’s account of the production of Shylock makes for better literature than Song of Spider-Man.

While there are certainly great Broadway books  of autobiography (Moss Hart’s Act One is an exemplar of the kind), more often than not the best chroniclers are those on the fringes or outside of a production entirely. Ted Chapin’s Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical ‘Follies’ is an impeccable recent example of the former, derived from Chapin’s own notes as a production assistant on the original Follies; William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look At Broadway has long stood as a grand achievement of the latter. Of course, in both cases, the authors were given rare access, which seems almost impossible in the more media savvy world of today; the film industry was reminded about the danger of giving journalism too much access when critic Julie Solomon roamed free on the set of a Brian DePalma film, resulting in The Devil’s Candy: Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, a detailed chronicle of the famous flop The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Though it covers work which is vastly less infamous and some 50 years in the past, I daresay that Jack O’Brien’s recent Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $35) is the more worthy, entertaining and educational insider theatre book of the year. While O’Brien could have easily produced a standard memoir, given his own considerable achievements as a director, he followed Chapin’s lead and instead opted to write about the access he had as a young man to a remarkable confluence of talents: the members of the APA and later the APA-Phoenix theatre companies, which included Richard Easton, Rosemary Harris and above all the now little-remembered Ellis Rabb. I know firsthand what a wealth of stories Jack can tell about his own exploits, but by deciding to honor the artists who formed his own aesthetic, he has written a work of history and memoir that is ultimately more important and informative than Berger’s attempt to make a few more dollars off the Spider-Man debacle.

Perhaps, one day, a young PA on Spider-Man: TOTD will emerge with his or her own book, to draw the truest picture of what went on as the web collapsed.  Until then, we’re left with a lopsided recap of a story that we mostly know, told by what is called, in literary circles, an unreliable narrator.