Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.

Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .

Chris Jones. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton (New York and London: Methuen Drama, 2019). 226pp.

20th Edition.

Chris Jones, longtime chief theater critic of the Chicago Tribune, whose book Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater (2013) was reviewed here recently, is the author of this valuable volume surveying over a dozen American theater milestones from the 1990s to the mid- 2010s. His purpose is to demonstrate how these plays, musicals, and their creators were linked both by the influence of each new one’s artistic and intellectual breakthroughs, and by their relationship to major socio-political issues of the day. 

Jones begins with Tony Kushner’s 1993 Angels in America, representing (among others) the impact of the AIDS epidemic on dramatic writing. He then uses Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles (1994), about the eruptions tied to the Rodney King beating, to analyze the emergence of topical solo plays. The gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side is explained in relation to Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996), while Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King (1997) discusses such things as the cultural diversification of Broadway, the creative inspiration of director Julie Taymor, and Disney’s increasing power on the Great White Way. The potency of August Wilson’s plays, among them King Hedley II (1999), is closely explicated. 

The damage to Broadway business after the tragedy of 9/11 is described before we read about how Mary Zimmerman’s imaginative staging in a pool of Ovid’s Metamorphoses helped pull people back into a theater, and how Mel Brooks’s The Producers (2001) tickled thousands of ribs. (This show is also discussed in Brooks’s memoir, All About Me!, the subject of next week’s column.) Jones would have to wait a while before major works about 9/11 itself were available; he mentions plays like Stephen Karam’s The Humans (2016) and the musical Come From Away (2017), but only in passing.

Jones shifts his view to Las Vegas for a 2002 chapter that examines that city’s ambitions with shows like Cirque du Soleil, Avenue Q, Spamalot, and Wicked, before adding another 2002 chapter focused on Edward Albee’s controversial The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, about a marriage upended when the husband falls in love with a goat; the chapter also looks at Off-Broadway’s decline in the commercial production of straight drama. 

The explosive debut of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2007), and its unusual exploration of a family drama set in rural Oklahoma, gets a chapter, in conjunction with its relationship to the recession then plaguing America. It’s followed by a 2010 chapter devoted to the rock musical American Idiot, in which Jones handles both the show’s creative innovations in staging Green Day’s hit concept album, and American Idiot’s thematic relationship to issues raised by the just-ended war in Iraq. 

Then, in a chapter that questions the ubiquity of Wikipedia as the most widely used reference source for historical subjects (among others), Jones investigates another 2010 musical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, about the seventh president and his problematic populist administration. As in several other places in the book, the administration of the 45th president manages to get nicked by a critical bullet.

Concerned as much about Broadway’s commercial practices as the ideas behind the shows it produces, Jones offers a detailed analysis of the spectacular failure of the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011), which, at $75 million, is the most expensive show in Broadway history. He next considers the hit 2014 revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), starring Denzel Washington, in connection with the political promise represented by the Obama administration. The visit of Michelle and Barack Obama to a performance is linked to their cultural outreach and the efflorescence of theatrical performances during their White House residence. 

All of which prepares the way for the period’s theatrical apogee, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015), which provides an uplifting hip-hop account of Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who grew to prominence despite a background as an impoverished immigrant, only to be killed in a duel with Aaron Burr. There’s as much here about Miranda as there is about his show.

Jones, a talented reviewer, offers incisive discussions of the various shows he includes, both for their ideological content, when appropriate, and their socio-political significance. He carefully unwraps the chief topical issues of the day, helping to clarify the importance of the shows to which they’re somehow connected.

But he also provides background on the creative talents involved, as well as valuable historical information relative to the origins and development of the shows they produced. When talking about Rent, for example, he’s as diligent in writing about the lawsuit brought against the producers by dramaturg Lynn Thomson as he is in explaining the show’s genesis. And Jones is just as interested in the business done by the shows he’s chosen as he is about their content.  

Apart from a few scattered places where his analytical writing gets a bit foggy, Jones’s prose is clear and lively, and his thoughts always worth attending to. However, while his book has an index, it lacks both illustrations and a bibliography. Still, Rise Up! is a book for both those interested in dramatic (and musical) content and those fond of well-documented show-biz commentary. And, its compact size and length make it a suitable beach companion.

Rise Up! makes a wise decision to tell the story of 13 years of Broadway theater by concentrating on only a select number of shows, most, but not all, commercial successes. All contributed to the artistic-intellectual zeitgeist that led to the last great production before the birth of Hamilton. Since the book was published in 2019, it just missed bumping into the Covid-19 pandemic. What, one wonders, would Chris Jones have chosen had he been able to name a post-pandemic show that followed in the tradition he was exploring? Suffs, perhaps, but, to date, nothing pandemic related . . . 

Coming up: Mel Brooks, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business

Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.