A helpful primer for anyone mounting a production, from school auditoriums to regional stages.
Lane, a six-time Tony Award–winning Broadway producer, offers a guide for aspiring impresarios.
The author has drawn upon a career spanning more than 35 productions to create a practical handbook for educators, community theater leaders, students, and anyone else intending to put on a show at an amateur level. The book offers a comprehensive blueprint for mounting a successful show, taking readers through the full production cycle—including selecting and licensing a show, assembling a creative team, making a budget, finding a performance space, holding auditions and rehearsals, marketing, and playwriting. The work is distinguished in a crowded field of theater how-to guides by Lane’s instinct for anecdote—he recounts the $300,000 elevator in Thoroughly Modern Millie that ended up being used twice per show, the fire alarm that cleared the house on the night the critics came, and Sutton Foster stepping into the role of Millie and never stepping out. Perhaps most memorable is his account of Frankenstein’s single-night Broadway run in 1981, “the most expensive nonmusical ever to open and close in one night,” a distinction that the author wears as a badge of honor and parlays into a sharp lesson about show selection. The work deftly balances Lane’s professional insights with practical accessibility; the text includes sample budgets, rehearsal schedules, sponsorship plans, and current licensing data, making it immediately useful for readers undertaking their own productions (the book serves both the high school drama teacher spending $7,000 and the producer dreaming bigger). Occasionally, the author pivots from providing practical advice for local-level theater producers to discussions of Broadway-level concerns, leading to moments that feel less relevant—and potentially overwhelming—for less experienced producers with limited resources. A chapter on playwriting feels somewhat tacked on, sitting apart from the book’s central focus on production. Still, Lane’s conversational prose and palpable enthusiasm for theater keep the material engaging and approachable.
A helpful primer for anyone mounting a production, from school auditoriums to regional stages.Pub Date: July 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781963549218
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Broad Book Press
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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