If you found the television show Smash insufferably unreal, here's the antidote. In The Untold Stories of Broadway Volume 1 (Dress Circle Publishing, $19.99), showbiz insider Jennifer Ashley Tepper has collected first-hand narratives from scores of Broadway professionals who tell us how it really happens.
You can see it in Tepper's smile, she's a go-to Broadway Baby. She hit New York fresh out of college, and her infectious enthusiasm and theatrical savvy quickly landed her an array of jobs in every aspect of theatre life. Tepper, currently 28 and the director of programming at Manhattan's hot show club 54 Below, has been kind of a backstage and creative team gypsy. She thought she'd write a book about her experiences. "But after working on theater projects with so many different people," she told an interviewer, "it came to me that this was the perfect idea for a book."
Untold Stories of Broadway finds its organization by recounting the histories of Broadway houses, chronologically, show by show, as told by the folks who lived them. This first volume (oh, joy, there's more to come!) covers eight theatres, including the legendary Winter Garden. Tepper talked to the writers, composers, producers, choreographers, designers, actors, and gypsies, lots of gypsies, whose stories of their work on countless shows always go untold (outside of A Chorus Line). In many ways even more fascinating than these people are the doormen, the ushers, and technicians, especially the technicians. Fly men and riggers and console punchers and scene changers and dressers tell the sort of backstage stories you just don't find in standard bios and interviews. Their insight is treasurable, and what wonderful tales they have of how shows, perhaps your favorite show, was run, and how it was guided through its paces every night by an unseen army of skilled show folk.
In her enthusiasm, Tepper gushes a little, and there's perhaps a bit too much of her own history, as well as a lenience allowed to coverage of shows she worked on. There's some cliche (the moment an unknown was discovered, and "engaged on the spot") and hyperbole: "As [he] sang the title tune for the last time, tears flung off his face and hit the edge of the stage. I reached out and touched them." But who could blame her in the thrill of it all, when her passion ferrets out testament about shows that is as fun for us to read as it will be important to future historians. She doesn't intrude on her subjects' narratives, and she considerately provides footnotes for terms of art that will most likely be unfamiliar. Without them, would you know what it is to "run the piano boards?"
It's notable that a portion of the proceeds from the book will benefit Broadway Impact, an organization of theater artists and fans mobilized in support of marriage equality. Finally, I'm serious, no hyperbole at all, when I say I just can't wait for the next volume.