Theater Geek

By Mickey Rapkin. Free Press. 208 pages. $25.

I’m putting off an appreciation of Finishing the Hat for another week. If Sondheim can spend decades scribbling ideas in journals for it, then so can I. Instead, I dip back to a book that came out nearly a year ago, in which Sondheim is the only sacred presence.

I like Mickey Rapkin’s books because in an age of non-fiction which paints our national concerns in very broad strokes—ultraconservative vs. hyperliberal, revisionist biographies which subject historic figures to a narrow checklist of enlightened contemporary values, not to mention all those autobiographies of anyone who ever sang or danced on a TV reality show—Rapkin’s delves into the details, outlining quirky little passions. He refuses to inflate these artistic obsessions into grand statements about The World Today.

By focusing on, and deeply respecting, the ensemble performance proclivities of young adults, he says more about how we relate in a fame-driven culture than a roomful of Humanities professors. And he makes it as entertaining and twisty-turny as a season of Glee.

Rapkin’s first book, Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory, actually beat glee to the punch, examining decades of singing groups like the Beelzebubs at Tufts University, who were transcending the art of a cappella performance even if few outside of those who had to compete against them noticed or cared. ( I am a Tufts alum myself and wrote strenuously about the Beelzebubs for several semesters. I wish it had occurred to me what a fertile ground for a boo (fiction or non) their escapades and cameraderie could be.)

In Theater Geek, Rapkin takes on Stagedoor Manor, the performing arts camp in the Catskills. Again, his non-nonsense reporting on day-to-day operations  is more valuable than any big-picture or high-concept overlays about the camp’s cultural value beyond its rolling lawns.

What’s particularly impressive is that the two elements which would totally distract anyone else writing a book about Stagedoor Manor—that it was the basis for a motion picture and that several future stars of stage and screen went there—don’t seem to interest Rapkin very much. He mentions such stuff, surely, but off-handedly. Which is exactly right. Some of that lauded alums had other legs-up in their quest for stardom (parents in the business, other good schools, lucky breaks), so it would be inaccurate to lay too much credit at Stagedoor’s doors. And that movie, Camp, by former Stagedoor camper Todd Graff, is a fond tribute to the place but also an uneven one thwarted by all its hokey romantic and bromantic subplots. Graff also riffs too heavily on the admittedly funny joke of kids doing adult drama—there’s a closing clip of tykes tackling Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for instance. That’s another aspect that Theater Geek soft-pedals.

Rapkin certainly finds a lot of questionable artistic decisions to carp about, and a bunch of imperious performers to profile. But he does so on their own terms, within the Stagedoor boundaries. He takes care to explain how rare an environment this is, and how the campers comport themselves so brashly there because they’re pariahs just about everywhere else. The only garish and glittery part of the narrative is the constant praise being sung of Sondheim. But I guess that’s to be expected of starstruck teens.

It’s a thrill to read such an even-handed chronicle of such a sensationalized and odd phenomenon as a Broadway-styled summer camp, which pumps out pint-sized productions of The Wild Party, Avenue Q, Sweeney Todd and Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. A lot of general readers simply find the idea of it strange and delightful, but Rapkin also writes for theater folk who immediately want to peek behind the curtains and ask “Really? How’d they pull that off?”