Fans pick 100 books like A History of Japanese Theatre

This book is probably the first scholarly book that blew my mind and pushed me to want to know what else I had always gotten wrong.

Where, like most people I know, I had always thought that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was just a thing that happened because of “war,” this book made it clear why it happened.

The US and Japan, both diplomats and everyday people, did not choose to understand each other. Different world views, different assumptions, and plain old racism led the US and Japan into a horrific, bloody conflict with long-lasting consequences.

This book provides an accessible introduction to butoh. Centered on the perspectives of its co-founder Kazuo Ohno and his son Yoshito Ohno, the first half of the book by Yoshito offers a useful outline of Kazuo’s life in dance. The second half provides insightful personal reflections, evocative photographs, detailed processes, and some of the relationships deriving from Kazuo’s workshops in his studio in Yokohama. The book reflects on Ohno’s distinctly ‘modern’ sensibility and worldview, as compared with the experimental-traditional fusion of butoh’s co-founder, Hijikata Tatsumi. Their mutual interest in the non-human and non-living generated a unique dance form that continues in the present.

In Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan, the social historian Mikiso Hane offers neglected insights on Japanese society from the margins. Hane’s people's history of modern Japan uses diaries, memoirs, fiction, trial testimony, personal recollections, and eyewitness accounts of peasants, factory and industrial workers, and outsiders to detail lived experiences of ordinary people. The perspective from the underclasses resonates with Hijikata’s butoh and his life experiences.

This book has helped me think through the relationship between capitalism, modernity, and romantic anti-capitalist movements both in East Asia and beyond. The book deals with intellectual currents in interwar Japan, (the 1920s to 1945) and shows how conservative philosophers developed a theory to “overcome modernity.” These authors, many from the so-called Kyoto School, targeted the rampant consumer culture, the overturning of ethical relations, and other structural changes. However, Harootunian contends that such critiques did not grasp the fundamental dynamic of capitalism and its relation to such cultural shifts and consequently, such philosophers were “overcome by modernity.”  This means that such critics of modernity were incorporated into the Japanese fascist military complex, which itself claimed to confront capitalist modernity. At a time, when we see right-wing attempts to confront modernity around the world (Trump, Le Pen, Modi) this book remains extremely relevant.  

While the first two links are a good introduction to classical drama and theatre for the uninitiated, this third choice is different, a vast and unparalleled compendium covering productions of the whole corpus of direct and marginal translations of Greek tragedy on the English stage over some 250 years.

It is a work of reference rather than a ‘good read’, but it is a book into which I hope everyone would find reason to dip who believes in research as an essential feature of creative preparation for the new production of a ‘classic’.

The book is written by two of the most prominent and inspirational contemporary classical scholars whose prolific output in kindred areas of the classics and of theatre history has little rival.

Issues such as stage censorship, social and political change and translation bias show how the classical repertoire from Aeschylus through to Seneca has made it possible,… show more.

This excellent collection of articles by the top connoisseurs of East European art and culture discusses how Ukrainians and Jews created new trends in art and literature in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil Kyiv, then short-lived capital of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and later of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This book proves that avant-garde images and trends emerge from the revolutionary utopianism and the desire to create a universalistic language understandable beyond the ethnic divide and languages.

As a teacher of History and Musicals at NYU, I’ve seen how theatre students are most interested in the shows they know, which typically means those produced in their lifetime. So I try to meet them where they are and then journey backwards into the past. While Singular Sensation moves forward in time from the 1990s, it shows how the Broadway we know today came to be. And who could resist reading about Patti LuPone throwing a floor lamp out her dressing room window when Andrew Lloyd Webber fired her from Sunset Boulevard? So I hope you’ll come back for more and read Riedel’s equally dishy yet informative Razzle Dazzle, which is about Broadway in the 1970s, when someone could mug you at knifepoint in broad daylight on 42nd Street (and, in my case, did).

The chronology of my Shakespeare-era novels hasn’t reached The Tempest, but I love how this novel features a production of the play—in a prison. The relation of the inmates to their roles and the protagonist’s personal crisis give Prospero and his island new life in a setting also set apart from society. I enjoyed how the characters come to realizations about Shakespeare’s play as they rehearse, the goal of my own novels from a different angle. Many spinoffs from Shakespeare use his plot devices, but Atwood relies on The Tempest for her plot. Each ‘best’ novel here reveals new visions to the reader and gains plot and suspense from the links to Shakespeare. Though my goals aren’t identical to these authors', their works offer inspiration.

One of my all-time favourite stories is Romeo and Juliet but since it’s been covered so many times before it rarely feels new. However, Always Never Yours is a strong adaptation of this classic as it provides such an original viewpoint. Megan is definitely no Juliet, she is the one before guys meet their ‘one.’ She’s used to never being chosen and instead focuses on her ambitions in theatre directing. However, to get into her dream college she needs an acting credit. Seeking the comfort of the smallest part in the play, she’s aghast to be cast as Juliet. I love a story that shows us the development of a character and this is a great illustration of that as we follow Megan’s journey of self-discovery and love.

Widge is an orphan in Elizabethan England, where orphans are sadly too common. But Widge is unusual. He has a unique talent which he learned from his first master: he knows a secret kind of shorthand. Sold to a dastardly villain who wants to use that talent to steal Shakespeare’s newest play, Widge finds himself in London apprenticing with the theatre company. Will he steal the play or risk his life to be loyal to the only “family” he’s ever known? Inspired by Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain's Men – and a very real problem of plays being stolen – there’s plenty of action, including swashbuckling swordplay. From the first page, I found myself rooting for Widge, hoping he would make the right choice and live to become an actor in the company.