Fascinating book about the author’s life and the role he played in the theater (including Broadway), while also coming to terms of his sexuality.

This was such an enjoyable book. As someone who has seen all four of Jeffrey Seller's Tony Award-winning musicals, I really loved learning about how he ended up where he did. I only would have loved to learn more about his post-Rent time producing on Broadway as I feel that could have included so much more and felt a bit rushed at the end. It was interesting learning about his childhood and what ultimately brought him to some of the biggest shows on Broadway.

When Jeffrey Seller was 18 years old and frustrated at his new job as the drama director at a summer camp for kids, somebody handed him a copy of Moss Hart’s 1959 memoir “Act One,” touting it as the best book about the theater ever written. Seller, who went on to become a successful Broadway producer best-known for the landmark musicals “Rent” and “Hamilton,” sees reading Hart’s book as a significant enough moment in his life that he writes about it in his own memoir, “Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir” (Simon and Schuster, 368 pages.)

It’s clear why. Hart, who also got his start directing theater at a summer camp, had grown up in an impoverished, embittered family in the Bronx — and went on to become a huge success on Broadway. Seller himself had grown up in an impoverished, embittered family, in a neighborhood outside Detroit so ramshackle that it was nicknamed Cardboard Village.

“If Moss Hart can do it, can I?” Seller recalls asking himself.

Not long after he writes about “Act One,” Seller tells us how he read another revelatory memoir, Harold Prince’s 1974 “Contradictions” (which was updated and reissued four decades later as “Sense of Occasion”)

“It comes to me in a flash: I want to do what Hal Prince does. But how?”

If we don’t know exactly how much these two memoirs goaded Seller into his illustrious career, they both seem to have helped guide him in writing his new memoir. “Theater Kid” may not be the best book about the theater ever written, but it’s pretty damn engaging: convincing dialogue, well-drawn portraits; the appealing perspective of a yearning outsider; the useful perspective of a knowledgeable insider. It would have been better, though, had he chosen either Hart or Prince as his apparent model, rather than both.

Hart’s “Act One” (which in 2014 was adapted into a Broadway play) focuses on Hart’s childhood, his enthusiasm for theater, and his earliest theatrical experiences. “The theater is not so much a profession as a disease,” Hart famously wrote, “and my first look at Broadway was the beginning of a lifelong infection.” Hart’s memoir ends with the long and elaborate effort to stage his first big Broadway success, a play he wrote with his mentor George S. Kaufman, “Once In A Lifetime.” The memoir completely omits Hart’s later and much greater successes — as a director (Tony winner for “My Fair Lady”), a playwright (Pulitzer-winner for “You Can’t Take It With You”) a librettist (working with Irving Berlin Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers), a producer (“Camelot.”) This is why it’s called “Act One.”

By contrast, Hal Prince’s memoir is a less personal albeit candid show-by-show analysis of his productions over his long celebrated career as director and producer.

“Theater Kid” is divided into three sections, labeled “Acts,” the first two of which seem to use Hart’s memoir as a blueprint. Seller’s Act One focuses on his childhood, mixing tales of a dysfunctional family with detailed accounts of his theatrical experiences, from his very first as an actor (in the local synagogue’s Purim play) and a playwright (“Adventureland” – the script is included – which he staged with his friends), both at age 9, progressing through a youth theater called Rag-a-Muffins and community theater called Stagecrafters. These early chapters read like a YA book – complete with illustrations – seemingly intended for young readers for whom the title fits. Seller not only explains theatrical terms like blocking, but seamlessly works his explanations into his narrative by telling us where, when and how he first learned each term.

The theater was the only place where he felt he belonged. He was adopted; he eventually realized that he was gay; and he had a difficult relationship with a well-meaning, colorful father who was erratic (largely the result of a brain-damaging motorcycle accident), sometimes abusive, and frequently flatulent. Seller’s childhood anecdotes are rife with blunt descriptions of intestinal distress and bodily fluids.

There is also a captivating account of first love. This was a serious relationship. Both residents of Oak Park, Michigan, they were brought together in part by their mutual love of theater, they lived together during college at the University of Michigan; they collaborated on theater projects; they kept in touch after they broke up. Yet, although Seller writes about him extensively, and tells us his real name – Andrew Lippa – the author for some reason doesn’t explicitly identify Lippa as the now well-known, Tony-nominated Broadway composer. (Later chapters include graphic accounts of sexual encounters that make “Theater Kid” unlikely to be shelved with the YA books.)

Act Two begins when, after graduating from college, Seller moves to New York City in 1986. On an earlier job-hunting trip to the city, he had attended Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Song and Dance,” where Bernadette Peters portrayed a newcomer to New York who says “It’s the one place on earth I want to be.” Seller repeats that line to the owner of a small New York press office who has just asked him if he would be interested in an entry level job. But, once he’s moved, his experiences are somewhat less sentimental (“The Times Square station is like Dante’s Inferno if Dante’s Inferno also smelled like piss.”)

The foundations for his later career as a producer begin with a subsequent entry level job with the famed Tony-winning producers Barry and Fran Weissler (“Working at the Weissler office is like getting a PhD in Broadway producing.”) His job, though, was in their booking department. A booker is a seller – his name helped him get the job – who convinces theaters throughout the United States outside of New York City to present a show (in this case a Weissler-produced one.)

It is a job he apparently did quite well, although it never much interested him. This is why he moonlighted for Temple Rodeph Sholom, putting together a concert of Frank Loesser songs, including those from the movie “Hans Christian Anderson.” So, when the Weisslers commission the legendary Tommy Tune and Maury Yeston to put together a stage adaptation of that movie musical, Seller takes it on himself to give critical notes about the script to Fran Weissler. His immediate supervisor, Susan Weaving, is outraged.
“Sell it, don’t smell it,” she says.
“What?”
“You’re a booker. You’re not the producer or the director or the dramaturg, whatever the fuck that is. Your job is to sell the show, don’t tell them what’s wrong with it.”

After several years gaining experience and contacts, he launches his own booking business with Kevin McCollum, a development recounted at some length. He’s still a booker, but as he explains (in a different context): “The tiny business of Broadway is built on friendships, alliances and favors.” Their booking business – called the Booking Office – becomes a producing office.

The final four chapters of Act Two are devoted to the process of producing “Rent.”
A colleague from the Weissler office had invited him to go with her to see “Boho Days, a rock monologue by Jonathan Larson.” Seller is overwhelmed: “It feels like he’s singing directly to me… By the time he gets to the line ‘what a way to spend a day,’ in a song recounting his love of doing theater as a boy, the dam behind my eyes breaks open… I’ve never met this man and yet his musical feels like my life. How did he know my story?” Seller writes Larson a letter (reprinted in full) telling him how much his show meant to him, how he too wants to do “great things in the theater, but from the producing and directing side,” and that he has “about a thousand ideas to share, and I’m sure you do too.” Thus begins a relationship that changed his life. Seller is unable to raise the money to transfer Larson’s monologue, which he suggests be retitled “Tick..Tick…BOOM,” but they keep in touch, and Larson invites him to attend the first reading of “Rent.” Seller finds it disappointing. “This cycle of songs doesn’t electrify. It numbs. It feels like we’re lost in the East Village and can’t find a way out.” Seller bluntly offers his assessment to a deflated Larson. Seller doesn’t claim to be the only person whose guidance helped Larson realize the one blaze of glory that “Rent” became. At the next, vastly improved workshop eighteen months later, for example, Seller spots Stephen Sondheim (“I try not to gawk”), who shows up with a then new-fangled Apple Newton to take notes. (“I’m impressed by his embrace of new technology.”) But Seller’s account of what’s become the familiar but still riveting story — the sudden death of the 35-year-old Larson on the eve of his show’s first preview, and the musical’s subsequent unprecedented success — provides insider details I haven’t read before, and a unique perspective. We learn of the ironic stampede of interest by huge entertainment conglomerates for the movie and album rights after this Off-Broadway play about East Village broke bohemians gets rave reviews; we get the entertaining play-by-play of the negotiations with the hard-charging mogul David Geffen for the album. We also get Seller’s personal take on the various people involved in the musical. (On director Michael Greif: “He talks with a trace of sarcasm. When he says ‘Nice to meet you,’ I’m not sure he means it.”)



Act Two ends with triumph at the Tony Awards, his reconciliation with his father, and a return visit to his old home in Cardboard Village. His parents no longer live here; he bought them a house. An immigrant family, refugees from Iraq, now occupy the place he despised as a child, and they are grateful for it. So, he now realizes, is he. “This house is where I’m from. Where I climbed the maple tree in the backyard and pictured soaring through the sky, where I wrote Adventureland, where I listened to Pippin, Evita, and Dreamgirls, where I imagined a better life in the theater…”

It’s a fine ending to a fine memoir. Except “Theater Kid” doesn’t end here.

Act Three begins with a jolt. Suddenly, it’s 28 years later, and Seller abruptly catches us up on his personal life: He had a long relationship, now ended, and two children, now grown. He then backtracks for chapters on “Avenue Q,” which focuses on its surprisingly successful campaign to win the Tony Award for Best Musical, and on both “In The Heights” and “Hamilton.” Similarly to his account of Larson and “Rent, but far more abbreviated, he recounts his discovery of Lin-Manuel Miranda and the process of developing Miranda’s two musicals.

The Jeffrey Seller in Act Three is a successful businessman, connected and clearly affluent. He writes about how he asked his next-door neighbor in the Hamptons, Kurt Vonnegut, to listen to Lin play his opening number, and asked Mike Nichols, “acquaintance, supporter, friend,” to attend an early workshop of “Hamilton,” after which the famed director sent Seller “the first investor check.”

There is what feels like a digressive chapter about his search for his birth mother, which resulted in a vivid visit with her surviving family members. And at one point, he offers insight about his profession that de-emphasizes the business aspects: “Many producers focus on the hard skills of producing—optioning the play, raising the money, booking the theater—but they don’t think about the soft skills—giving an author a place to write, making them lunch, showing up without demands or pressure, sending the right note at the right time.”

The clear implication is that Seller is a soft-skills kind of producer. But the tone of the book has shifted. No longer the Hart-like questing theater kid, Seller comes off as a savvy strategist. I would call this Prince-like, but Hal Prince’s memoir included the behind-the-scenes stories of his flops, not just of the hits. It would probably be unfair to characterize Seller’s exclusive focus on his greatest successes as outright boasting, and he’s probably earned the right to pontificate, as he does with increasing frequency (a tendency that becomes cringeworthy only when he claims that the curtain speech during Vice President Mike Pence’s attendance at “Hamilton” helped spark a protest movement that defeated Donald Trump; clearly Seller had to submit his book to the publisher a while ago.) So let’s just say the Act One Seller was more relatable and easier to root for.

Act Three feels like a different book. And perhaps it should have been. Was this overload of riches a generous act or a calculated one, ambitious or undisciplined? Was it Seller the experienced seller who thought including “Rent” and “Hamilton” would sell more books, or the inner insecure theater kid who worried whether anybody would be interested in a book about his life story without his biggest seller?

Consider this a quibble. “Theater Kid,” which reflects how full and fascinating Jeffrey Seller’s life has been, feels like a must-read for grown-up theater kids.

I did not expect the graphic sex scenes in this memoir. Was really off putting. The author mentioned that erotic literature was more enjoyable for him that pornography; perhaps he has tried to create that with lurid details here. But I had to set the book down. I don't think I've ever read a memoir where sex (heterosexual or homosexual) was discussed so graphically. DNF. Would suggest toning it back before publication.