ONE MORE SEAT AT THE ROUND TABLE - Susan Dormady Eisenberg


Drama school graduate Jane Conroy is eager to get out of her steady-but-unsatisfying job and work in the theatre.  With the help of a family connection, she gets work as a production assistant on a brand new Lerner and Loewe musical ... something about King Arthur, based on a book by T. H. White. She gets to not only see, but be a part of the process of shaping a major Broadway musical through out-of-town previews and daily changes to the script and the score while working alongside some relatively new faces who have just started making names for themselves, like Richard Burton and Julie Andrews and Roddy McDowall.

The tenacity of those involved at every level will be tested as the negative reviews come in, relationships develop and fizzle on the road, rehearsals of new material will occur during the day then there will a performance in the evening, and the legendary director, Moss Hart, will suffer a heart-attack and be forced to quit the show prior to the Broadway opening.

Among the cast is a rising performer, Bryce Christmas, and Jane and Bryce will take a shine to one another and begin dating while on tour.  But Bryce, with only a minor speaking role and one short solo (in "Then You May Take Me to the Fair") gets an offer to star in another musical that is soon to start rehearsals. It's a tough choice - stay with a show with some star power but which is struggling, or go to the unknown, which has more to offer him personally. Could his relationship with Jane survive if they worked on different shows?  And with her own ambitions within the theatre world (she's given encouragement to pursue directing despite it being a male-dominated field and she finds the idea of stage management thrilling) the pair may always be apart.

This book is pretty much tailor-made for a reader like myself. I've spent the majority of my career working in live theatre and I do love musicals.  Camelot may be one of the first original cast recordings I ever bought (and of course listened to over and over again), in part because it's based on such a great fantasy story.

Author Susan Dormady Eisenberg does a really great job of mixing the historical, factual events with fiction and I did have to go back and look up some of the performers from the original production to see if they were indeed made up for the book.

The process of a putting on a new show, complete with rehearsals and performances is well researched and described. Perhaps life was different in 1960, but were the chorus kids not generally gay? With all the hookups described, none of them were same-sex, which I though unusual.

There's a literary term that I've really only referred to with fantasy novels called "Mary Sue."  This is generally used to describe a female main character who is unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses and often seen as an idealized fantasy for a female author.  The term definitely has negative connotations, and I don't mean to imply it negatively, but I couldn't help but see Jane Conroy as a theatrical "Mary Sue." She manages to find a chorus person (an old friend), rehearse the young boys performing as Tom of Warwick at the end of the play, solve the problem of the man who impregnates her friend but is engaged to someone else, assists the wives of the creative team, visits Moss Hart in the hospitable, etc etc etc.

But I didn't mind this Mary Sue-ness.  Really, this was very well researched and enjoyable.

Looking for a good book? One More Seat at the Round Table by Susan Dormady Eisenberg is a lot of sweet, 1960's innocent fun with the backdrop of an iconic Broadway musical surrounding it.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

4-1/2 stars

* * * * * *

One More Seat at the Round Table

author: Susan Dormady Eisenberg

publisher: Atmosphere Press

ISBN: 9781639888023

paperback, 358 pages

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