When I saw Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty First-Century, edited by Kirsty Sedgman, Francesca Coppa and Matt Hills listed on NetGalley, I jumped at the chance to request it. After all, this seemed like the perfect fit for this theatre blog that I’m trying to get off the ground. So many thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher for making this available to me.

As the title suggests, Theatre Fandom is a collection of essays that cover the intersections between theatre and fandom. The authors come from a number of different disciplines.

Many of the essays in Theatre Fandom lean more academic, which should come as no surprise if you consider that it’s published by University of Iowa Press and features authors with an academic background. Which, I mean, I think readers who tend to read more academic books are probably the ones going to be reading Theatre Fandom anyway. Additionally, I think the editors are hoping that Theatre Fandom gets assigned in classroom settings as well.

Some of my favorite essays in Theatre Fandom included ones about high frequency theatre attendees, Danial Kitson (whom I was not familiar with prior and would love to learn more about), an essay about RENT, an essay about Hamilton, and an essay about how theatre fans in Europe and Asia experience Western theatre.

I think it’s relevant to mention that Theatre Fandom contains discussion of A Very Potter Musical and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. As you may be aware, JK Rowling has been very vocal about her transphobia, to the point of funding anti-transgender organizations in the UK in recent years. And her bigotry doesn’t end there. This information isn’t addressed anywhere in Theatre Fandom. I want to give the authors and editors some grace here; I appreciate that a work like this takes time to research, write and publish. Rowling’s bigotry may not have been as well known during the early stages of the process. That said, if Theatre Fandom ever gets updated - or a similar collection ever gets published - I’d love to see this addressed. Maybe an essay about how former fans are interacting with these works in light of learning of Rowling’s ideology.

I also want to note that the list price for Theatre Fandom is $85. While this might be in line with pricing for a University Press, I’m not sure it’s worth that price point. While I thought some of the essays were very good and worth reading, I didn’t think they were worth $85. My advice to anyone interested in reading Theatre Fandom? Consider getting it from the library or buying it second hand.

Overall, a great book. The quality of the specific content varies, and varies in ways that it varies, due to it being a book of articles, but the application of fandom studies on theater provides a lot of useful things and still further potential. So that makes a singular review difficult. But the other reason that makes it difficult is that, whenever I have described this one to people, the response that I get is "...so, do you think it's a good idea to write a review a book about yourself?"

The answer is no, and generally the amount of time I spent thinking 'that is not...oh, no, okay, I see" about me in Chapter 1, which is a study of a survey of theater fans, suggests that I lack some of the necessary arms-length-ism to talk about this. But here goes:

There are a few too many to do this chapter by chapter, but there are a certain set of themes and groupings here. The first is the narrative, which amounts to someone relating a set of facts about the theater that are relevant to fandom. Some of this is wonderful, like the openings to sections one and three, and in general whenever the subject is on the relation of race to theater audiences. Some of it is bad, or something like Chapter 5 (on Zines) or Chapter 11 (on Fanformance art), which feels more like a story in search of a justification to be in the book. Except when this gets so specific that it becomes fascinating again, like Chapter 2 on Daniel Kitson, or Chapter 13, where it is the 'meta' of such a story, namely Michael Jackson at Exeter City F.C., and a study of how to treat a fandom in studying a fandom's story.

The second section of the book has more of what I expected this book to have of the sort of anthropology with a shiv look at fan culture's relationship with the theater. That said, the best exploration of this is in Chapter 12's exploration on the Rent fandom, which is important to me personally in that, while I was never a part of that fandom, it was the first time the idea of a theater fandom - maybe even fandom - was made obvious to me. And it provides a great point of reference to look at the thing in general, from inside and out, and with different apparatuses, since it is so prolific and long-standing.

If there is a read only one chapter out of this, it is the last, chapter 14, on the reception of European musicals in East Asia. Like a musical itself, this chapter has it all, all the aspects of the book reflected into a singular object. It also will be your cocktail party tidbit to bring out of it and there are some musical performances here for you to find recordings of that slap. Chapter 4, on the matter of the idea of the joy of theater fandom with its analysis on specific historical fandoms, is sort of the version of this dialed down to 5, but also good.

The obvious pull-chapter is 10, on Hamilton and Bisexualities, interesting and well-rounded, but it is also twelve pounds of argument in an eight pound sack. While the discussion has its most important takes on the fandom, there is too much extra or otherwise super-structural information about it, both from early U.S. History but also from the contemporary society of the '10s, that matter too much in its argumentation.

My personal favorite out of these is probably Chapter 8, on A Very Potter Musical. As a Hater, I expected to dislike or otherwise find cause to distance myself from these chapters on the topic of Potter's adaptations in general, both thinking as noted above about its use but also dreading its prevalence and neither wanting to nor feeling happy about engaging in the material. But this one, discussing the why of a fandom performance and how it separates itself from other sorts of fan material does what I, as a non-academic, are looking for the most in academic writing: not providing arguments that I can use, but providing me with something I disagree with in productive ways. Chapter 9 has some of this, and Chapter 11 starts that way, but it is giving me a coherent and good argument that I am not in accord with to push off of, which is everything in trying to define what it is that my own thinking is.

But great read, primarily for a scholarly audience but I do feel that if you are the subject here of the book, it is also a joy.

My thanks to the editors, Kristy Sedgman, Francesca Coppa, and Matt Hills, for compiling the book (and for their contributions) and to the publisher, University of Iowa Press, for making the ARC available to me.