If you have some time off for the holidays, you can catch up on your reading with these three recent releases on historic contributions to the theater in London’s West End, at Yale University, and by the women who wrote Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals. The books are must-have additions to your library and they also make great gifts for the other theater-lovers you know.

Amnon Kabatchnik, Murder in the West End: The Plays of Agatha Christie and her Disciples, Volume I (Orlando, FL: BearManor Media, 2024), 550 pp., ISBN: 979-8887714707, hardcover, $49.00.

With his 2008 book on Sherlock Holmes on the Stage, seven volumes in his series Blood on the Stage, the single tome Horror on the Stage, and the two-volume Courtroom Dramas on the Stage to his credit, retired theater professor Amnon Kabatchnik (who taught at SUNY Binghamton, Stanford University, Ohio State, Florida State, and Elmira College) has recently released the latest publication in his thematic specialty on the history of whodunits and murder mysteries in the theater.

Centered on the fifteen thrillers by British author Agatha Christie (1890-1976) that have been produced in London’s West End – most notably, Ten Little Indians, Witness for the Prosecution, and The Mousetrap, which opened in 1952, and remains London’s longest running show – the current book, in which he notes the widely held perception that “only the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare have sold more copies,” examines Christie’s famed oeuvre and the works of her most important and prolific predecessor Edgar Wallace and the playwrights that followed her in the crime genre, including W. Somerset Maugham, A.A. Milne, J. B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier, Aldous Huxley, and Graham Greene.

Presented chronologically, the entries offer biographical information about the playwrights and the key actors and directors of their works, a plot synopsis of each, data on the West End productions, comments by critics and scholars, and the afterlife of the play in terms of published acting editions, adaptations, and awards.

James Magruder, The Play’s the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre (1966-2016) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), 400 pp., ISBN: 9780300215007, hardcover, $60.00.

Yale alumnus, educator, writer, and award-winning dramaturg James Magruder gives an insider’s account of the first 50 years of Yale Rep, in four chapters dedicated to each of the institution’s consecutive Artistic Directors – Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, Stan Wojewodski Jr., and James Bundy – from its founding in 1966 to the present, and all the significant moments in its history of building the company, training and presenting a roster of some of our country’s most respected actors, creators, and shows, and meeting both the educational needs and artistic demands inherent in a university-based not-for-profit repertory theater.

The comprehensive and detailed chronicle is based in part on interviews with the stars who were there – among them Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, Tony Shalhoub, Frances McDormand, Dianne Wiest, Paul Giamatti, Christopher Walken, John Guare, Rick Elice, and Tarell Alvin McCraney – about the roles they played and the experiences they had in its evolution. It also features numerous boxed inserts throughout the chapters on such related subjects as venues for the shows, housing for the artists, prop and costume shops, most frequently produced playwrights, and other asides, a revealing foreword by Broadway producer and part-owner of Jujamcyn Theaters Rocco Landesman, a brief preface by Magruder outlining his own connections to the University and his change in attitude since his early years, and an appendix of Yale Rep’s production history.

Enlivening the text are black-and-white and full-color illustrations of production photos, headshots, and archival materials, along with the author’s insightful, witty, and provocative style of writing.

Jennifer Ashley Tepper, Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy that the History Books Left Out (Essex, CT: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2024), 408 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4930-8031-1, hardback, $39.95.

Not only has Jennifer Ashley Tepper served as the Creative and Programming Director at 54 Below for the past decade, curating and overseeing the production of some 7000+ shows to date, she is also a dedicated theater historian and author of four volumes on The Untold Stories of Broadway. Her fifth and latest tome, released in November, pays tribute to the more than 300 women lyricists, composers, and librettists who have achieved fame or been overlooked in previous history books, tracing their contributions from the beginnings of permanent theater in NYC in the 18th and 19th centuries, through each decade of the 20th century, and into the new millennium.

In her introduction, Tepper explains her motivation and approach to the subject, and the societal patterns and revelations she discovered in her extensive research on the intersection of identity and art, including the lack of gender and racial parity that persists into the present. The main body of the book celebrates each of the women by name, with an individual section in the chronologically arranged chapters, sharing biographical facts, the work they created, the reception they received, and their place in the evolution of musical theater.

They include such renowned figures as Dorothy Fields, Gertrude Stein, Betty Comden, Marilyn Bergman, Ntozake Shange, Lynn Ahrens, Susan Stroman, and Jeanine Tesori (the most honored female composer in Broadway history), popular performers Dolly Parton, Sara Bareilles, Cyndi Lauper, and Shaina Taub, and Pulitzer Prize winners Quiara Alegría Hudes, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage, along with largely forgotten people like Clara Driscoll, a wealthy philanthropist who saved the historical site of the Alamo by purchasing the land it’s on and turning it over to the state of Texas in 1903, and, at the age of 24, wrote the book and lyrics for the 1906 musical Mexicana, and Micki Grant, whose 1972 hit revue Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, about the Black experience, made her the first woman to write the book, music, and lyrics for a Broadway show. The informative and engaging text is followed by an index of the musicals discussed, listed in order of opening date.

All three books are available for purchase on Amazon and other popular sites.