“Marquee Moments” by Phillip Sprayberry

Marquee Moments

Phillip Sprayberry
Fenêtre Press (2026)
ISBN: 979-8986230344
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (09/2026)

Phillip Sprayberry’s Marquee Moments: Essays by Theatre Lovers begins with a simple premise: people who love theatre collect memories of it. A scene, a song, a performance, or even a mishap can lodge permanently in the mind, acquiring greater meaning as the years pass. Sprayberry organizes more than eighty recollections into five “acts”—“From the Start,” “From the Seat,” “From the Stage,” “From the Staff,” and “From the Rest”—moving from first encounters with theatre to lives shaped by it. The contributors include actors, directors, teachers, technicians, ushers, and devoted audience members, but the distinction between professional and amateur matters less here than their shared conviction that live theatre can alter a life.

“From the Start” collects the initial experiences that converted contributors into lifelong theatre lovers. One of the most affecting is Paul Siegel’s “‘Put on Your Sunday Clothes.’” At eleven, Siegel was supposed to see Hello, Dolly! with his father, who had introduced him to Broadway cast recordings. His father died suddenly three weeks before the performance, and Siegel instead attended with his newly widowed mother. The musical does not miraculously cure their grief, but it gives them somewhere to carry it together. As they leave, his mother says that his father would have loved the show. The essay captures one of the collection’s central ideas: theatre does not erase suffering, but it can give suffering shape, music, and companionship.

In “From the Seat,” the strongest piece may be Nonie Gilbert’s “Finding Freedom in a Prison.” Gilbert attends a performance of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf inside Manhattan’s Bayview Correctional Center for Women. One incarcerated performer delivers an abortion monologue with such emotional freedom that Gilbert momentarily forgets she is watching a prisoner. The apparent contradiction becomes the essay’s point: the freest actress Gilbert has ever seen is a woman who is physically confined. The experience overturns her assumptions about prisoners and demonstrates how performance can restore individuality and dignity to people institutions reduce to categories.

“From the Stage” shifts the perspective to performers, for whom transcendence often arrives mixed with panic. In Bruce Winant’s two-part “A Working Actor’s Drama and Trauma,” Winant fights simply to audition for Ragtime, wins a place in the ensemble, and becomes the first understudy for Tateh. During previews, the lead loses his voice, forcing Winant to perform the enormous role without a single understudy rehearsal. Director Frank Galati steadies him with beautifully practical advice: the audience does not know the blocking or the words; Winant knows the man and must simply take his journey. With help from the cast—and twelve-year-old Lea Michele quietly guiding him around the stage—he does exactly that. The story reveals professionalism not as flawless execution but as trust, preparation, generosity, and recovery.

The people who make theatre possible without taking bows occupy “From the Staff.” Diane Nottle’s “On the Aisle: Ushering War Horse” is both an affectionate account of Broadway usher culture and a moving record of becoming attached to a production from the inside. After first seeing War Horse as an overwhelmed spectator, Nottle works nearly three hundred performances. She learns the rhythms audiences never notice: stuffing Playbills, closing doors, helping latecomers, guarding the stage, and watching Joey’s puppeteers take their break. When the production closes, Joey’s final bow leaves her weeping. Her essay makes a persuasive case that ushers are not peripheral to theatre. They occupy the threshold between the created world and the audience entering it.

“From the Rest” gathers lives that cannot be contained by a single theatrical role. Anthony LaMattina’s “My Life in Falsettoland” is particularly candid. Playing Marvin in Falsettos allows him to portray a gay man while he himself remains only partly open with his family and privately lives with an HIV diagnosis. Whizzer’s death from AIDS makes the musical’s finale almost unbearable to perform. Yet when LaMattina’s parents attend, their response is not rejection but tighter, longer embraces. Theatre becomes a place where truths too difficult for ordinary conversation can still be communicated and accepted.

With so many contributors, the collection is inevitably a bit uneven. Some essays overexplain familiar plots, repeat the same claims about theatrical magic, or drift into sentimentality. Nevertheless, the variety is part of the book’s appeal. Earthquakes, dropped lines, collapsing scenery, difficult patrons, dying friends, childhood discoveries, and great performances all belong to the same world. Marquee Moments ultimately succeeds not as a history of theatre but as a history of what theatre does to people. The show ends; the set comes down; the actors move on. What remains is the moment—and the person changed by having witnessed it.