Remember...I've Seen You Naked: A Backstage Memoir

Arthur Beaumont here. A good non-fiction book changes one specific thing about your week, and this one changed what I notice in the ninety seconds before a curtain goes up.

The book's strongest asset is the lived sense of its world. Shenston Grant has spent two decades in the wig room, the quick-change booth and the stairwell, and he renders that world with the precision of someone who actually held the comb. The Sandy transformation in Grease has twelve to fifteen seconds to get from a good girl to a leather pantsuit. In Chapter 3, the March sisters hold a calm, unanimous consensus on lubricants ten feet from Maureen McGovern's "Days of Plenty." The mermaid quick change in the Luxor stairwell ends with the author's face in a very wet place. This is backstage as it is, not as the Playbill has it. The book's structural idea is that the polished part happens onstage and the reality happens ten feet away, and nearly every chapter proves it.

The book earns its feeling honestly. Chapter 11 is the proof. Grant gets the HIV diagnosis on a freezing stone ledge outside the Kennedy Center, without his coat, five minutes before places, and he writes it in plain declaratives. The phone rings, the heat floods through him, he goes back in and works the show. Then Elena Shaddow starts singing "The Beauty Is" and he comes apart. The comic chapters have taught us to expect a punchline, so withholding one makes the chapter land harder. The Jaki Harris and Eartha Kitt chapter, closing on a Post-it reading "Dear Eartha, Dress yourself. Love, Jaki," does similar work.

The comic set pieces (Prudence's pee-laces, the Big Bird feathers, the Providence luggage rack, Ethel Merman and the white glove) are well built and well timed. Recurring motifs, like "Who knew?", Mr. Raleigh and the Urinetown municipal government, give a loose collection a spine. The structure does wander, and some chapters run long. But the voice stays consistent and generous, and the people are alive on the page.