The Magic of Live Theater

While Los Angeles certainly has always had its own vibrant regional theater scene, in Good Company that show business hub is associated with Hollywood-style film and television, such as the kind that employs Julian, Flora and Margot after luring them away from their New York theater roots. While New York is home to many television productions, such as Margot's earlier short-lived sitcom, its identity as a theater town of Broadway musical, classical drama and avant-garde performance arguably precedes its reputation as a television and film center.

Because theater is live, it is subject to the unpredictable conditions of real life like human fragility or the weather, exemplified in the novel's depiction of the two Shakespeare in the Park Festival productions twenty years apart. For young Flora, the first break she gets with Margot's help is “miraculous” (58) because she had never been to...