Putting it together: creating theatre means you never go it alone--and in musicals, the spectator's psyche is a collborator, too.("The Alchemy of Theater")("The American Musical and The Performance of Personal Identity")(Book review)

THE ALCHEMY OF THEATRE Edited by Robert Viagas, Applause Books, New York. 296 pp, $29.95 cloth. THE AMERICAN MUSICAL AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PERSONAL IDENTITY By Raymond Knapp, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 488 pp, $39.50 cloth. Everyone loves a good backstage horror story: a lurid description of a diva's tantrums, or an account of a tyrannical director's sadistic mind games.

The thrill quotient would seem to plummet substantially, though, when theatrical shoptalk turns to the subject of cooperation. Bands of thespians with tamped-down ...

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