Recent studies have emphasized the business of theatre making, from copyright law (Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911 by Derek Miller, 2018) to backstage labor (Working Backstage by Christin Essin, 2021). Nic Leonhardt's fascinating Theatre across Oceans shines the spotlight on what she calls the “mediators of transatlantic theatrical exchange” (19): the managers, booking agents, and playbrokers who facilitated the international circulation of performance around the turn of the twentieth century. Their work marks an era in commercial theatre when the logistics of performance increased in complexity and the planning of theatrical tours moved toward centralization and standardization. (The United Booking Office, which regulated the touring practices of bigtime vaudeville performers in the United States, was founded in 1906.) Leonhardt uses a remarkable array of sources, including archives and trade publications in multiple languages, to demonstrate just how vital the practices of theatrical mediators were to the construction of a vibrant theatrical culture.

The book's first chapter serves as an introduction to the study's methods. In Chapter 2, Leonhardt posits that the two factors that make the work of these theatrical mediators possible are modern innovations in transportation and media technologies. Like Marlis Schweitzer's Transatlantic Broadway, Leonhardt's argument aligns with current work in mobility studies, where transportation networks and communication networks are understood as facilitating similar kinds of circulation—of people and goods in the first case and information in the second. Railroads were instrumental to the development of theatrical circuits, and faster transatlantic travel by steamship opened theatrical markets, both for performers and for mediators scouting for new talent. The sinking of the Titanic becomes an interesting case where transportation failed to circulate as intended and media filled in the gaps: the transoceanic crossing broken up by an iceberg became one of the first “transnational media events” (39) constructed through newspaper stories, still images, speeches, and films. Leonhardt discusses communication technologies at all levels of scale: while telegrams made person-to-person interaction possible over broader distances, agencies operated as key nodes in the networking of information related to the theatre business. With the founding of the Associated Press, theatre promoters from the mid-nineteenth century onward had a centralized consortium for the collective transmission of news stories and pictures. A fascinating artifact that ties together the interpersonal and the centralized in this chapter is the Artistische Telegramm-Schlüssel (roughly, “Artistic Telegram Key”), a codebook listing abbreviations that can be used in telegrams that established a “shared vocabulary” for mediators communicating as part of the international theatrical business (59). Throughout the monograph, Leonhardt finds vivid illustrations of the theatrical mediators’ work in the print culture of the time.

One broad transition marked by this history is the way the actor-manager of the nineteenth century, who dealt with performance and business alike, fragmented and multiplied into the theatrical bureaucracy of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 gives a history of theatrical agencies as their business practices were systematized. We can see how Taylorism entered the business of theatrical mediation: offices proliferated in different theatrical capitals, with each branch divided into similar departments to ensure that business was handled in a standardized way across the globe. Each office negotiated rights for the production of plays, handled contracts and travel plans for international tours, and ensured coverage of the performers they represented in newspapers and magazines. This section highlights the ways that the work of press agents and journalists intertwined. Although the mediators made it possible for creatives to get their work done and get paid, Leonhardt shows how they also used channels of communication to cultivate their reputations as businesspeople, dealmakers, and personalities in their own right.

The book's most expansive section, and the one to which I return most frequently, is Chapter 4, “Transatlantic Mediators of Theatre.” Leonhardt employs four theatrical agents as case studies for considering the complex set of skills needed to facilitate transatlantic performance in the early twentieth century. Elisabeth Marbury is the best-known figure, a New York–born businesswoman who was mentored by producer Charles Frohman. She became a play agent, theatrical manager, and eventually a political operative within the Democratic Party. Marbury seems to have been uniquely skilled at grounding social networks in particular places, from salons in New York and France with her life partner Elsie De Wolfe to “respectable dance hall[s]” (171) hosted by Vernon and Irene Castle. The career of Marbury's protégé Alice Kauser illustrates how transitional this moment was for people working with media: Kauser begins her career helping playwrights sell their work to stock companies and ends her career selling those rights to motion picture studios. The section on “Globe-Trotting Mimic” (202) turned agent Richard Pitrot is especially successful in illustrating the ways that agents used their letterheads, business cards, and other promotional materials to craft their public personas. H. B. Marinelli, the final subject, also began his career as a performer. As the booker of European acts for the New York Hippodrome and Winter Garden, Marinelli shaped popular performance in the United States. Consistent across all four case studies is a focus on the grasp of logistics necessary to communicate and coordinate travel across continents.

Leonhardt conjures this theatrical moment in all its complexity and then concludes with the ways that the outbreak of the Great War changed it into something different. This mode of theatrical work shifts after World War I for several reasons. Most immediately, war shut down the physical circulation of performers between countries and, consequently, the work done by transnational theatrical mediators. Some of the subjects in Leonhardt's book pivoted successfully to other forms of theatrical mediation. Elisabeth Marbury helped produce the smaller-scale musical comedies at the Princess Theatre. Sometimes called the “Princess musicals,” these shows, with music by Jerome Kern, books by Guy Bolton, and lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse, provided an important counterweight to the lavish revues of the day and served as a model for American book musicals of the midcentury. By refocusing our study of the early twentieth-century theatre on mediators such as Marbury, Kauser, Pitrot, and Marinelli, this book convincingly interrogates and even erases what seemed to be obvious divisions scholars use to make sense of the period's theatre history, such as the boundaries between the legitimate theatre and the popular stage and between foreign and domestic acts. Theatre across Oceans is a model work of scholarship for revealing the networks of behind-the-scenes processes that made early twentieth-century performance possible.