For your pleasure and consideration, I have brought you a review that is also a drinking game. We will be taking a drink every time we spot a reference to a play or musical; we will be taking two drinks if we spot a reference specifically to The Phantom of the Opera (1986); and we will be finishing our glass if we are sufficiently off-book on Into the Woods (1987) that we can finish a lyric quoted in the book at a crucial moment. That last bit will be the final exam of this book review.
Apollo Weeps tells the story of a town, a theater, an actress, and a writer. Transracial adoptee Alouette Chagney (drink twice!), who goes by Owl, has come back to their hometown of Leroux (drink twice!) to write about the town’s beloved Cassandra Theater. Well, really they come back because they want to see their high school crush again. Maddie Grey is a star actress, manager of the Cassandra for the last ten years, and inheritor of a boatload of intergenerational trauma. Owl arrives in Leroux determined to write the full story of the Cassandra Theater, going all the way back to a mythical bargain Maddie’s ancestors may have struck with a mysterious, ghostly figure called the Silver Man.
Except no they didn’t. Because magic isn’t real. And ghosts aren’t, either. Obviously.
Also, Owl would rather kiss Maddie than uncover all her family secrets, although they’re potentially interested in doing both.
As a woman who has only really watched Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd (1979; drink!), and thought they were both just okay (sorry!), I questioned my ability to write an adequate review of a book that describes itself as a tribute to “the twisting plots of Stephen Sondheim musicals.” Luckily, Sondheim knowledge—even knowledge of musicals more broadly—is not the price of admission into this book’s world, but more like the endless, winding catacombs underneath its theater: if you know they’re there, you can have a great time playing in them, and if you don’t, you’ll still enjoy the show that’s playing up on the stage. Xian Mao has written a love letter to musical theater, and to theater kids in particular, but Apollo Weeps is a story accessible to every reader, not just those who misspent their youths trying to hit the high E at the end of “The Phantom of the Opera” (drink!).
Like the plot description at the start of a program, Maddie tells Owl the bare bones of her family’s story at their very first meeting. Her great-grandfather, a Polish immigrant, built the Cassandra on top of a local cemetery, with the condition that his daughter Sarah—Maddie’s grandmother—would star in every production. Sarah Garden fell pregnant with an illegitimate daughter, whom she named Miranda (drink!). Maddie’s grandfather on her father’s side was a Black actor named Daniel Grey, whose pregnant wife, Shoshanna, came to join him in Leroux and served as a wet nurse to Miranda after her own baby, Mason, was born. When Daniel Grey died (stabbed by a sword that turned out not to be a prop, in a production of Macbeth—drink!), Sarah Garden sent Shoshanna away, keeping Mason for herself. Mason and Miranda eventually married and had Maddie.
If this all feels like a lot to hold in your mind, you are not alone. A large cast of characters is more manageable in the theater, where every actor has a different face (and different hair, and different clothes), but it can become unwieldy in prose, particularly in a book of under 200 pages. By virtue of the book’s short length, Mao has to put all their characters forward quite quickly, and it’s not always clear which characters have backstories we’ll need to remember—or which ones are just there to provide one-off solos to add texture to the world of the Cassandra. I spent a fair bit of time flipping pages back and forth to check which M name was whose, so my hot tip to readers is that you will need to understand Maddie’s family tree for plot purposes, but you can coast on emotions and vibes when it comes to the other theater staff and Owl’s family members.
Though Owl is only supposed to be in Leroux as a journalist, their digging into Maddie’s family background leads them to acquire a one-woman play called The Silver Man, likely written by Maddie’s late grandmother, Shoshanna. Maddie’s thrilled to get the script. The simplicity of the play will give the Cassandra enough financial wiggle room to close out the season with the ambitious Ragtime (1997; drink!)—a musical that ends, incidentally, with a white mother adopting the child of two deceased Black characters (one of them played by your queen and mine, Audra McDonald). But when rehearsals begin, the production seems cursed with injuries, accidents, and bad omens abounding. The crew start to whisper that the real Silver Man is behind all these calamities.
Owl searches for answers to the sabotage at the Cassandra, which gives Mao the opportunity to be quite Sondheimy. Chapters are named after the specific theater staff to whom Owl speaks on that day, and each person has the chance to share their perspective on Maddie and the theater and the legend of the Silver Man. Perhaps inevitably, they end up telling Owl about themselves, too: what is their role at the Cassandra? How did they come to it? Why do they stay? Owl finds themself drawing closer to working out what’s going on at the theater, and the reader gets a glimpse at all the pieces that build on each other, intersect with each other, and ultimately come together to make a play.
Weaving in and out of the story of The Silver Man and its curse is the story of Maddie’s family. Mao continues to use the device of shifting among characters, but here they are solving a different mystery, explaining a different performance. Maddie’s grandmother Shoshanna, who can see ghosts, does not feel as comfortable in the heavily white town of Leroux as her husband Daniel does. Nor is she particularly happy to be roped into service, shortly after her son Mason’s birth, as the wet nurse to Sarah Garden’s illegitimate daughter Miranda. It all feels more or less worth it until Daniel dies (an accident?) and Sarah legally maneuvers Mason out of Shoshanna’s custody.
Watching from the sidelines for all of this is the child Miranda. As a little girl, she makes a wish to the god of the theater, a wish born out of her desperate need to hold onto the few people who love her. Later, Miranda will realize that this single small act led to Daniel’s death, Sarah’s legal theft of Mason, Shoshanna’s departure from Leroux, the destruction of the lives of everyone Miranda loved and hoped to keep near her. There’s a scene in which Shoshanna tries to reassure her that she was just a little girl, it was one moment, it isn’t Miranda’s fault. This is true in a sense: the Silver Man granted her wish, and Sarah Garden is the one who carried it out. But Miranda cannot escape the knowledge of the truth that it’s her fear, the power of a white girl’s fear, that sets the wheels in motion.
The crew on the production all chose a life in the theater, whereas Maddie’s mother and grandmother were sucked into its orbit by forces greater than themselves. Finding the culprit behind the disruptions of The Silver Man will allow the performance to go on, while digging out Maddie’s family secrets has the potential to halt the trauma, misery, and sacrifice that have been passed down through the generations. Mao’s choice to enlist the full cast (so to speak) to solve the book’s two central mysteries creates some contrasts and parallels between the little mystery of unveiling the theater’s saboteur and the big one of tracing Maddie’s family history back to the theater’s founding and—perhaps—to its ghostly benefactor.
At times the multitude of voices, characters, and motives can feel a little overwhelming, but that’s all part of the musical theater experience. There’s a tonal weirdness about musicals that you’re either able to merrily roll along with (drink!) or you’re not. On one hand, the whole enterprise is joyous and playful and even silly; on the other, you were so emotionally destroyed by the end of Hamilton (2015, drink!) that you sometimes have to pull the car over to cry when the finale song comes on shuffle when you’re driving. The artifice of the theater, combined with the raw emotion that can come through in songs, offers space to get at some of the deepest truths of humanity. Warmly welcoming to musical theater nerds, clear-eyed about the legacy of American racism within and outside of theater spaces, and as cleverly constructed as a Sondheim play, Apollo Weeps is an exciting, weird, atmospheric debut. It’s easy to get drunk on.