O’Brien’s memoir is about the making of a career which, as his subtitle indicates, he never expected. O’Brien helped to keep alive in the 1960s: A.P.A.-Phoenix, the last of the great American touring companies, one that brought ensemble acting and top-class repertory to Broadway itself. Mainly, the book is about the flame that Mr. Indeed he was, but only at the end of “Jack Be Nimble” does he give us any intimation of those triumphs. Hasn’t he won Tony Awards for staging work as different as the musical “Hairspray” and Tom Stoppard’s Russian-set “ Coast of Utopia” trilogy? Wasn’t he the artistic director of San Diego’s prestigious Old Globe for the 25 productive years that ended in 2007? O’Brien, who has just turned 74, has lighted and left plenty of flames whose heat we still feel. Hurdling over a candle without extinguishing it was an early-19th-century game, and Mr. It’s not just that a director as successful as he has had to be nimble and quick-witted to thrive in a precarious profession. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick.” So runs the nursery rhyme whose opening Jack O’Brien has made the title of his exuberant theatrical memoir, and it’s even apter than he may realize.
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