Theatre has long had a vexed relationship with religion. The devout saw the stage as a space of sin and the theatrical saw no room in their performance for religious material. Henry Bial's Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage and Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit and Joshua Edelman's Performing Religion in Public, however, explore how religion and theatre have more to discuss than once assumed. Bial's work relies on archival evidence and historical context to examine biblical adaptations featured on Broadway between 1891 and 2001. The essays in Performing Religion in Public adopt performance studies methods to investigate a re-conception of ‘the relationship between religion and the public sphere’ (p. 1). Despite their different methodological approaches, these works seek to understand how religion intersects with theatre and performance. Further, each volume examines the ways in which the sacred meets the secular, both in theatrical and non-theatrical spaces.

Bial's monograph, divided into seven chapters that each explore several productions, asks ‘how tensions between theatre and religion manifest in a popular commercial environment’ (p. 14). The author deploys four ‘performance strategies’ (spectacle, sincerity, authenticity and irony) as frameworks to view the works under consideration in each chapter. Like Jill Stevenson's Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (2013) and John Fletcher's Preaching to Convert (2013), Bial's text asks how collisions between the secular and the religious create tension at the site of performance. Specifically, its close readings of production history and rigorous archival research provide the reader with exacting evidence to support Bial's larger project: excavating how spiritual concerns impact the creation and production of plays and musicals, with a particular concern for their subsequent commercial viability. The stakes are high: any given production's success or failure, as Bial notes, is measured in both ‘souls [and] dollars’ (p. 17).

Beginning with Salmi Morse's 1891 production of The Passion, Bial examines Broadway success stories, as well as a few flops, which provide readers with a broad range of biblical narratives from both the Old and New Testaments. In the chapter ‘Ben Hur: Biblical Fan Fiction’, the author uses the dramaturgy of fan fiction to examine how the sacred (in particular, God) is staged. ‘In the Beginning: Theatrical Creations’ considers retellings of the creation story by examining works including Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures (1930). ‘Jesus Christ, Broadway Star’ examines the most critically and popularly successful Bible adaptations to date, Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) and Godspell (1971), by framing ‘the traditional passion narrative in terms of late twentieth-century celebrity culture’ (p. 33).

Bial considers the ‘multitude of dynamic forces . . . that shape the production and reception of the Bible on the Broadway stage’ (p. 31). His methodological choice to view this particular canon through multiple lenses (his four ‘performance strategies’) supports his claims, but so does the vast array of archival evidence he brings to his case studies. Bial's monograph provides scholars of both theatre history and performance studies not only with an overview of the Bible on Broadway, but also with a lens through which to understand how religious texts function in a commercial space.

Performing Religion in Public invites readers to explore a myriad of secular spaces complicated by religious acts and objects. The collection posits a response to Jürgen Habermas's 2006 essay ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, in which he calls for a more rigorous interrogation of the role of religion in public life. The essays answer this call by viewing religious practice as a ‘dynamic, lived, and fluidly embodied set of actions, practices, gestures, and speech acts’ (p. 2). Arguing that the public sphere is, in part, constructed by religion, the collection examines how acts of religious devotion, as well as performative spaces and objects, intersect with society; it seeks not to define an appropriate role for religion, but to understand how religious practice collides with the body politic.

The book is divided into four thematic sections. The introduction outlines Habermas's theory surrounding the development and decline of the bourgeois public sphere (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962), but, further, articulates critical interventions that followed its initial publication. These responses include Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics (2002), which introduces the idea of multiple publics subordinate to the dominant culture, and the field of performance studies. At the conclusion of each of these sections, a conversation between the scholars represented further illuminates how their individual work speaks in conversation with the others, and within these larger theoretical frames. In ‘Publics and the Non-democratic State’, the authors investigate how religion functions in early modern England, Parisian seminaries and South Africa during apartheid. In the ‘Visceral Publics’ section, Joshua Edelman argues for the potential intimacy of street preaching and its ‘building up forms of public affect and discourse in opposition to the ways that Habermas and [Michael] Warner suggest’ (p. 119). ‘Publics and Commodification’ provides a look at how market trends impact the circulation of religious cultural products globally, namely in the whirling Sufi dance from Turkey, the Hindu Dūrgā Pūjā, and the nineteenth-century religious communities of Nottingham, England. In the final section, ‘Ephemeral Publics’, a postmodern perspective on religious space shapes Stephen Seely's identification of the Catholic confessional and the act of coming out as ‘signifier[s] of both Christian and queer counterpublics and identities’ (p. 20).

Performing Religion in Public suggests the public sphere as a lens through which to understand the ‘multifaceted surfaces of public cultures’ (p. 18), and in this it succeeds. Chambers, du Toit and Edelman have edited essays that provide a diverse look at how performance studies as a methodology can interrogate the role of religion in and as performance. The many spaces, times, nationalities and religions the text explores provide readers with a multidimensional view of the intersection of the sacred and the secular. Henry Bial provides us with a microhistoric perspective on the same question. His methodological intervention moves the reader from moments of archival discovery to their larger social implications, juxtaposing the commercial theatre and Judaeo-Christian doctrine. Together, these works provide scholars of theatre history and performance studies with multiple perspectives from which to view religion functioning in and as theatre. In turn, these perspectives will facilitate continuing debate over the role of the sacred in performance.