An inside look at live theater ---
from community to professional ---
from the Kenley Players to Pittsburgh
Civic Light Opera ---
from Pittsburgh to Youngstown and beyond.....
With over 100 photographs in the book, the reader takes a journey through a lifetime of theater stories and experiences. From Ballantyne's meager beginnings in Pittsburgh with his first theater experience in Junior High School up to the present with the production of powerful hard hitting shows based on historical events.
The book is entertaining and lighthearted but also provides those in the business as well as those just starting out, an educational outlook on what to do and what not to do to be successful in the theater world.
Theater is filled with stories. Everyone in the business has them and the ones in "Why I Did It!" provide the backbone for a book filled with fascinating times spent entertaining audiences across the country from small intimate stages to palatial palaces in major cities.
The reader will meet major celebrities as well as unknowns and discover what makes them, as well as theater, tick. Magic happens every night the curtain goes up on a stage production. The agony and the ecstasy of that magic is vividly described in "Why I Did It!"