I have many fond memories of the Front Row Theatre.

The theater-in-the-round with the rotating stage in the Cleveland suburb of Highland Heights operated from 1974 to 1993. It was the first place where I saw James Brown and Chuck Berry and where I saw one of my all-time favorites (Warren Zevon) twice.

I shook hands there with Richard Manuel of The Band as he left the stage, one week before he killed himself in a Florida hotel room. I remember a Belinda Carlisle concert interrupted by either a power outage or technical problems, and walking out of the theater after a Paula Poundstone show and being greeted by a lake-effect blizzard.

Like any concert venue, there were post-show traffic jams in the parking lot as everyone rushed to get home, and they were exacerbated by the lane- changing yahoos who would cut off 12 other drivers if it might get them out of the lot two cars quicker. However, after two hours of peace, love and harmony from Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, that goodwill at least carried over to the parking lot as drivers courteously let others pull out in front of them and patiently made their way to the exits. It was unlike anything I’d seen before or since.

The details are hazier about many, many other shows I saw there.

Perhaps no one has more memories of the Front Row than Jeannie Emser Schultz, who served as the theater’s director of marketing and publicity. And her memory still is razor sharp, if her book “As the Stage Turned: A Front Row Theatre Memoir” ($21.95, Cleveland Landmarks Press) is any indication.

“I do have an incredible memory, but I did have a lot of clippings for certain things,” she said.

Emser Schultz fills the books with behind-the-scenes stories of the good (and bad) behavior she saw on the job without turning it into a trashy tell-all. She shares who wanted the Front Row staff to iron his silk boxers (Andy Williams) and how the food Luther Vandross wanted in his dressing room veered wildly from health food to junk food, depending on whether he was dieting or not. However, the ones who asked where they could find drugs or prostitutes remain anonymous.

“Those people have children out there somewhere, not that they’re going to maybe see the book or anything, but I don’t want to have a book of yellow journalism,” she said. “I just really didn’t want to go there. It wasn’t going to be that kind of a book.”

For the first several years of its existence, the Front Row booked many of its acts for week-long engagements. That meant the staff spent more time with the performers compared to the one-nighters that are the norm at most venues.

In addition to shepherding performers to television and radio interviews, they’d escort them to Cleveland-area restaurants or arrange day trips to Amish country or Cedar Point.

Emser Schultz said performers like Johnny Mathis and Liberace were there so often they became like family. She watched Jay Leno grow up at the Front Row, going from opening act for Donny & Marie Osmond and Perry Como to headliner. He was supposed to be the venue’s final act before closing, but his mother’s impending death forced him to cancel, and Vandross ended up playing the final show.

The idea for the Front Row book started with a request by Cleveland magazine to write something for the anniversary of the theater’s opening or closing.

“I started, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t put this into one article.’ It’s just too much,” she said.

Emser Schultz — who also is the author of “Playhouse Square: An Entertaining History,” which is where she worked from the time the Front Row merged with the downtown Cleveland theater group until her retirement in 2022 — started shaping too much into book form during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I was pleasantly surprised to see my own name in the book, mentioned in a list of reporters who regularly covered events there. But after talking with Emser Schultz, now I’m just glad I survived.

Many of the people mentioned in the book — Jimmy Buffett, Harry Belafonte, Burt Bachrach — passed away while she was writing it. She reached out to Mitzi Gaynor’s agent to see if she might have any memories of her appearances at the Front Row to share. She died the next day.

“All these people were dying, and my brother said, ‘Gee, sis, I hope my name’s not in your book,'” she said.

“As the Stage Turned” is a very fun read, and Emser Schultz’s experience as a feature writer for the Plain Dealer before becoming a publicist comes through in the prose.

For those who ever saw a show there, it will make them nostalgic for the loss of a truly unique concert-going experience. And it made me wish I’d taken advantage of more opportunities to see events there when it existed.

Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at grayareas@tribtoday.com.