Double star.

Fair warning: I'm a huge Heinlein fan, so my reviews of his work aren't exactly impartial. Having said that this is one of my favorite novels of his. It is also one of his more unHeinlein-like stories. His main characters are often rugged individuals with strong dominant personalities but in this story the protagonist needs to subsume himself into another identity in order to succeed. I graduated from UC Berkeley with Dramatic Arts degree. Given the story line is basically about an actor, I found Heinlein's discussions about performance and acting interesting even when I didn't exactly agree with him. This novel was one of his best.

This is unusual for Heinlein in that the protagonist is not one his super-competent engineer types, but instead a down-on-his-luck actor. He is shanghaied by a spaceman, and soon find himself on Mars, being asked to impersonate a popular politician. His main qualifications for this is that a) he is an actor, after all; and b) he resembles the politician enough to pull it off. But because "The Great Lorenzo" has no technical skills at all, this book is about human nature and not science and engineering. This is middle period Heinlein, when he had mastered his trade, but before things got out of hand. This is a good read, and was the first of his books to win a Hugo award.