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The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson
(3/1/2007) One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in an... |
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Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent
(7/1/2006) Rent can be characterized as a Tony- and Pulitzer-winning rock musical and film, but it can be described also as an ensemble experience that just kept growing. Nobody can describe that deeply human process better than actor Anthony Rapp, who played video artist Mark Cohen in both the Broadway play and the movie. His heartwarming personal memoir shows the continuity between the musical's genesis and the emotional lives of the artists workshopping it. With You takes you backstage and into the hea... |
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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
(6/13/2006) The year 1599 was crucial in the Bard's artistic evolution as well as in the historical upheavals he lived through. That year's output—Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and (debatably) Hamlet—not only spans a shift in artistic direction and theatrical taste, but also echoes the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth's court and the downfall of her favorite, the Earl of Essex. Like other Shakespeare biographers, Columbia professor Shapiro notes the importance of mundane events in Shakespeare's art... |
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The World of Theatre: Tradition and Innovation
(11/29/2005) The World of Theatre is the first introduction to theatre book to truly focus on diversity and globalism, integrating coverage of multicultural, international and experimental theatre throughout. Theatre is presented as a global and multicultural form that reflects both traditional and evolving world views. While the American commercial theatre and European forms are central to the text, alternative theatres are placed side by side for comparison and contrast in each chapter, thus avoiding the s... |
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The Fabulous Lunts: A Biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne
(10/13/2005) For 40 years, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were the most acclaimed stage actors in America. From 1928 (six years after their marriage) until their retirement in 1960, they appeared only togethermost notably in drawing-room comediesperfecting the subtle team playing that became their hallmark. In this comprehensive biography, Brown, theater professor at Western Illinois University, meticulously documents the couple's lives. Describing the perishable art of stage performance (the Lunts made few f... |
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Theatre and Travel: Tours of the South
(3/2/2005) Presents rare information on traveling circus, minstrel, opera, and Toby shows. This collection of essays explores an understudied but pervasive aspect of American theatre: theatre on the road, from minstrel shows and Toby shows to contemporary African American theatre, 19th-century circus rail travel, and small-town opera houses. The challenges in gathering and compiling data on these ephemeral productions, from such far-flung sources as railroad schedules and weather reports, minutes f... |
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New York Then/New York Now
(2/21/2005) New York Then/New York Now—a collection of essays, memoirs, interviews, commentary, and plays—contemplates New York City’s history and future as a center for groundbreaking theatrical forms and ideas. Featuring the work of theater artists, producers, and critics, this special issue of Theater is concerned with the ideas and practicalities of making theater in and for New York within specific historical, political, and economic contexts. The first section, “New York Then,” reflects on ... |
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The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin
(1/10/2005) Gathered together in one volume for the first time: all of the incomparable song lyrics of Irving Berlin, whose career and work are the most important and all-encompassing in the history of American popular music. Berlin came from a poor immigrant family and began his career as a singing waiter, but by the time he was nineteen he was publishing his songs and quickly found fame with "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911. In the extraordinary six decades that followed, Berlin wrote one popular hit... |
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The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee
(1/1/2005) Edward Albee, perhaps best known for his acclaimed and infamous 1960s drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is one of America's greatest living playwrights. Now in his seventies, he is still writing challenging, award-winning dramas. The essays in this collection provide a comprehensive, multi-faceted survey of Albee's career. Written in an engaging and accessible way, this book should appeal equally to students, scholars, and general readers. |
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The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan
(1/1/2005) Lovers of Gilbert and Sullivan will be in heaven with the publication of these two books, which nicely complement each other. Stedman (English, Roosevelt Univ., Chicago) offers an outstanding study of this playwright and his often overlooked works, with much of its value deriving from its study of Gilbert without Sullivan. The author is a recognized expert on Gilbert as well as the Victorian time period, and she shows him to be a complex and interesting man who often found himself at odds with ... |
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The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway
(7/1/2004) Playwright/novelist/screenwriter Goldman analyzes Broadway from the perspective of the audiences, playwrights, critics, producers and actors. |
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The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet
(1/1/2004) This collection of specially written essays offers both student and theatregoer a guide to one of the most celebrated American dramatists working today. Readers will find the general and accessible descriptions and analyses provide the perfect introduction to Mamet's work. The volume covers the full range of Mamet's writing, including now classic plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, and his more recent work, Boston Marriage, among others, as well as his films, such as The Ver... |
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Golda's Balcony: A Play
(11/21/2003) The sold out off-Broadway smash has moved to Broadway! The rise of Golda Meir from impoverished Russian schoolgirl to Prime Minister of Israel is one of the most amazing stories of the 20th century. Now her life has been transformed into a one-woman play of overwhelming power and triumph by William Gibson, author of The Miracle Worker. Golda's Balcony earned actress Tovah Feldshuh a 2003 Drama Desk award."Enlightening ... Now, hearing from someone who was there at the birth of the country, who ... |
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The Girl Who Fell Down: A Biography of Joan McCracken
(9/18/2003) An overnight sensation for her 1943 comedic role as "The Girl Who Falls Down" in the groundbreaking musical Oklahoma!, McCracken established the prototype dancer-comedienne, headlining in ballet, stage, film, and television productions before her life was tragically cut short by complications from diabetes. Author Lisa Jo Sagolla draws on extensive interviews with McCracken's friends, family, and colleagues to paint a complex portrait of the petite, blue-eyed, and sprightly entertainer as a w... |
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The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama
(6/25/2003) Known through three editions as the boldest and most distinguished introduction to drama, William Worthen's pace-setting text continues to provide exciting plays usefully situated within their historical and cultural contexts. |
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Let the Sun Shine In: The Genius of Hair
(6/13/2003) "Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen" In 1967, Hair launched a revolution. It rejected every convention of Broadway, of traditional theatre in general, and of the American musical specifically. It paved the way for the nonlinear concept musicals that dominated American musical theatre innovation thereafter. It also launched the careers of such actors as Diane Keaton, Melba Moore, Tim Curry, Peter Gallagher, and Ben Vereen. "Knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided" With more r... |
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O'Neill: Son and Artist
(11/25/2002) The turbulent, often tragic life of America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill, is laid bare in this acclaimed and insightful biography. |
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O'Neill Volume I: Son and Playwright
(11/25/2002) The turbulent, often tragic life of America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill, is laid bare in this acclaimed and insightful biography |
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OK! The Story of Oklahoma!: A Celebration of America's Most Beloved Musical
(3/1/2002) The first pairing of Richard Rodgers's music and Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics, along with Agnes de Mille's choreography, turned the sentimental Green Grow the Lilacs , written by a playwright named Lynn Riggs, into a phenomenon that was to set the standard for musical theater. And few first-nighters attending the 1943 Broadway opening of Oklahoma! could have known that they were witnessing the genesis of modern musical comedy. Conveying a "Hey, I was there" ambience, Wilk ( Don't Raise the Bridge ... |
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Diary of a Mad Playwright: Perilous Adventures on the Road with Mary Martin and Carol Channing
(3/1/2002) In this wild, humorous tale of the theater world, novelist and playwright Kirkwood ( A Chorus Line ) self-indulgently describes his three-year-long roller-coaster attempt to present his play, Legends! Here are vivid accounts of how Kirkwood found, lost and found again financiers, producers, directors, managers, a cast and supporting crew. Although much of the book's zany action centers on the two feuding actresses--Carol Channing and Mary Martin--who played the major roles of two feuding actress... |
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Shakespeare
(1/17/2002) Like Burgess's early novel, Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life, this equally delightful factual treatment of what we know of the Bard combines Burgess's stimulating erudition and his well-informed imagination. The result is at once a speculative biography, a theatrical history, and a re-creation of the Elizabethan age. Whether a vivid retracing of the evolution Elizabethan theater, a bravura reconstruction of the first performance of Hamlet, an infiltration of the intricaci... |
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The Lyrics of Noel Coward
(1/1/2002) Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Don't Put your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington and over 250 more lyrics from Coward's musical masterpieces. Noel Coward is one of the greatest lyricists of the twentieth century. Songs such as A Room with a View, The Stately Homes of England, Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Mrs Worthington are known, sung and loved the world over. This edition gathers together over 250 of Coward's lyrics, arranged in chronological order and grouped by show. In addition, these masterp... |
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Letters to George
(3/1/2001) Letters to George is a director's handbook of techniques written from inside the theatre; a brand new kind of rehearsal log. |
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An Actor and His Time
(4/1/2000) John Gielgud tells the story of his life in the theatre, from the time of the great actor/managers like Tree and du Maurier and star actresses like Sarah Bernhardt and his own great aunt Ellen Terry, to his famous partnerships with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. |
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Theatre World 1994-1995, Vol. 51
(1/1/2000) Theatre World, the statistical and pictorial record of the Broadway and off-Broadway season, touring companies, and professional regional companies throughout the United States, has become a classic in its field. The book is complete with cast listings, replacement producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles, and much, much more. There are special sections with biographical data, obituary information, listings of annual Shakespeare festivals and major drama a... |
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Theatre World 1993-1994, Vol. 50
(1/1/2000) Theatre World, the statistical and pictorial record of the Broadway and off-Broadway season, touring companies, and professional regional companies throughout the United States, has become a classic in its field. The book is complete with cast listings, replacement producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles, and much, much more. There are special sections with biographical data, obituary information, listings of annual Shakespeare festivals and major drama a... |
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The Social Significance of Modern Drama
(1/1/2000) Out of print virtually since its completion in 1914, Emma Goldman's pioneer work Social Significance in Modern Drama bridges modern drama and political philosophy, pointing out the road that remains to be travelled toward a theatre of social empowerment. Activist, feminist, philosopher and anarchist, Emma Goldman was a passionate thinker about all things modern when the 20th century was still raw and new. The emergence of her treatise on the theatre after years of obscurity is certain to arouse ... |
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Polaroid Stories
(1/1/1999) Naomi Iizuka’s 1997 play, Polaroid Stories, consciously uses stories, characters and themes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to tell the stories of street kids living on the edge in a desolate, urban landscape. Because these characters are named after Orpheus and Eurydice, and Echo and Narcissus, or based on stories of Dionysus, and Ariadne and Theseus, and because scenes are entitled “The Story of Semele” or “Theseus in the Labyrinth,” Iizuka creates a world that has two dimensions: the g... |
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Showtune: A Memoir
(11/1/1996) This memoir is by the man who created the Broadway hits "Hello Dolly!," "Mame," and "La Cage Aux Folles." The self-described "Mr. Show Business, the razzmatazz musical comedy writer, a cheerful man whose life is dedicated to making people smile and feel good and leave the theater humming a show tune," Jerry Herman takes readers on a sentimental journey, retracing his steps toward big-time success and occasional disappointment. Though Herman relates losing his lover to AIDS, and tells of his own ... |
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One Hell of a Life
(9/20/1995) Stapleton (b. 1925) has enjoyed a long career as a character actress and has won every award in sight: Oscar, Tony, Emmy. Her memoir, written with Scovell, covers her starstruck girlhood, her Broadway debut in 1946 and her charter membership in the Actor's Studio and offers insights into her art in such roles as Serafina (The Rose Tattoo). Along the way she talks candidly about her friendship with Marilyn Monroe, her struggle to save Montgomery Clift from self-destruction, the emotional dues she... |
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The Complete Lyrics Of Lorenz Hart
(1/1/1995) This expanded edition includes an appendix of previously uncollected and newly discovered lyrics. |
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Musicals!: A Complete Selection Guide for Local Productions
(12/2/1994) From A . . . My Name Is Alice to The Zulu and the Zayde, this second edition of a title first published in 1984 contains information about 500 musicals (100 of which are new to this edition) available for production by community theaters and schools. Listed alphabetically by title, each entry includes date of original production, playwright, composer, lyricist, plot summary, licensing agent and music publisher, recordings and librettos available (for in-depth research by the user), and cast (num... |
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The Story of Starlight Theatre
(3/1/1992) Starlight Theatre is a magic place where an evening of musical theatre under the stars in Kansas City's Swope Park speaks so strongly of emotion that the audience is transformed by the presence of the creative experience. This book is filled with historical photos and provides a "behind the scenes" look at the real workings of the second largest outdoor theatre in the United States. A must for theatre goers everywhere. Unlike many other art forms, live outdoor theatre is a participatory expe... |
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Five O'Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just
(1/1/1990) A remarkable collection of letters reveals the most intimate portrait yet available on the private life of Tennessee Williams. Maria St. Just was for 30 years Williams' closest friend, confidant, and reader and the inspiration for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. |
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Listening Out Loud: Becoming a Composer
(9/1/1989) The latest entry in Harper & Row's series on the professions explores composition as a career. Best known for her musical theater work (e.g., Doonesbury ), Swados has also written operas, oratorios, and TV and film scores. With this broard perspective, she addresses many musical styles (rock, jazz, classical), work settings (concert hall, theater, recording studio), and the composer's job from creative impulse to the craft of composition to the practical task of getting the music performed. Some... |
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My Side: The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon
(5/2/1986) Ruth Gordon's autobiographical account. |
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Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theater
(1/1/1986) Largely culled from the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, here are reflections about Broadway by many of its most successful professionals. The entries, most in the form of dialogues or panel discussions, are in three sections: analyses of specific shows (Death of a Salesman, Gypsy, Torch Song Trilogy, etc.) by those who created and performed in them; conversations with individual dramatists about their own careers; and group discussions of more general theater topics, such as criticism, librettos and... |
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Letters from an Actor
(4/1/1984) Letters from William Redfield while he was performing in the Gielgud-Burton production of "Hamlet." |
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The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof
(1/1/1971) A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the classic musical 'Fiddler on The Roof'. |
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I Am My Own Wife
(12/31/1969) Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama From the Obie Award-winning author of Quills comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi. In an attempt to d... |
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Conversations with August Wilson
(12/31/1969) In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Two of the plays—Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990)—were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and seven of them received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play. Wilson was indisputably the most significant American playwright to emerge since Edward Albee. Convers... |
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The Glass Menagerie
(12/31/1969) No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and ... |
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Memoirs
(12/31/1969) For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story. When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the mediathough long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest livi... |
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The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
(12/31/1969) Wilde on Sincerity: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Nearly a century after his death, the wit of Oscar Wilde remains as fresh and barbed as ever. This collection of his works, letters, reviews, anecdotes and repartee is ample proof of this iconoclast's enduring place in the world of arts and letters. |
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The Perfect Monologue: How to Find and Perform the Monologue That Will Get You the Part
(12/31/1969) In this companion volume to her highly successful Callback, Ginger Howard Friedman, a veteran casting director, playwright and teacher, reveals her winning formula for a monologue audition that lands you the part. She explains her essential rules for a successful audition, then selects scenes from 16 plays and adapts them into monologues, comic and serious, for men and women of all ages. |
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The Director's Voice: Twenty-One Interviews
(12/31/1969) Arthur Bartow is the Artistic Director of the Department of Drama at New York University. He is the author of The Director's Voice (TCG) and has been a consultant and a producer. He staged the original production of Short Eyes by Miguel Pinero and Elizabeth Swados' The Beautiful Lady. |
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The Actor with a Thousand Faces
(12/31/1969) A movement-based gudebook compendium, resource workbook, and practical manual for students, teachers, and theatre practitioners who are dedicated to the advancement of ensemble work. Using movement, text, sound, masks, and materials, these exercises are designed to instruct, provoke, and inspire participants to launch works that eventually transcend them. |
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Sweet Smell of Success
(12/31/1969) Based on the famous film starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, this well-received Broadway musical starred John Lithgow, who won the Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance. A controlling, sometimes vicious columnist (a character modeled after Walter Winchell) gets involved with an ambitious young publicist in late 1950s New York. This folio features 11 songs from the show, including: At the Fountain * Don't Know Where You Leave Off * Don't Look Now * For Susan * Laughin' All t... |
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Arcadia
(12/31/1969) Arcadia takes us back and forth between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging over the nature of truth and time, the difference between the Classical and the Romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life. Focusing on the mysteries—romantic, scientific, literary—that engage the minds and hearts of characters whose passions and lives intersect across scientific planes and centuries, it is “Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play... |
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Soliloquy: The Shakespeare Monologues - The Men
(12/31/1969) Your one-stop classical workshop! At last, over 175 of Shakespeare's finest and most performable monologues taken from all thirty-seven plays are here in two easy-to-use volumes (Men and Women). Selections travel the entire spectrum of the great dramatist's vision, from comedies, wit and romances, to tragedies, pathos and histories. Soliloquy! is an excellent and comprehensive collection of Shakespeare's speeches. Not only are the monologues wide-ranging and varied, but they are superbly annota... |
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