Broadway Bookshelf

Biographies, show books, musical scores, history, and must-read theatre books.

Browse by Category

Biographies Show Books Autobiography For Actors Musical Scores Reference Books History

Latest Broadway Books

Patti LuPone: A Memoir

(9/14/2010)

Broadway legend LuPone, a five-time Tony nominee and two-time Tony winner, raises the curtain on her life and career in this engaging memoir. Detailing both her travails and her triumphs, she takes the reader on a guided tour recalling some memorable moments in musical theater. She began in her teens when she and her twin brothers performed on Long Island as the LuPone Trio. On a 1968 scholarship at John Houseman's Juilliard Drama Division, she was "overwhelmed with fear," but then toured with H...

Playbill's At This Theatre

(1/1/2010)

Theatregoers' favorite history of Broadway is back in an updated and expanded 2010 edition including more than 500 color production photos, vintage archival photos, and Playbill covers from all forty currently operating Broadway theatres. Thirty-eight of the original chapters have been expanded to cover all the shows that have opened in the ten years since the popular 2000 edition, with two new chapters added to include Broadway theatres recently refurbished and returned to life. This unique chr...

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...

The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson Cover

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...

The World of Theatre: Tradition and Innovation Cover

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 ...

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 ...

The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan Cover

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...

The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet Cover

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.

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...

Theatre World 1993-1994, Vol. 50

(1/1/2000)

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 ...

The Social Significance of Modern Drama Cover

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...

Contemporary American Playwrights

(2000)

The playwrights covered in this study have among them won most of the available awards and experienced considerable success in the theater. They have not, however, found their way so easily into the academic canon. Christopher Bigsby examines, in some detail, the developing careers of some of America's most fascinating and original dramatic talent: John Guare, Tina Howe, Tony Kushner, Emily Mann, Richard Nelson, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson. In a...

Neil LaBute: Stage and Cinema

(2008)

Neil LaBute is one of the most exciting new talents in theatre and film to have emerged in the 1990s. Influenced and inspired by such writers as David Mamet, Edward Bond and Harold Pinter, he is equally at home writing for the screen as for the stage, and the list of films he has written and directed includes The Wicker Man (2006), Possession (2002) and In the Company of Men (1998). As a playwright, screenwriter, director, and author of short stories, he has staked out a distinctive, and distur...

The Cambridge History of American Theatre 3 Volume Paperback Set

(2006)

This unique three-volume history covers all aspects of American theatre from plays and playwrights, through actors and acting, to theatre groups and directors. Each volume includes an extensive overview and timeline followed by chapters on specific aspects of American theatre including vaudeville and popular entertainment, European influences, theatre in and beyond New York, the rise of the Little Theatre movement, reception, modernism, scenography, stagecraft, and architecture. Volume I covers...

The Cambridge History of American Theatre 3 Volume Paperback Set Cover

A Myth of Shakespeare

(2010)

This play contains no thesis of Shakespeare's life, character, or genius, except that he was a born poet and working dramatist. The scenes included were intended, quite mythically, to represent barely possible incidents in his life, passages read to or by his friends, or performances in his theatre.-adapted from the Note Charles Williams was one of the finest-not to mention one of the most unusual-theologians of the twentieth century. His mysticism is palpable-the unseen world interpenetrates o...

How to Enjoy Opera

(1987)

Discusses the essential elements of opera, surveys the history of opera, and describes the plots of one hundred popular operas.

Charles Osborne's Theatricals: The Collected Dramatic Criticism

(1999)

In 1986 Charles Osborne, ex-actor and translator of plays from French and German (and once described in Vogue as 'a suave 20th century version of the universal man') published a vitriolic attack on British drama critics. As a result, he was offered the posiiton as Chief Theatre Critic for the Daily Telegraph. He agreed to undertake the job for a period of no more than five years. His perceptive, trenchant and wittily expressed reviews established him as a highly respected recorder of the London ...

Charles Osborne's Theatricals: The Collected Dramatic Criticism Cover

The Theatre of Howard Barker

(2005)

In this second, fully revised edition of his acclaimed study of Barker's work, Charles Lamb sets out to make emotional sense of the characters and their interactions. This is a detailed exploration of the 'scene of seduction' - the challenge, the secret, the abject and the catastrophic, processes which dominate Barker's work. For Lamb, the power of Barker's plays is to be found in the exposure to the irrational and its promotion of a state of unknowing. This revised edition includes: *...

The Saint's Tragedy

(2006)

The writer of this play does not differ with his countrymen generally, as to the nature and requirements of a Drama. He has learnt from our Great Masters that it should exhibit human beings engaged in some earnest struggle, certain outward aspects of which may possibly be a spectacle for the amusement of idlers, but which in itself is for the study and the sympathy of those who are struggling themselves.

Plays and Puritans

(2010)

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Great Britain; Theater; Literary Criticism / Drama; Performing Arts / Theater / General; Performing Arts / Theater / History

A Christmas Carol

(2001)

Paul Sills, the master of improvisation and found of The Second City and creator of Story Theatre - and who has influenced some of theatre's most important directors, writers and actors - adapts for stage one of the classic works of literature, Charles Dickens' masterpiece, A Christmas Carol.Included as well are some of the exercises devised for Story Theater by Viola Spolin, renowned for her work with games and improvisation and whose best-selling text has become the definitive guide to improv...

The Chosen

(2000)

The Chosen is a novel/play written by Chaim Potok. It was published in 1967. It follows the main character Reuven Malter and his friend Daniel Saunders, as they grow up in New York in the 1940s. A sequel featuring Reuven's young adult years is titled The Promise.

The Methuen Book of Modern Drama: Plays of the '80s and '90s

(2003)

Published to celebrate twenty years of Methuen's Royal Court Writers Series, this volume contains five ground-breaking plays of the eighties and nineties.

The Methuen Book of Modern Drama: Plays of the '80s and '90s Cover

The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart

(2006)

The large-scale Broadway musical is one of America's great contributions to world theatre. Bill and Jean Eckart were stage designers and producers at the peak of the musical, and their designs revolutionized Broadway productions. At a time when sets were meant to remain simply backdrops that established time and place but not much else, an Eckart set became part of the performance on stage, equal at times to an actor. Anyone who has seen Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables has seen the innov...

The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart Cover

Pinocchio

(2001)

Noted writer Leon Katz, the champion of the present day commmedia dell'arte, has written a brand-new stage adaptation for children's theatre. Included are the costume sketches, the stage cues and even a few of the stage tricks used to bring not just Pinocchio but all of the play to real life in its acclaimed original American Children's Theatre production.

A Heiner Muller Reader: Plays, Poetry, Prose

(2006)

Heiner Muller was born in Eppendorf, Saxony, into a working-class family. His father, a socialist, was beaten, arrested, and lost his job during the Nazi regime. Muller too became a socialist and was a civil servant in East Germany and later worked as a journalist and technical writer for the East German Writers’ Union. He honed his skills as a dramatist working at the Maxim Gorki Theater in East Berlin in the late 1950s. Muller wrote three plays with his wife, Inge Muller. The pair won th...

A Heiner Muller Reader: Plays, Poetry, Prose Cover

Mary Poppins: Anything Can Happen If You Let It

(2007)

Two veteran writers collaborate on this fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the journey that took the “practically perfect” nanny from the pages of P. L. Travers’s beloved novels to the stage. Well-known British writer and radio personality Brian Sibley tells Mary Poppins’s story, from her obscure origins in Travers’s Australian childhood and her progress through the series of books Travers began to write in 1934, to her incarnation by Julie Andrews in one of the most succe...

Mary Poppins: Anything Can Happen If You Let It Cover

The Man from Home

(2007)

Newton Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis. He first attended Purdue University but graduated from Princeton University in 1893. While at Princeton he was the editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine and formed the Princeton Triangle Club. He was also voted the most popular man in his class. He was one of the most popular American no...

The Mother

(1994)

The Mother is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It is based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel of the same name. It was written in collaboration with Hanns Eisler, Slatan Dudow and Günter Weisenborn from 1930–31 in prose dialogue with unrhymed irregular free verse and ten initial songs in its score, with three more added later. It premièred at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, opening on 17 January 1932. It was directed by Emil Burri and the scenic design was by...

Visions of Simone Machard, The: Schweyk in the Second World War

(1987)

Schweik in the Second World War is a play by German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht. It was written by Brecht in 1943 while in exile in California, and is a sequel to the 1923 novel The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek. It is set in Prague and on the Russian Front during World War II. It is a satirical tale of a common man, Schweyk, who is forced into war and manages to survive. He overcomes dangerous situations in Gestapo Headquarters, a military prison, and a Voluntary Labor Service. ...

Visions of Simone Machard, The: Schweyk in the Second World War Cover

The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Ui

(2010)

In this savage and witty parable written in exile in 1941, Brecht recasts the rise of Hitler as a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. This prizewinning translation by Ralph Manheim skilfully captures the wide range of parody and pastiche in the original - from Richard III to Al Capone, from Mark Antony to Faust - without diminishing the horror of the real-life Nazi prototypes.

Bertolt Brecht: Journals 1934 - 1955

(1995)

Bertolt Brecht's work journals trace his years of exile (the period from 1934 to 1955) in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and America, as well as his return, via Switzerland, to East Berlin. These journals include his perceptive and at times polemical critiques of other writers and intellectuals, but the accounts of his own writing practice provide the greatest insights into the creation of his dramatic work as well as the development of his politics and theories about epic theatre. There are memora...

Bertolt Brecht: Journals 1934 - 1955 Cover

Saint Joan of the Stockyards

(1970)

"A major Brecht play in an outstanding translation with an expert and up-to-date preface." -- Eric Bentley "... a fine translation.... Jones has handled Brecht's meters with great skill." -- Choice

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

(1999)

Writing in exile in the USA during the Second World War, Brecht borrowed from an ancient Chinese story-echoed in the Judgement of Solomon-in which two women both claim the same child. Brecht's subversion of this tale provides a parable which seems to say that resources should go to those in whose hands they will be most productive. Thanks to the rascally judge, Azdak, one of Brecht's most vivid creations, this story, at least, has a happy outcome. The child is entrusted to the peasant Grusha, w...

Sejanus: His Fall

(2006)

We stand not in the lines, that do advance To that so courted point.

The Poetaster Or His Arraignment

(2008)

Johnson coined the term poetmaster, which he defined as "an inferior poet with pretensions to artistic value". Ben Johnson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. He is known for his satirical plays such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Johnson was a great reader and lover of controversy. Johnson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets. In 1616 he received an annual pension, making him the first Poet Laureate of Engla...

Plays And Poems

(2007)

Ben Jonson’s “Song to Celia” is known to millions as “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes.” Jonson was educated at the prestigious Westminster School in London. He took up acting, and by 1597 he was writing original plays. Jonson’s first widely acclaimed play, Every Man in His Humour, included William Shakespeare in its cast.

The New Inne

(2004)

Playes in themselves have neither hopes, nor feares, Their fate is only in their hearers eares: If you expect more then you had to*night, The maker is sick, and sad. But do him right.

The Alchemist

(2010)

The Alchemist is a sublimely accomplished satirical farce about dreams of self-refinement: people want to transform themselves into something nobler, richer, more powerful, and more virile just as base metal was touted to be transformed into gold in the alchemical process. First performed in 1610 and set in the same contemporary London time period, the plot revolves around scheming con artists during their master’s absence from the house. Face, Subtle and Doll Common dupe a series of ‘c...

Epicoene: Or, The Silent Woman

(2008)

"Epicoene, or the Silent Woman is a comedy by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson. It was originally performed by the Blackfriars Children, a group of boy players, in 1609. It was, by Jonson's admission, a failure on its first presentation; however, John Dryden and others championed it, and after the Restoration it was frequently revived--indeed, a reference by Samuel Pepys to a performance on July 6, 1660 places it among the first plays legally performed after Charles II's ascension. The play ...

Volpone and Other Plays

(2004)

The three plays collected in this volume depict the faults, errors and foibles of ordinary people with exuberant humour, savage satire and acute observations. "Volpone" portrays a rich Venetian who pretends to be dying so that his despised acquaintances will flock to his bedside with extravagant gifts in hope of an inheritance. "The Alchemist" also deals with greed and gullibility, as a rascally trio of confidence tricksters, claiming to have the legendary Philosopher's Stone, fool a series of ...

Every Man in His Humor

(2008)

Every Man in His Humour is a 1598 play by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The play belongs to the subgenre of the "humours comedy," in which each major character is dominated by an overriding humour or obsession. All the available evidence indicates that the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre. That date is given in the play's reprint in Jonson's 1616 folio collection of his works; the text of the play (IV,iv,15) contains an allusion to John Bar...

Cynthia's Revels

(2009)

Cynthia's Revels was one element in the so-called Poetomachia or War of the Theatres between Jonson and rival playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker. Ben Jonson coined the term poetmaster, which he defined as an inferior poet with pretensions to artistic value. Ben Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. He is known for his satirical plays such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Jonson was a great reader and lover of controversy. He had an unparalleled bre...

The Ground on Which I Stand

(2000)

August Wilson's radical and provocative call to arms.

Master Olof (A Drama in Five Acts)

(2006)

A drama based 'the Luther of Sweden'

Master Olof (A Drama in Five Acts) Cover

Creditors, and Pariah

(2007)

Johan August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish writer, playwright, and painter. Strindberg is known as one of the fathers of modern theatre. His work falls into two major literary movements, Naturalism and Expressionism. His novel The Red Room (1879) brought him fame. His early plays were written in the Naturalistic style. His best-known play from this period is Miss Julie (1888). Later, he underwent a time of inner turmoil known as the Inferno Period, which culminated in the production of a ...

Open Letters to the Intimate Theater

(1966)

Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, who combined in his works psychology, naturalism, and later elements of new literary forms. Strindberg was married three times – several of his plays drew on the problems of his marriages and reflected his constant interest in self-analysis. A sensitive and controversial writer, who suffered from hostile reviews, Strindberg represented the 19th-century ideal of artist as a free personality, unrestrained by convention.

Open Letters to the Intimate Theater Cover

August Strindberg: Selected Essays

(2006)

This is the first fully edited translation of a series of essays by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, have been selected for the light they shed, both directly and indirectly, on Strindberg's contribution to the European theater, first in such masterpieces of psychological realism as The Father and Miss Julie, and subsequently in those works, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, with which he largely established a basis...

August Strindberg: Selected Essays Cover

Miss Julie and The Stronger: Two Plays

(2002)

Frank McGuinness presents scintillating new versions of two of August Strindberg's plays -- one a major work, the other less well known. Miss Julie is Strindberg's examination of power, sex, and class, set on a midsummer's eve in a nobleman's house and focusing on the shifting relationship between Miss Julie, the daughter of the house, and Jean, her father's manservant. The Stronger is a short play that explores the complex range of emotions felt by Madame X when she encounters Mademoiselle Y, ...

Miss Julie and The Stronger: Two Plays Cover

View all Videos

Tickets From $59

Tickets From $77

Tickets From $71