Biographies, show books, musical scores, history, and must-read theatre books.
For readers of Hidden Figures and Something Wonderful, Footnotes is the story of New York in the roaring twenties and the very first Broadway show with an all-black cast and creative team to succeed―and the indelible mark on our popular culture.
The great American composer George Gershwin was a product of the energetic Jazz Age city of New York. Yet Pittsburgh may have been his adopted town, through road tours of his Broadway shows, his appearances as a concert pianist, and his myriad associates with ties to the Steel City. Meticulously researched, Gershwin in Pittsburgh chronicles these surprisingly consequential connections. Theatrical venues such as the Nixon and Alvin Theatres and colleagues like Ned Wayburn, Oscar Levant, George S...
The author uses newly uncovered letters, manuscripts, and production files to reveal Meredith Willson's unusual combination of experiences in his pre-Broadway career that lead him to compose The Music Man at the age of 55. McHugh also gives an in-depth look at the reception of The Music Man and examines the strengths and weaknesses of Willson's other three musicals, with his sustained commitment to innovation and novelty. Packed with new revelations about the processes involved in writing these...
In today’s complex and challenging world, we often find ourselves facing problems for which there seem to be no answers. In this practical and inspirational book, songwriter and author David Friedman explores the idea that there are ALWAYS answers, and they often come in ways we don’t expect, if only we are willing to be open to the possibilities. In 1990, David wrote the song, Help is on the Way, in response to the AIDS crisis. First sung by Nancy LaMott, it has since become the theme song...
From the beginning of theater on the Cape in 1916 when a group of artists and writers in Provincetown mounted a production of a one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff, by a little-known playwright, Eugene O'Neill. It grew into the constantly expanding theater universe it is today. The theatrical descendants of O'Neill and the Provincetown Players continue to present classical drama, contemporary hits and new, experimental works to audiences that have come to expect the best. A tour of the theater...
Downtown Boston once thrived as a dazzling bohemia of burlesque halls, movie palaces, dime museums, and regal stages. By 1915, more than 20 theaters crowded along a quarter-mile stretch of lower Washington Street. The theater district gave birth to vaudeville and incubated some of America's most darling musicals and daring new dramas en route to Broadway. Theatergoers flocked to Tremont and Boylston Streets to watch the latest tryouts. Some productions flopped; others, like Oklahoma! and Paul R...
This book situates the production of The Boy Friend and the Players' Theatre in the context of a post-war London and reads The Boy Friend, and Wilson's later work, as exercises in contemporary camp. It argues for Wilson as a significant and transitional figure both for musical theatre and for modes of homosexuality in the context of the pre-Wolfenden 1950s.
Paris and the Musical explores how the famous city has been portrayed on stage and screen, investigates why the city has been of such importance to the genre and tracks how it has developed as a trope over the 20th and 21st centuries. From global hits An American in Paris, Gigi, Les Misérables, Moulin Rouge! and The Phantom of the Opera to the less widely-known Bless the Bride, Can-Can, Irma la Douce and Marguerite, the French capital is a central character in an astounding number of Broadw...
Includes over 30 new interviews, features hundreds of theatre professionals discussing everything that makes Broadway essential. Part of the proceeds will benefit the Broadway Advocacy Coalition.
This book chronicles one hundred years of dramatic developments in ballet, modern, and experimental dance for stage and screen in Europe and North America. The volume is magisterial in scope, encompassing the history of theatrical dance from 1900 through 2000. Beginning with turn-of-the-century dancer-choreographers like Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Michel Fokine, and a bit later Vaslav Nijinsky, and proceeding through the profusion of dance styles performed today, the book provides an unparall...
Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar...
Examines the origins and development of ancient drama, and particularly comedy, within a Sicilian and southern Italian context. Each chapter explores a different category of theatrical evidence, from the literary (fragments of Epicharmus and cult traditions) to the artistic (phylax vases) and the archaeological (theater buildings)
In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning,...
Since the late 1990s, Rupert Goold has garnered a reputation as one of the UK's most exciting and provocative theatre directors. His exhilarating, risk-taking productions of both classic texts and new plays have travelled from regional stages to the National Theatre, the West End, Broadway and beyond. Through his artistic directorship of Northampton's Royal & Derngate, the touring theatre company Headlong and London's Almeida Theatre, he has radically transformed, not only the companies themsel...
Records the seven-decade history of this distinguished theatre from its nightclub origins to its current status as a Tony Award-winning Broadway institution. Based on years of research as well as interviews conducted with Circle in the Square's major contributing artists.
Documents how black women theater artists and activists—many of whom worked behind the scenes as directors, designers, producers, stage managers, and artistic directors—disseminated the black aesthetic and emboldened their communities. Draws on nearly thirty original interviews with well-known artists such as Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, as well as less-studied figures including distinguished lighting designer Shirley Prendergast, dancer and choreographer Halifu Osumare, and three-tim...
Approaches the avant-garde Japanese performance art form of butoh from a cross-cultural, gender studies, and scientific perspective. From twenty years of research, interviews with some of the world’s top practitioners, historical documents, and rare photographs.
A wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigates musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others ... reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Explores themes of race, religi...
From the beginning of theater on the Cape in 1916 when a group of artists and writers in Provincetown mounted a production of a one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff, by a little-known playwright, Eugene O'Neill. It grew into the constantly expanding theater universe it is today. The theatrical descendants of O'Neill and the Provincetown Players continue to present classical drama, contemporary hits and new, experimental works to audiences that have come to expect the best. A tour of the theater...
In 1936 Orson Welles directed a celebrated all-black production of Macbeth that was hailed as a breakthrough for African Americans in the theater. For over a century, black performers had fought for the right to perform on the American stage, going all the way back to an 1820s Shakespearean troupe that performed Richard III, Othello, and Macbeth, without relying on white patronage.
A historical narrative of a group of musicals that cost millions, were created by world-renowned writers and directors, and that had spectacular potential... but bombed anyway.
Gives readers an overview of the work from its inception through revisions and stagings in regional theatres and Broadway, exploring its use of African American vernacular genres - blues music, folk songs, folk tales, and dance - and 19th Century Southern post-Reconstruction history. Ladrica Menson-Furr presents Joe Turner's Come and Gone as a historical drama, blues drama, American drama, great migration drama, and the finest example of Wilson's gift for re-locating the African American experi...
Explores this rich, decades-long history by traversing musicals, stars, and sounds from film, Broadway, and Las Vegas to the small screen. From Rodgers and Hammerstein's appearance on the first Toast of the Town telecast and Mary Martin's iconic Peter Pan airings to Barbra Streisand's 1960s CBS specials, "The Carol Burnett Show," "Cop Rock," "Smash," "Galavant," "My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," Great Performances, and a string of one-off musical episodes of sitcoms, nighttime soaps, fantasy shows, and...
Through an archive-driven investigation of the musical Pal Joey and its music, author Lindberg offers insight into the historical moment during which Joey was born, and to the process of genre classification, canon formation, and the ensuing critical debates related to musical and theatrical maturity. More broadly, the book argues that the critique and commentary on class and gender conventions in Pal Joey reveals a uniquely American concern over status, class mobility, and progressive gender r...
In a series of short essays, the stage musical is re-examined from seven different perspectives, including how the musical heralded the end of an era on Broadway, its reinvention of history and biography, how the film version has influenced future stage productions and the ways in which it put child performers centre stage ... how, nearly 60 years after its stage debut, the musical has a direct impact on the modern world, through its recent iterations ... through Salzburg's recent embracing of t...
Broadway musicals are one of America’s most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation? Now in a new second edition, The Great White Way is the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years from Show Boat (1927) to Hamilton (2015). This revised edition incl...
Musical theatre has a special place in the hearts of Australians. Whether it is The Boy from Oz, Bran Nue Dae or Muriel's Wedding, we love to see Australian stories on the big stage with all the glamour, energy and vibrancy a musical can offer. However magical they are on stage, performances leave behind few traces. Australia has a rich, hidden history of achievement in musical theatre which is now largely forgotten. Drawing on their long careers in musical performance, and extensive researc...
The National Theatre’s Costume department is one of the theatre’s largest departments. Their skilled practitioners work in a number of areas including tailoring, dyeing, costume props, costume production and maintenance to produce over 10,000 costume elements every year, transforming a designer’s vision for a production into vibrant reality. Accompanying the National Theatre’s showcase Costume exhibition from October 2019 to June 2020, Costume at the National Theatre is a lavish larg...
Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar...
London's West End is a global success story, staging phenomenal hit shows that have delighted millions of spectators and generated billions of pounds in revenue. In Good Nights Out, Aleks Sierz provides a thematic survey of such popular theatre shows that were enormous commercial successes over the past 75 years. He argues that these outstanding hits have a lot to say about the collective cultural, social and political attitudes and aspirations of the country, and about how our national identit...
From Anything Goes to Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter left a lasting legacy of iconic songs including "You're the Top," "Love For Sale," and "Night and Day." Yet, alongside his professional success, Porter led an eclectic personal life which featured exuberant parties, scandalous affairs, and chronic health problems. This extensive collection of letters (most of which are published here for the first time) dates from the first decade of the twentieth century to the early 1960s and features correspon...
The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "m...
The first comprehensive study of August Wilson's drama introduces the major themes and motifs that unite Wilson's ten-play cycle about African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. Framed by Wilson's life experiences and informed by his extensive interviews, this book provides fresh, coherent, detailed readings of each play, well-situated in the extant scholarship. It also provides an overview of the cycle as a whole, demonstrating how it comprises a compelling interrogation of ...
From Audra McDonald to Liza with a "Z," this is a showstopping rythmic alphabet book featuring your favorite leading ladies of the Broadway stage! Step into the spotlight and celebrate a cavalcade of Broadway's legendary leading ladies. Start with "A" for six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, then sing and dance your way through the alphabet with beloved entertainers like Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Lea Salonga, and Liza Minnelli! ...
Hasa Diga Eebowai In 2011, a musical full of curse words and Mormon missionaries swept that year’s Tony Awards show and was praised among major media outlets as a triumphant return of the American musical. Has everyone gone insane, or is this show a new milestone for musical theatre? This book explores the inherent achievements and failures of The Book of Mormon--one of the most ambitious, and problematic, musicals to achieve widespread success. The metaphor of boxing helps to explore the ...
Irresistible and authoritative, The Movie Musical! is an in-depth look at the singing, dancing, happy-making world of Hollywood musicals, beautifully illustrated in color and black-and-white--an essential text for anyone who's ever laughed, cried, or sung along at the movies. Leading film historian Jeanine Basinger reveals, with her trademark wit and zest, the whole story of the Hollywood musical--in the most telling, most incisive, most detailed, most gorgeously illustrated book of her long...
Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth- century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What Makes It Great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the Great American Songbook, bringing many of our favorite classics to life through the songs and stories of eight of the twentieth century’s most treasured American composers―Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, ...
From the Wall Street Journal's opera critic, a wide-ranging narrative history of how and why the New York City Opera went bankrupt―and what it means for the future of the arts In October 2013, the arts world was rocked by the news that the New York City Opera―“the people’s opera”―had finally succumbed to financial hardship after 70 years in operation. The company had been a fixture on the national opera scene―as the populist antithesis of the grand Metropolitan Opera, a nurturi...
Never have musicals been more popular than they are today. With live television broadcasts of shows like Rent and Hairspray and films like Mean Girls and Shrek being adapted to the stage, musicals?as well as the creators and artists who bring them to life?are at the forefront of popular culture. In 100 Most Important People in Musical Theatre, Andy Propst profiles the individuals who have helped shape this beloved art form. Songwriting greats such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodge...
A comprehensive companion to the six-part Emmy-winning PBS documentary series, Broadway: The American Musical is the gold standard of musical theater history books, tracing the roots of the art form at the turn of the twentieth century through the smashing successes of the new millennium. The in-depth text is lavishly illustrated with a treasure trove of photographs, scenic renderings, production stills, and rehearsal shots, many previously unpublished. With a foreword by Julie Andrews, thi...
In the Long Run: A Cultural History of Broadway?s Hit Plays presents in-depth analysis of 15 plays that ran over 1,000 performances, examining what made each so popular in its time?and then, in many cases, fall into obscurity. Covering one hundred years of theatre history, it traces the long-running Broadway play as a distinct cultural phenomenon that rises and falls from 1918 to 2018. Each chapter focuses on the longest-running plays of a particular decade, synthesizing historical research ...
There has never been a show business book quite like The Show Won't Go On, the first comprehensive study of a bizarre phenomenon: performers who died onstage. From the comedy magician who dropped dead on live television to the amateur thespian who expired during a play called The Art of Murder, the book is a celebration of lives both famous and obscure, as well as a dramatic and accurate recounting of events leading to the moments they died "doing what they loved." The Show Won't Go On covers a...
Chicago is a bona fide theater town, bursting with an explosive, innovative vitality that?s fed every sector of the entertainment industry?from Hollywood to Broadway to Studio 8H?for as long as it?s delighted adoring local fans. Ensemble is an in-depth, first-of-its-kind history of Chicago?s internationally celebrated theater scene, spanning 65 years and told through first-person accounts from the people who made it happen. Among many other topics, this book explores the early days of the fa...
Hollywood's conversion to sound in the 1920s created an early peak in the film musical, following the immense success of The Jazz Singer. The opportunity to synchronize moving pictures with a soundtrack suited the musical in particular, since the heightened experience of song and dance drew attention to the novelty of the technological development. Until the near-collapse of the genre in the 1960s, the film musical enjoyed around thirty years of development, as landmarks such as The Wizard of O...
Celebrating its eightieth birthday since being rebuilt in 1938, Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre is a vital part of the city's cultural identity. There has been a theatre on the site for nearly two hundred years, since Cooke's New Circus started life as the result of an argument about a broken sewer in 1826. Quickly renamed the Royal Amphitheatre (and affectionately known as the Amphi), the theatre went on to serve the city in a number of guises. From an establishment where horses were the enter...
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the vocal and theatrical traditions of American musical theater as important theological tenets. As Church membership grew, leaders saw how the genre could help define the faith and wove musical theater into many aspects of Mormon life. Jake Johnson merges the study of belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to explore the surprising yet profound link between two quintessentially American institutions. Throughout t...
This book showcases a lesser-known aspect of Maurice Sendak's oeuvre--his set designs for operas and ballets. Maurice Sendak is well-known for his acclaimed children's books, but he was also an avid music lover and designed a number of opera and ballet productions, among them Mozart's Magic Flute, Jan cek's Cunning Little Vixen, Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, and an opera composed by Oliver Knussen based on Where the Wild Things Are. This book brings together n...
One of the few studies covering both Broadway and Hollywood musicals, this book explores most of the most famous musicals of the past two centuries, along with many others. Presented as an introductory text for musical, dance and theater majors, as well as for musical lovers, the book includes references for nearly 1000 internet video examples of dance and song.
For generations, residents of New York's Capital District have flocked to the region's numerous theaters. The history behind the venues is often more compelling than the shows presented in them. John Wilkes Booth brushed with death on stage while he and Abraham Lincoln were visiting Albany. The first exhibition of broadcast television was shown at Proctor's Theater in Schenectady, although the invention ironically contributed to the downfall of theaters across the nation. A fired manager of the...
Since man first walked the Earth...in heels, no other art form has wielded as unique an influence on pop culture as Drag. Drag artists have now sashayed their way to snatch the crowns as the Queens of mainstream entertainment. Through informative and witty essays chronicling over 100 years of drag, readers will embark on a Priscilla-like journey through pop culture, from television shows like The Milton Berle Show, Bosom Buddies, and RuPaul's Drag Race, films like Some Like It Hot, To Wong Foo...
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