Broadway Bookshelf — History — Page 5

Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now

(7/10/2014)

The glorious tradition of the Broadway musical from Irving Berlin to Jerome Kern and Rodgers and Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim. And then . . . Cats and Les Miz. Mark Steyn's Broadway Babies Say Goodnight is a sharp-eyed view of the whole span of Broadway musical history, seven decades of brilliant achievements the best of which are among the finest works American artists have made. Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Gypsy, and more. In an energetic blend of musical history, analysis, and backsta...

Masked: The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the Court of Siam

(6/30/2014)

A brave British widow goes to Siam and—by dint of her principled and indomitable character—inspires that despotic nation to abolish slavery and absolute rule: this appealing legend first took shape after the Civil War when Anna Leonowens came to America from Bangkok and succeeded in becoming a celebrity author and lecturer. Three decades after her death, in the 1940s and 1950s, the story would be transformed into a powerful Western myth by Margaret Landon’s best-selling book Anna and the ...

A HISTORY OF US MUSICAL THEATRE: No Business Like It

(6/27/2014)

From the diverse proto-theatres of the mid-1800s, though the revues of the ‘20s, the ‘true musicals’ of the ‘40s, the politicisation of the ‘60s and the ‘mega-musicals’ of the ‘80s, every era in American musical theatre reflected a unique set of socio-cultural factors.? Nathan Hurwitz uses these factors to explain the output of each decade in turn, showing how the most popular productions spoke directly to the audiences of the time. He explores the function of musical theatre...

Blood on the Stage, 480 B.C. to 1600 A.D.: Milestone Plays of Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem

(6/20/2014)

In four volumes of Blood on the Stage, Amnon Kabatchnik examined more than 400 crime-themed plays produced in the 20th century. As any theater lover knows, however, depicting acts of wrong-doing is not a recent phenomenon. The stark, violent plays of Seneca in ancient Rome were followed by liturgical dramas of the Dark Ages that drew on both the Old and New Testaments. The golden age of Elizabethan drama boasted masterful plays drenched with treachery, bloodshed, and horror. In Blood on the ...

The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies

(6/2/2014)

The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies offers a series of cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling topics in the growing field of Sondheim Studies. Focusing on broad groups of issues relating to the music and the production of Sondheim works, rather than on biographical questions about the composer himself, the handbook represents a cross-disciplinary introduction to comprehending Sondheim in musicological, theatrical, and socio-cultural terms. This collection of never-before p...

Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter

(5/6/2014)

Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Camelot--love them or love to hate them, movie musicals have been a major part of all our lives. They're so glitzy and catchy that it seems impossible that they could have ever gone any other way. But the ease in which they unfold on the screen is deceptive. Dorothy's dream of finding a land "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut, and even a film as great as The Band Wagon was, at the time, a major flop. In Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals M...

Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady

(5/1/2014)

Few musicals have had the impact of Lerner and Loewe's timeless classic My Fair Lady. Sitting in the middle of an era dominated by such seminal figures as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, and Leonard Bernstein, My Fair Lady not only enjoyed critical success similar to that of its rivals but also had by far the longest run of a Broadway musical up to that time. From 1956 to 1962, its original production played without a break for 2,717 performances, and the show went on to be adapted into...

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918-1923

(5/1/2014)

Dorothy Parker holds a place in history as one of New York’s most beloved writers. Now, for the first time in nearly a century, the public is invited to enjoy Mrs. Parker’s sharp wit and biting commentary on the Jazz Age hits and flops in this first-ever published collection of her groundbreaking Broadway reviews. Starting when she was twenty-four at Vanity Fair as New York’s only female theatre critic, Mrs. Parker reviewed some of the biggest names of the era: the Barrymores, George ...

Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater

(5/1/2014)

From patriotic "God Bless America" to wistful "White Christmas," Irving Berlin's songs have long accompanied Americans as they fall in love, go to war, and come home for the holidays. Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater is the first book to fully consider this songwriter's immeasurable influence on the American stage. Award-winning music historian Jeffrey Magee chronicles Berlin's legendary theatrical career, providing a rich background to some of the great composer's most enduring songs, ...

Broadway Musicals, 1943-2004, (2 volume set)

(4/10/2014)

On March 31, 1943, the musical Oklahoma! premiered and the modern era of the Broadway musical was born. Since that time, the theatres of Broadway have staged hundreds of musicals--some more noteworthy than others, but all in their own way a part of American theatre history. With more than 750 entries, this comprehensive reference work provides information on every musical produced on Broadway since Oklahoma's 1943 debut. Each entry begins with a brief synopsis of the show, followed by a three-p...

Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

(3/11/2014)

“A must-read for all dancers as the invaluable historical references and in-depth coverage of the different jazz forms cannot be found in such detail in any other book on the market today.”—Debra McWaters, author of Musical Theatre Training “Artfully weaves history and professional perspectives to reveal the boundaries of the jazz dance world. It invites the reader to develop a more complicated definition of jazz dance for the twenty-first century.”—Susan A. Lee, Northwestern Un...

Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films

(2/25/2014)

Smoke. Shadows. Moody strains of jazz. Welcome to the world of "noir musical" films, where tormented antiheroes and hard-boiled musicians battle obsession and struggle with their music and ill-fated love triangles. Sultry divas dance and sing the blues in shrouded nightclubs. Romantic intrigue clashes with backstage careers. In her pioneering study, Music in the Shadows, film noir expert Sheri Chinen Biesen explores musical films that use film noir style and bluesy strains of jazz to inhabit...

The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical

(2/6/2014)

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? 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 The Scottsboro Boys (2011). Musicals mirror their time periods and reflec...

Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s

(1/2/2014)

Full-page newspaper ads announced the date. Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical. In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and art...

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater

(6/15/2012)

This second edition covers theatrical practice and practitioners as well as the dramatic literature of the United States of America from 1930 to the present. Includes a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1.000 cross-referenced entries on plays, playwrights, directors, designers, actors, critics, producers, theaters, and terminology.

Stage Turns

(5/28/2012)

Stage Turns documents the development and innovations of disability theatre in Canada, the aesthetic choices and challenges of the movement, and the multiple spatial scales at which disability theatre operates, from the local to the increasingly global. Kirsty Johnston provides histories of Canada's leading disability theatre companies, emphasizing the early importance of local efforts in the absence of national coordination. Close readings of individual productions demonstrate how aesthetic ch...

A New Poetics of Chekhov's Plays

(4/1/2012)

* Casts new light on how Chekhovís plays can be interpreted and enacted * The author explores all the prime components of Chekhov's theatrical technique: text construction, themes and ideas, scenes, dialogue, plot, and interaction between verbal and nonverbal elements * A rigorous and comprehensive treatment of the many aspects of Chekhov's artistic universe * All the major works explored. One century after the death of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), his plays are celebrated throughout the world a...

Mr. Broadway

(4/1/2012)

Mr. Broadway was completed just one month before Gerald Schoenfeld's death in 2008 at the age of 84. Bringing the reader backstage, the long-term chairman of the Shubert Organization shares his triumphs and failures, sings praise, and settles scores. He recounts nightmarish tales of the Shuberts, themselves - the meanness of Lee, the madness of JJ, the turmoil surrounding John's personal life, and the drunken ineptitude of Lawrence Shubert Lawrence, Jr., the man who succeeded them and nearly br...

A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance

(3/27/2012)

A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance three volume setcontains detailed listings of all major English-language productions of Shakespeare plays on stage and screen from 1970 to the early twenty-first century in the UK, Canada and the USA.

Working in Groups

(3/4/2012)

Updated in its 6th edition, Working in Groups provides readers with practical strategies, built on theory and research, for communicating and working successfully in groups. The authors use the guiding principle of balance while looking at both how groups work and how to work in groups. This accessible and user-friendly text gives readers the tools to apply group communication theories, methods, and skills—helping them become more effective and ethical group members.

Marriage, Gender, and Desire in Early Enlightenment German Comedy

(3/1/2012)

J. C. Gottsched, who reformed early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s, among the other moral goals that they pursued, propagated a new sentimental discourse promoting marriage based on love while devaluing its traditional socioeconomic foundations. Yet in comedies by well-known dramatists of the period such as Gottsched, Gellert, J. E. Schlegel, Lessing, and Quistorp, alternative gender roles and sexual beh...

A History of Theatre in Spain

(3/1/2012)

Leading theatre historians and practitioners map a theatrical history that moves from the religious tropes of Medieval Iberia to the postmodern practices of twenty-first-century Spain. Considering work across the different languages of Spain, from vernacular Latin to Catalan, Galician and Basque, this history engages with the work of actors and directors, designers and publishers, agents and impresarios, and architects and ensembles, in indicating the ways in which theatre has both commented on ...

Liverpool Playhouse

(2/15/2012)

Since its opening in 1911, Liverpool’s Playhouse has been inextricably linked to the history of the city in which it was built. The impetus to create it, Ros Merkin reveals in this chronicle of the oldest surviving repertory theater in Britain, grew out of the city’s new sense of civic pride and largesse in the early twentieth century. Her book asks both how the city has shaped the theater and what the theater has brought to the city, and along the way she dispels the myth that the Playhous...

Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism

(2/14/2012)

This bookranges from refugee camps in Palestine to halting sites of the Irish Travellers and elsewhere in search of a new politics practiced through performance. Written through the intersection of performance and philosophy, the book refutes neoliberalism's depoliticizing and strategic uses of humanitarianism, human rights, and development.

Stanislavski

(2/12/2012)

Stanislavski: The Basics is an engaging introduction to the life, thought and impact of Konstantin Stanislavski. Regarded by many as a great innovator of twentieth century theatre, this book examines Stanislavski's: life and the context of his writings major works in English translation ideas in practical contexts impact on modern theatre With further reading throughout, a glossary of terms and a comprehensive chronology, this text makes the ideas and theories of Stanislavski available to an und...

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater

(2/1/2012)

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation’s past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, ...

The Kabuki Theatre of Japan

(1/17/2012)

One of the most comprehensive handbooks available on Kabuki theatre provides readers with all the information they need to understand and appreciate this exciting amalgam of dramatic and musical arts. A clear and thoughtfully written text describes the theater’s development in the context of Japanese history, with detailed analyses of actors’ techniques, music and dance, plays and playwrights, the playhouse’s design evolution, and six representative Kabuki plays. Includes glossary of Japa...

Chekhov

(1/15/2012)

Indian Popular Theatres

(1/12/2012)

Indian Popular Theatres foregrounds an aspect of contemporary performance that has for some time warranted but not received serious study. It explores the living traditions of Indian Theatre in terms of its audience and the specific circumstances that surround them, focusing on four key forms: Bengali Jatra epics The Pandavani and storytellers of Central India The progressive New Marathi Theatre of Pune Safdar Hashmi’s JANAM street theatre Each of these styles o...

On Actors and the Art of Acting

(1/7/2012)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1880. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XI. FOREIGN ACTORS ON OUR STAGE. THAT our drama is extinct as literature, and our stage is in a deplorable condition of decline, no one ventures to dispute; but there are two opinions as to whether a revival is possible, or even probable; and various opinions as to the avenues ...

History of Theatre

(1/7/2012)

Updated in this 11th edition, Brockett and Hildy’s History of Theatre, is the most comprehensive and widely used survey of theatre history in the market. This eleventh edition retains all of the traditional features that have made History of the Theatre the most successful text of its kind including worldwide coverage, extensive illustrations – many now in color! --useful maps, and the expertise of Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, two of the most widely respected theatre historians ...

Costumes and Scenery for Amateurs

(1/6/2012)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1915. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... PROPERTIES AND HOW TO MAKE THEM Use care in the selection of your properties. Study your text. Avoid anachronisms. Do not use muskets and pipes in a scene that is laid before muskets were invented and tobacco discovered. Do not use modern lamps to light a mediaeval scene. Do not use mod...

Wild and Dangerous Performances

(1/3/2012)

Elephants, lions, tigers and leopards evoke fascination and awe, fear and excitement.This bookanalyzes trained acts in twentieth-century live circus and cinema,reveals how humans anthropomorphize animals with their emotions, and interrogates the notion thatanimals embody a phenomenology of emotions and feelings in culture.

Spectacular Performances

(1/3/2012)

Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concepts of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theater, relate to one another? How do portraits of poets help make the author readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect...

Re-Visioning Myth

(1/3/2012)

Re-Visioning Myth is the first in-depth assessment of "re-vision" as a phenomenon in women’s drama, examining the diverse ways in which classical myth narratives have been reworked by women playwrights for the European stage. This study explores the ideological and aesthetic potential of such practice and silmultaneously exposes the tensions inherent in attempts to challenge narratives that have fundamentally shaped Western thought. From tracing the persistence of classical myths in conte...

Performing Gender Violence

(1/3/2012)

Violence against women in plays by women has earned little mention. This revolutionary collection fills that gap, focusing on plays by American women dramatists, written in the last thirty years, which deal with different forms of gender violence. Each author discusses specific manifestations of violence in carefully selected plays: psychological violence, violence within the family, violence suffered by women at the hands of the medical profession, violence caused by situations of war and soci...

Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage

(1/3/2012)

This is the first book-length study, in any language, of the influence of Mei Lanfang - the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles - on the twentieth-century international stage. Focusing on Mei Lanfang's tours of Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Min Tian investigates - in the twentieth-century transnational political, ideological, cultural as well as theatrical contexts - the presence and placement of Mei Lanfang and the Chinese theatre on the intern...

The Drama of Marriage

(1/3/2012)

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Terence R...

Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment

(1/1/2012)

What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway, this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussi...

The Making of the West End Stage

(12/31/2011)

All roads lead to London - and to the West End theatre. This book presents a new history of the beginnings of the modern world of London entertainment. Putting female-centred, gender-challenging managements and styles at the centre, it redraws the map of performance history in the Victorian capital of the world. Bratton argues for the importance in Victorian culture of venues like the little Strand Theatre and the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street in the experience of mid-century London, ...

Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent

(12/15/2011)

This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obama’s election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments’ actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair’s support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a rad...

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

(12/2/2011)

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video "Dangerous." In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of "whiting up," in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial i...

Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire

(11/30/2011)

Claire Cochrane maps the experience of theatre across the British Isles during the twentieth century through the social and economic factors which shaped it. Three topographies for 1900, 1950 and 2000 survey the complex plurality of theatre within the nation-state which at the beginning of the century was at the hub of world-wide imperial interests and after one hundred years had seen unprecedented demographic, economic and industrial change. Cochrane analyses the dominance of London theatre, bu...

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage

(11/30/2011)

Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zo...

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical

(11/22/2011)

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists--from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim--have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience’s aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals sti...

Modern Chinese Drama

(11/1/2011)

This is a book for all fans of Chinese theater arts, from Kunqu and Peking Opera to Chinese and Western plays, operas, and stage or variety shows; from the smallest, most intimate neighborhood theaters to China's cutting edge or avante-garde playhouses to its grandest concert halls. Hongfan Zhao examines themes, plots, characters, and all aspects of stagecraft (artistic and technical) in China from the twentieth century to the present. This is the definitive history and appreciation of stage dra...

Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos

(10/25/2011)

The theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theater history and literary scholarship, offer a hybrid theater that integrates the popular with the formal, the mainstream with the experimental. Fahy examines the integration of and challenges to popular culture found in their works and offers new readings with an eye to American cultural studies and the impact of mass entertainment on modern life.

Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History

(10/11/2011)

This book explores automata or early robots as performers on the stage of theatre history. Automata are precursors to our digital culture, demonstrating that our spectacular culture of machine-based entertainments has numerous historical precedents. Automata are surprisingly saturated with intellectual and cultural history. Chapters examine topics like English Reformation Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass God's nature in Elizabethan moving statues; the influence that hydraulic garden auto...

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship

(10/1/2011)

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other t...

Theatre and Prison

(9/27/2011)

Theatre and Prison investigates how theatre makers stage critical questions about the use of prison in society. Using examples from popular culture, dramatic texts and applied theatre, it analyses how theatre and performance reveals economies of punishment, affects penal reform and both challenges and participates in narratives of reformation.