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Reference Books Books

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre

(12/16/2011)

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in US Latina Theatre explores contemporary theatrical productions by Latina dramatists in the United States and focuses on the effects that neoliberal politics, global market strategies, gender formation, and racial and ethnical marginalization have had on Latinas. Through the analysis of select plays by dramatists Nao Bustamante, Coco Fusco, Anne García-Romero, Josefina López, Cherríe Moraga, Linda Nieves-Powell, Dolores Prida,...

Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre

Scenic Art for the Theatre

(12/15/2011)

Now in its Third Edition, Scenic Art for the Theatre: History, Tools and Techniques continues to be the most trusted source for both student and professional scenic artists. With new information on scenic design using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other digital imaging softwares this test expands to offer the developing artist more step-by-step instuction and more practical techniques for work in the field. It goes beyond detailing job functions and discussing techniques to serve as a trouble-sh...

Ibsen's Foreign Contagion: Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Wing Pinero and Modernism on The London Stage

(12/15/2011)

..Matos's important book provides a well-researched, well-written ,and fascinating discussion of the notion of contagion from Ibsen and into Pineo and Jones. Professor Gregory Tague, St Francis College, editor of Origins of English Literary Modernism,1870-1914 The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre, London in 1891 precipitated one of the most famous theatrical quarrels in European theater history. Although many have commented on the extremity of the response from t...

Ibsen's Foreign Contagion: Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Wing Pinero and Modernism on The Lond

Inspired Drama Teaching: A Practical Guide for Teachers

(12/8/2011)

A practical guide to teaching and championing drama across the curriculum. The ideas in this book will inspire even the most unlikely thespian.

Inspired Drama Teaching: A Practical Guide for Teachers

Playing with Theory in Theatre Practice

(12/6/2011)

Through a collection of original essays and case studies, this book introduces ideas and raises questions about building dynamic, theoretically minded production work. Artists and scholars grapple with the shifting value and function of theory in theatre, exploring the multi-faceted and complex relationship between theory and theatre practice.

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights

(12/6/2011)

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights is an authoritative guide to the work of twenty-five playwrights who have risen to prominence since the 1980s. Written by an international team of scholars , it provides an illuminating survey and analysis of each writer's plays and will be invaluable to anyone interested in, studying or teaching contemporary drama. Among the many playwrights whose work is examined are Sarah Daniels, Terry Johnson, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Anthony Nei...

The Stage Lighting - The Technicians Guide: An On-The-Job Reference Tool

(12/6/2011)

Stage technicians or “teckies” traditionally apprentice for knowledge about their craft. This is a new, unique practical guide for teckies that can be read or used as a reference manual for all aspects of stage lighting, from equipment to lighting a performance space to special effects and design. Information is easily accessed through tabbed sections and keywords. The information in each chapter is presented at three levels: “A Quick Start,” enough basic information to get started; ...

The Stage Lighting - The Technicians Guide: An On-The-Job Reference Tool

Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre

(12/6/2011)

Provides a comparative approach to the internationally wide-spread phenomenon of the contemporary director-auteur in the theatre, urging a historical and theoretical exploration of the visions, methods, and stage idioms in the work of established artists. Sidiropoulou examines prominent examples of both older and more recent director-auteur work, aiming at re-asserting – to its artistic and academic audience – the value of balancing the established emphasis on the diegetic aspects of theatre...

Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre

Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000

(12/1/2011)

Far too often young theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from film to theater without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. Starting with a history of the relationship between theater and film, the collection includes essays from a variety of writers, directors, and theorists by examining the differences between working in, and creating for, drama and film. The playwright Bernard Shaw looks at the ways...

Stage and Screen: Adaptation Theory from 1916 to 2000

Playwriting Across the Curriculum

(11/30/2011)

This book is a guide to introducing the craft of playwriting into the secondary English curriculum at key stage 3, using the TEEP (Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme) framework. The authors also provide a particular focus on applying this versatile scheme of work to other areas of the curriculum, including Citizenship and PSHE. Playwriting Across the Curriculum also contains schemes of work for: • pupils with special educational needs (SEN) • pupils with English as an addit...

Acting in Moving-Image Culture

(11/30/2011)

This volume offers transdisciplinary approaches to discuss acting in moving-image culture. It assembles international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art and philosophy, who scrutinie both the actor’s presence and art in analog and digital film from historical, generic, and particularly theoretical perspectives: phenomenology, Deleue studies, new media theory to cognitive research, along with re-animated classical approaches and case studies. Each perspective in...

Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present

(11/25/2011)

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. This has led to an astonishing range of performance styles, ways of working and modes of intervention in varied sites of theatrical production. The essays in this collection place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives tha...

Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present

Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction

(11/22/2011)

This critical introduction to Performance Studies provides undergraduates with an accessible way into terminology and context. Using an innovative tripartite structure that combines the voices of artists, critics and teachers, it addresses a variety of practices moving through body, space, time, technology, interactivity and organization.

Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction

African Theatre 10: Media and Performance

(11/20/2011)

Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Several of the articles deal with popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, though the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon is not completely neglected. One article addresses the interface between live performance and video (or still photography) and the way popular live or recorded music in South Africa creates layers of theatrical and ideological expression and link...

African Theatre 10: Media and Performance

The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre

(11/19/2011)

Di Benedetto considers theatrical practice through the lens of contemporary neuroscientific discoveries in this provoking study, which lays the foundation for considering the physiological basis of the power of theatre practice to affect human behavior. He presents a basic summary of the ways that the senses function in relation to cognitive science and physiology, offering an overview of dominant trends of discussion on the realm of the senses in performance. Also presented are examples of how ...

The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre

Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare's Auditory World, Stage and Screen

(11/16/2011)

This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by scholars such as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the acoustic world of the plays involves a real paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about Shakespeare’s plays: from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to lar...

Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare's Auditory World, Stage and Screen

Costume in Greek Tragedy

(11/15/2011)

This is the first book-length survey of tragic costume to be published for over forty years. The core of the book focuses on tragic costume in its original performance context of fifth-century Athens, but the implications of subsequent uses in Roman and more recent performances are also taken into consideration. Most importantly, the reader is invited to think about how tragic costume worked as a language in ancient performance and was manipulated physically and verbally in order to create meani...

Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes

(11/15/2011)

A unique contribution to an emerging field, Composed Theatre explores musical strategies of organization as viable alternative means of organizing theatrical work. In addition to insightful essays by a stellar group of international contributors, this volume also includes interviews with important practitioners, shedding light on historical and theoretical aspects of composed theatre.

Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes

Acting Together II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

(11/15/2011)

Acting Together II continues where the first volume left off, presenting more inspiring examples of peace-building performances in conflict-ridden regions. Where the first volume emphasizes theater and ritual's potential for resistance and catharsis in the midst of direct violence and in the aftermath of mass violence, the second volume focuses on performance's ability to bridge gaps and create inclusion in the more subtle context of structural violence and social exclusion. Drawing examples fro...

Acting Together II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

All for the Best: How Godspell Transferred From Stage to Screen

(11/11/2011)

The Off-Broadway hit musical Godspell became a worldwide cultural phenomenon in 1972 when, just over a year after its award-winning emergence on stages around the world and with the Top Twenty Billboard hit "Day by Day," Columbia Pictures decided to film and release it on the silver screen across the globe. In the process, it created cinematic history for its use of locations around New York City (including the then-unfinished World Trade Center) and, at the same time, accomplished the nearly-i...

All for the Best: How Godspell Transferred From Stage to Screen

Lux Presents Hollywood: A Show-by-show History of the Lux Radio Theatre and the Lux Video Theatre, 1934-1957

(10/31/2011)

This reference work is a show-by-show chronicle of the series, arranged by broadcast season, and showing network affiliation, host, announcer, director, musical director, and adaptation writer. Show listings include title, date first broadcast, cast, cast of the Lux commercials, plot synopsis, and film versions of the story. Also provided are the intermission guests-D.W. Griffith, Theda Bara, King Vidor, Sid Grauman among others-interviewed between acts of the broadcasts.

Lux Presents Hollywood: A Show-by-show History of the Lux Radio Theatre and the Lux V

Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater

(10/28/2011)

We easily accept that size matters in other areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their great length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalbexamines internationally prominent, marathon-length theater productions, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Comp...

Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater

Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theater in Colonial Mexico

(10/25/2011)

Nahuatl drama, one of the most surprising results of the Catholic presence in colonial Mexico, merges medieval European religious theater with the language and performance traditions of the Aztec (Nahua) people of central Mexico. Franciscan missionaries, seeking effective tools for evangelization, fostered this new form of theater after observing the Nahuas’ enthusiasm for elaborate performances. The plays became a controversial component of native Christianity, allowing Nahua performers to pr...

Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theater in Colonial Mexico

The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays

(10/25/2011)

Contemporary Irish drama communicates not only through words but also through the non-verbal use of space – both the geographical places in which plays are set and the ways stage space is used. The work of cultural and physical geographers, brought to bear on plays by Friel, McPherson, Carr, and McGuinness, illuminates the extent to which perceptions of themes and characters are determined by the plays’ uses of space. The plays shape reactions to issues of belonging and not belonging, home a...

The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays

Working in American Theatre: A Brief History, Career Guide and Resource Book for over 1000 Theatres

(10/11/2011)

This is the indispensable career guide for anyone interested in the theatre: the complete A to Z culled from industry expert Jim Volz's experience and interviews with many voices in the theatre community. This guide is your first port of call from how to get your foot in the door to where, when and how to advance your career. In addition to advice, inspiration and strategies for all working practitioners, not just actors, it also features extensive listings and directories for regional companie...

Working in American Theatre: A Brief History, Career Guide and Resource Book for over

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (20th Anniversary Edition)

(10/11/2011)

A revised edition of one of the most influential plays of our time, published with a new forward by the author, and debuting in celebration of Signature Theatre Company’s Tony Kushner season.

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (20th Anniversary Edition)

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals

(10/11/2011)

Scott Miller once again shares his passion for and knowledge of musical theater in this endlessly entertaining and informative look at how musicals have both reflected and adapted to America's changing mores. Specifically, Miller casts his eye on the triumvirate of postwar social change: sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Eager to respond to the concerns and tastes of the increasingly influential baby-boomer generation, musical theater in the late Sixties began to embrace formerly taboo subjects. S...

Working in American Theatre

(10/11/2011)

Show Case: Developing, Maintaining, and Presenting a Design-Tech Portfolio for Theatre and Allied Fields

(10/5/2011)

A design tech portfolio showcases a theatre designer/technician's most prized accomplishments in stage design, lighting, costuming, or makeup. The ability to make a winning portfolio is essential to getting into choice colleges, obtaining scholarships, and getting new jobs in the field. Unfortunately the process can become time consuming and challenging if you don't know where to start. Show Case offers students, teachers, and aspiring professionals the information they need to know to create, m...

Show Case: Developing, Maintaining, and Presenting a Design-Tech Portfolio for Theatr

They Can't Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives

(10/1/2011)

Does a particular song take you back to a certain time and place? More than 100 celebrities were asked what songs bring back special memories. * Film star Joan Collins The Way You Look Tonight reminds her of the first dance at her wedding to Percy Gibson. * TV presenter Richard Madeley remembers playing guitar at the local folk club when he hears American Pie by Don McLean. * Pavarotti's rendition of Nessun Dorma sets off memories of the 1990 World Cup for Gary Lineker * Joanna Lumley thinks of ...

They Can't Take That Away from Me: Musical Memories That Colour Our Lives

Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies

(10/1/2011)

The vanished world of India’s late-colonial theatre provides the backdrop for the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time. These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or soci...

Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies

The Playbill Broadway Yearbook: June 2010 to May 2011, Seventh Annual Edition

(10/1/2011)

Many of the people who work on Broadway keep scrapbooks of their experiences: photos, signed posters, ticket stubs, and, of course the Playbills. Playbill Books, a division of the iconic 127-year-old company that designs the programs for every show on Broadway, has expanded this idea into an annual project that has become a Broadway institution: The Playbill Broadway Yearbook. Taking the form of a college yearbook, the seventh edition is packed with photos - more than 4,000 of them, many in colo...

The Playbill Broadway Yearbook: June 2010 to May 2011, Seventh Annual Edition

Broadway MVPs: 1960-2010 - The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons

(10/1/2011)

Every year, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League name a Most Valuable Player - an MVP. The Broadway musical community doesn't. Oh, there are the Tony Awards, the Drama Desk Awards, and the Theatre World Awards. But what if Broadway selected a MVP each season? In Broadway Musical MVPs: 1960-2010, The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons, Peter Filichia names his choices for the MVPs of each of the past 50 ...

Broadway MVPs: 1960-2010 - The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons

The Making of War Horse

(9/13/2011)

Generously illustrated with the work of award-winning photographer Simon Annand, this book takes you behind the scenes, describing how Tom Morris, director at the National Theatre, interacted with the Handspring Puppet Company in developing ideas for the staging of the piece. It also gives a clear account of how the puppets were designed and constructed.

Words Into Action: Finding the Life of the Play

(9/13/2011)

Drawing instances from his own work in theater and from teaching at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, William Gaskill looks at action and intention, stillness and movement, sentences and rhetoric, punctuation and pauses. He pays detailed attention to staging Shakespeare's plays, including chapters on masks and on language as character.

Words Into Action: Finding the Life of the Play

Violence in American Drama: Essays on Its Staging, Meanings and Effects

(9/13/2011)

This interdisciplinary collection of 19 essays addresses violence on the American stage. Topics include the revolutionary period and the role of violence in establishing national identity, violence by and against ethnic groups, and females as perpetrators and victims, as well as state and psychological violence and violence within the family. The book works to assess whether representing violence may cause its cessation, or whether it generates further destruction. Featured playwrights include S...

Violence in American Drama: Essays on Its Staging, Meanings and Effects

Mixing a Musical: Broadway Theatrical Sound Mixing Techniques

(9/9/2011)

When mixing a live show, for the first time or hundredth time, there are countless things running through your mind, foremost- this is live and you have to get it right! Whether you are working on Broadway, in a regional theatre or on the school production, having an understanding of the equipment, set up, and how sound behaves is crucial to the success of your show's performance. In this guide to live sound mixing for theatre, Shannon Slaton shares his expert knowledge and proven, effective tec...

Mixing a Musical: Broadway Theatrical Sound Mixing Techniques

Fundamentals of Theatrical Design: A Guide to the Basics of Scenic, Costume, and Lighting Design

(9/6/2011)

This book delves into the fundamentals of Theatrical Design including A Guide to the Basics of Scenic, Costume, and Lighting Design.

Fundamentals of Theatrical Design: A Guide to the Basics of Scenic, Costume, and Ligh

The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance

(9/2/2011)

An all-encompassing reference guide to the theatre arts.

The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance

Grease: Music on Film Series

(9/1/2011)

In the summer of 1978, Grease was the word. On Friday, June 16, 1978, the movie musical made a major comeback when a big-screen version of the long-running rock-and-roll stage musical, Grease, opened in theaters around the country. With a talented cast led by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John and a memorable score featuring a mixture of oldies-style rock and contemporary pop, Grease captured the look and the feel of an old-fashioned Hollywood musical while taking audiences on a nostalgic trip...

Sweat, Tears, and Jazz Hands: The Official History of Show Choir from Vaudeville to Glee

(9/1/2011)

Featuring more than 100 competitive show choirs from around the United States in photos, quotations, and stories, this edutainment-style book details the pop culture and theater influences that, over time, built this unique entertainment genre into the mecca of music lovers that it is today. Read real-life accounts of show choir performers, directors, and choreographers. Catch a glimpse into a once practically unknown society of "swing choirs." Discover what P. T. Barnum, Bob Fosse, speakeasies,...

Sweat, Tears, and Jazz Hands: The Official History of Show Choir from Vaudeville to G

Broadway Musicals, Show by Show - Seventh Edition

(9/1/2011)

This updated edition of one of the best-selling and comprehensive Broadway reference books, first published in 1985, has been expanded to include many of the most important and memorable productions of the American musical theater, including revivals. Chronologically arranged beginning with The Black Crook in 1866, the seventh edition adds new entries and photos on numerous musicals from recent years, including American Idiot, Billy Elliot: The Musical, Hair (revival), Memphis, Next to Normal, ...

Broadway Musicals, Show by Show - Seventh Edition

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification

(8/30/2011)

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama explores the fruitful and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama, with analyses of Othello, Titus Andronicus, King Henry IV Part 1, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Tempest.

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification

The Health & Safety Guide for Film, TV & Theater, Second Edition

(8/30/2011)

A reference book outlining the Health & Safety Guide for anyone involved in the Film, TV & Theater industry.

The Health & Safety Guide for Film, TV & Theater, Second Edition

Shakespeare's Speculative Art

(8/16/2011)

This is the first book-length analysis of Shakespeare’s depiction of specula (mirrors) to reveal the literal and allegorical functions of mirrors in the playwright’s art and thought. Adding a new dimension to the plays Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Henry the Fifth, Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and All’s Well That Ends Well, Maurice A. Hunt also references mirrors in a wide range of external sources, from the Bible to demonic practices. ...

Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett's Work

(8/16/2011)

Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Works places sex and sexuality firmly at the heart of Beckett’s ouevre. From the earliest prose to the late plays, Paul Stewart uncovers a profound mistrust of procreation and a surprising variety of non-reproductive forms of sex— the solitary, the homoerotic, and the geriatric—which challenge established notions of propriety and identity politics. Sex informs Beckett’s search for a means of aesthetic creation not infected by aspects of natural pr...

Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections

(8/16/2011)

Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.

To Have or Have Not: Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre

(8/14/2011)

Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre.

Digital Technical Theater Simplified: High Tech Lighting, Audio, Video and More on a Low Budget

(8/12/2011)

The theater is in the midst of a digital revolution! This book provides readers with an easy-to-understand overview of the digital technology currently available for the stage. In clear language, Digital Technical Theater Simplified explains digital technology in the fields of lighting, audio, video, and show control. All chapters contain do-it-yourself examples of how anyone can use these advanced technologies, as well as case studies of “How the Pros Do It.” 40 black-and-white illustration...

Digital Technical Theater Simplified: High Tech Lighting, Audio, Video and More on a

This is Burlesque: The Glitzy Guide

(8/1/2011)

This is the ultimate comprehensive whirlwind guide to burlesque theatre. Discover its roots and shoots, its heroines and heretics—and the reason WHY burlesque has always been taboo…yet so popular.

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