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Reference Books Books

Stages to Outstanding Performance: In the Rehearsal Room

(7/31/2011)

In a series of engaging case studies exploring how actors and directors work, this authoritative volume, written by some of the world's leading pioneers in the field, takes theater students and aspiring actors into the rehearsal and gives a unique insight into theater production at its best. The essays look closely at the processes used by a range of important artists, providing a valuable introduction to modern theater practice and advice on how to transform rehearsals into great stage portraya...

Stages to Outstanding Performance: In the Rehearsal Room

Playwriting For Dummies

(7/26/2011)

The easy way to craft, polish, and get your play on stage Getting a play written and produced is a daunting process. From crystallizing story ideas, formatting the script, understanding the roles of the director stagecraft people, to marketing and financing your project, and incorporating professional insights on writing, there are plenty of ins and outs that every aspiring playwright needs to know. But where can you turn for guidance? Playwriting For Dummies helps any writer at any stage of...

Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles

(7/12/2011)

Unrivalled insights into playing Shakespeare's major characters, from an extraordinary roll-call of star actors. Includes stories from Brian Cox, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Rebecca Hall, Derek Jacobi, Jude Law, Adrian Lester, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Tim Pigott-Smith, Kevin Spacey, Patrick Stewart, and Penelope Wilton.

Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles

Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical

(7/7/2011)

In this lively book, Stacy Wolf illuminates the women of American musical theater--performers, creators, and characters--from the start of the cold war to the present day, creating a new, feminist history of the genre, which finds often overlooked moments of empowerment for female audience members. Moving from decade to decade, Wolf first highlights the assumptions that circulated about gender and sexuality at the time, and then looks at the leading musicals, stressing the key aspects of the pla...

Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical

The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner's Broad Spectrum

(7/5/2011)

The essays in this anthology are situated within the larger context of a critical engagement with Richard Schechner's work as a theatre practitioner, teacher, scholar, activist, and visionary. Through a wide variety of approaches, the contributors acknowledge the profound impact that Schechner's work has had on our understanding of performance as a mode of cultural practice and on the emergence of Performance Studies as a discipline. Some essays are embedded in intensely personal reflections on ...

The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner's Broad Spectrum

Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre

(7/5/2011)

Engaging Audiences provides an insightful introduction to spectatorship from the perspective of cognitive studies. Using performances of several plays and a wide array of scientific evidence, Bruce McConachie examines the dynamics of conscious attention, mental concepts, empathy, emotion, and culture in theatre-going. This ground-breaking study challenges many of the current theories used to understand spectators and is a valuable resource for artists and scholars interested in how and why audie...

Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre

Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance

(7/5/2011)

This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre,' metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world.

Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance

Biographical Theatre: Re-Presenting Real People?

(7/5/2011)

Marilyn Monroe, Vincent van Gogh or the victims of rendition flights -- the number and variety of historical and contemporary figures represented on British stages is amazing. This book develops a new theoretical framework for the representation of real life figures on stage and examines different ways in which they can be included in performances.

Biographical Theatre: Re-Presenting Real People?

Latino Theatre Initiative / Center Theatre Group Papers, 1980-2005

(7/1/2011)

Established in 1992 by Los Angeles's Center Theatre Group, the Latino Theatre Initiative sought to diversify audiences by diversifying theatrical programming. Until 2005, when it was suspended, the program resulted in the production of eleven new main-stage plays at the Mark Taper Forum. It was also key in the development of new and emerging Latino artists, the production of second-stage works, and the incorporation of community-based events into theater programming. Chantal Rodriguez draws on ...

Latino Theatre Initiative / Center Theatre Group Papers, 1980-2005

The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama

(7/1/2011)

Though individual prologues and epilogues have been treated in depth, very little scholarship has been published on early modern framing texts as a whole. "The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama" fills a gap in the literature by examining the origins of these texts, and investigating their growing importance and influence in the theatre of the period. The topic-led discussion of prologues and epilogues deals with the origins of these texts, the difficulty of definition, and the way in wh...

The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama

Performance and Identity in the Classical World

(6/30/2011)

Actors in the classical world were often viewed as frauds and impostors, capable of deliberately fabricating their identities. Conversely, they were sometimes viewed as possessed by the characters that they played, or as merely playing themselves onstage. Numerous sources reveal an uneasy fascination with actors and acting, from the writings of elite intellectuals (philosophers, orators, biographers, historians) to the abundant theatrical anecdotes that can be read as a body of "popular performa...

Performance and Identity in the Classical World

Research Methods in Theatre and Performance

(6/21/2011)

How have theatre and performance research methods and methodologies engaged the expanding diversity of performing arts practices? How can students best combine performance/theatre research approaches in their projects? This book's 29 contributors provide hands-on answers to such questions. Challenging and debating received research wisdom and exploring innovative procedures for rigorous enquiry via archives, technology, practice-as-research, scenography, performer training, applied theatre/perfo...

Research Methods in Theatre and Performance

Performance and the City

(6/21/2011)

Urban studies has long understood the city as a 'text'. What would it mean now to use performance to rethink that metaphor? This book, now in paperback, queries the role theatre and performance play in urban policy, architecture, and civic history, also exploring their important place in the memories created in the wake of urban trauma.

Contemporary French Theatre and Performance

(6/21/2011)

This is the first book to explore the relationship between experimental theatre and performance making in France. Reflecting the recent return to aesthetics and politics in French theory, it focuses on how a variety of theatre and performance practitioners use their art work to contest reality as it is currently configured in France.

Contemporary French Theatre and Performance

Devouring Shakespeare: Five Simple Tools

(6/18/2011)

There are a number of ways you can experience Shakespeare—on the page or on the stage, in the classroom or in the living room—each with it’s own challenges and rewards. The one constant uniting all of them is the need to understand how Shakespeare works. Devouring Shakespeare: Five Simple Tools is a straightforward set of guidelines, developed in order to discover what makes Shakespeare tick. Created for the Chop Bard podcast, these guidelines have been used since 2008 to analyze the Ba...

Devouring Shakespeare: Five Simple Tools

Staging Marriage in Early Modern Spain: Conjugal Doctrine in Lope, Cervantes, and Calderon

(6/16/2011)

Staging Marriage in Early Modern Spain places dramatic representations of marriage within a historical and social framework and is framed by the decrees of the Council of Trent (1563), which ascribed sacramental status to marriage. While the diverse range of dramas examined in this study offer a multifaceted view of conjugal relations in early modern Spain, taken together they suggest a significant shift in the conventions governing marriage and other related social phenomena, including courtshi...

Staging Marriage in Early Modern Spain: Conjugal Doctrine in Lope, Cervantes, and Cal

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater: 1930-2010

(6/16/2011)

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater presents the plays and personages, movements and institutions, and cultural developments of the American stage from 1930 to 2010, a period of vast and almost continuous change. It covers the ever-changing history of the American theater with emphasis on major movements, persons, plays, and events. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 1,500 cross-referenced dictionary entries. This book...

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater: 1930-2010

Harold Pinter's Plays as 'Comedies of Menace'

(6/15/2011)

For the past few decades people have been torn apart by wars, terror attacks, financial crisis even in countries which were the so called super powers of the world. This has resulted in people living with insecurity, lack of recognition, fear and nostalgia and also led to broken families and forgotten friends whom we try to communicate only through social networking websites. In such a scenario the plays of Harold Pinter also expose the same especially through the theatre technique called comedy...

Harold Pinter's Plays as 'Comedies of Menace'

Tarragon Theatre

(6/12/2011)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Tarragon Theatre is a theatre in Toronto, Canada, and one of the main centers for contemporary playwriting in the country. Located near Casa Loma, the theatre was founded by Bill and Jane Glassco in 1970. Bill was the Artistic Director from 1971 to 1982. In 1982, Urjo Kareda took over as Artistic Director and remained in that role until his death in December 2001. R...

Organic Theater Company

(6/12/2011)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Organic Theater Company, a Chicago theatre, was founded in the 1970s by artistic director Stuart Gordon. The theater company was incorporated in 1972. Some productions were taken on the road, touring to New York City venues such as The Performing Garage, The Public Theater, and The Ambassador Theatre. After "E/R Emergency Room," Stuart Gordon went to the west coast to m...

How to write or choose the PERFECT PANTO SCRIPT

(6/7/2011)

Exactly what it says on the label. How to start writing, how to structure the scenes, what to include, what definitely to avoid, how to get comedy ideas, the secret of slapstick, and much more. He also digs deep into the problems with chosing a commercial script and gives detailed tips on how to avoid the outdated rubbish still being offered. Chris Lane brings 25 years experience of pantomime into this essential book. His scripts have been performed hundreds of times on amateur stages all over ...

How to write or choose the PERFECT PANTO SCRIPT

Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual

(6/7/2011)

Reality Principles gathers recent essays by esteemed scholar and theater practitioner Herbert Blau covering a range of topics. The book’s provocative essays—including “The Emotional Memory of Directing,” “The Faith-Based Initiative of the Theater of the Absurd,” “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness,” “The Human Nature of the Bot”—were given as keynotes and/or memorial lectures and are collected here for the first time. The essays take up a remarkable array of top...

Reality Principles: From the Absurd to the Virtual

Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated

(6/7/2011)

*Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated* proposes that the advent of new media forms, and the increasing integration of contemporary performance and media has generated new engagements, practices and understandings of presence. Developed as part of a major research project led by Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, Performing Presence poses questions over the nature of action, identity and self in the relationship with me...

Lighting Design For A Production Of A Streetcar Named Desire

(6/5/2011)

A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, was a realized dramatic production presented by the University of Florida School of Theatre and Dance. It was performed in the H.P. Constans Theatre during fall 2009. The process for this production began early in the year with design meetings and evolved over the following nine months, culminating on opening night as a theatrical production. I served as the lighting designer for this production. During this process, I analyzed the script and work...

Lighting Design For A Production Of A Streetcar Named Desire

Showstopper

(6/1/2011)

Showstopper is journalist and book author Abigail Pogrebin's account of being cast, at the young age of 16 (along with a then 21-year old Jason Alexander), in Stephen Sondheim's muscial "Merrily We Roll Along," the only flop in Sondheim's storied career. It's a still a mystery, and a much debated topic, among theater enthusiasts as to why "Merrily We Roll Along" flopped, especially since Sondheim's other productions, which include "Into the Woods," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd," and "A Funny Thing H...

The Handbook of Techniques for Theatre Designers

(6/1/2011)

Detailed advice on acquiring and refining the myriad of skills needed to be a theater designer, from drawing to costume design to effectively presenting design work Theater designers need to be proficient in an extraordinarily diverse range of skills to carry out their work—they are expected to be able to draw both creatively and technically; to be able to use color imaginatively; to make accurate scale models of their set designs; to design costumes, whether of a specific period, modern, ...

The Handbook of Techniques for Theatre Designers

Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage

(6/1/2011)

Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study, Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks...

Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage

Acting Together I: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

(6/1/2011)

Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict explores performance as a social justice, conflict resolution, and peace-building tool in regions fractured by violence, dislocation, poverty, and oppression. Nine case studies from six continents shape a vocabulary for evaluating community, artist, and ritual-based performance, giving voice to silenced truths. Performative genres of positive resistance and peace building include traditional and nontraditional theater, s...

Acting Together I: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

Great West-End Musical Flops

(6/1/2011)

Inspired by 'Not Since Carrie, 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops', this is a collection of some great (and not so great) London West-End flops. Featuring a cast that includes Alan Ayckbourne, Lionel 'Oliver' Bart, Ronnie Corbett, Bill Kenwright, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Barbara Windsor.

The Musical: A Research and Information Guide

(5/30/2011)

This research guide includes more than 1,400 annotated entries related to the genre as it appears on stage and screen. It includes reference works, monographs, articles, anthologies, and websites related to the musical. Separate sections are devoted to sub-genres (such as operetta and megamusical), non-English language musical genres in the U.S., traditions outside the U.S., individual shows, creators, performers, and performance. The second edition reflects the notable increase in musical theat...

The Musical: A Research and Information Guide

The Making of Cabaret

(4/20/2011)

A handy and engaging chronicle, this book is the most detailed production history to date of the original Broadway version of Cabaret, showing how the show evolved from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories, into John van Druten's stage play, a British film adaptation, and then the Broadway musical, conceived and directed by Harold Prince as an early concept musical. With nearly 40 illustrations, full cast credits, and a bibliography, The Making of Cabaret will appeal to musical theatre aficion...

The Enraged Accompanist's Guide to a Perfect Audition

(1/1/2011)

"I am your accompanist. You do not know me. I am the guy who sits behind the upright in the unflattering fluorescent light of the dance studio, a bottle of water on the floor, a half-eaten Power Bar on the bench, and your audition in my hands." Award-winning New York theatre composer and pianist Andrew Gerle pulls no punches in this irreverent, fly-on-the-wall guide to everything you've never been taught about auditioning for musical theatre. From the unique perspective of the pianist's bench, ...

The Enraged Accompanist's Guide to a Perfect Audition

Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater

(5/31/2010)

Stage Money is a groundbreaking guide to understanding professional theater finances today through the use of the tools and metaphors of the business world at large. This approach results in a comprehensive picture of the economic realities of theater production that is radically different from the assessments typically espoused elsewhere. Tim Donahue and Jim Patterson combine their experiences in the financial and creative aspects of theater production to present in straightforward prose their ...

Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater

The Play That Changed My Life

(11/1/2009)

What was the play that changed your life? What was the play that inspired you, that showed you something entirely new, that was so thrilling or surprising, breathtaking or poignant, that you were never the same? Nineteen of today's most gifted playwrights respond in this most revealing and personal book published by Applause Books and presented by the American Theatre Wing, founder of The Tony Awards. From Edward Albee's 1935 visit to New York's Hippodrome Theatre to see Jimmy Durante (and an...

What We Do - Working in the Theatre

(11/21/2008)

A comprehensive look at what theatre people do in pursuit of their careers and dreams. A must-have book for every theatre student and all the friends and family of theatre people. About Bo Metzler Spanning 40 years, the author has worked on some 125 shows in educational, community, regional, stock, dinner theatre, Off-Off & Off Broadway, on tour in every state and nine different countries, as well as several T.V. shows, rock concerts and special events. He has worked as either an actor, stag...

The Making of the Sound of Music

(4/4/2007)

The Sound of Music was the last – and most successful – collaboration of two giants of the musical theater, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Enjoying a long run on Broadway and then transformed into a major hit film--recently reissued in a 40th anniversary edition on DVD with new footage – The Sound of Music remains among the most produced musicals by professional and amateur companies around the world. This book tells the full story of the making of the show, from the first rough...

We Bombed in New London

(7/7/2006)

WE BOMBED IN NEW LONDON tells the true story of one man's tenacious plight to get his musical mounted. From its romantic inception to its eventual demise and then the score's resurrection in cabarets and recordings, this book takes you on a journey through the ups and downs of the theatrical world with all its excitement, disappointment, laughter and hope. Packed with memorabilia, including rare photos and interviews, this book documents composer/lyricist Brian Gari's minute by minute developmen...

The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators

(9/6/2005)

Bryer and Davison, co-editors of The Actor's Art, collect interviews with leading lyricists, composers, librettists, producers and directors who created the masterpieces of late 20th-century musical theater. Conversations with talent like Kander and Ebb, Susan Stroman, and Harold Prince shed light on the various ways to combine music and dance, which resulted in hits such as Cabaret, The Producers and Fiddler on the Roof, respectively. Each interview includes a brief bio and an appraisal of triu...

The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators

The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway

(7/1/2004)

Playwright/novelist/screenwriter Goldman analyzes Broadway from the perspective of the audiences, playwrights, critics, producers and actors.

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.

Letters to George

(3/1/2001)

Letters to George is a director's handbook of techniques written from inside the theatre; a brand new kind of rehearsal log.

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 Birth of Shylock & the Death of Zero Mostel

(5/1/1999)

Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice--the epitome of money-grabbing avarice and cruelty--is, Arnold Wesker believes, "a libel on the Jews" and a reflection of Elizabethan racism. Wesker, one of Britain's most revered playwrights, decided to create a counter portrait to the Bard's offensive character by writing his own play, Shylock, in which the Jew is compassionate, intelligent, and deeply moral. John Dexter, the world-renowned director, arranged to have it open on Broadway in 1977 w...

The Birth of Shylock & the Death of Zero Mostel

Lost Broadway Theatres

(9/1/1997)

Theaters are more than just buildings, more than giant musical instruments, as some have described them. For regular theatergoers, they're old friends. When a theater disappears, there's a palpable sense of mourning. Updated to 1997, Lost Broadway Theatres recalls, in photos and memories, playhouses from the colossal and opulent American Theatre, now a parking lot, to the cozy Punch and Judy, now the site of an office building. The good news is that several of the houses previously considered do...

Musicals!: A Complete Selection Guide for Local Productions

(12/2/1994)

From A . . . My Name Is Alice to The Zulu and the Zayde, this second edition of a title first published in 1984 contains information about 500 musicals (100 of which are new to this edition) available for production by community theaters and schools. Listed alphabetically by title, each entry includes date of original production, playwright, composer, lyricist, plot summary, licensing agent and music publisher, recordings and librettos available (for in-depth research by the user), and cast (num...

Musicals!: A Complete Selection Guide for Local Productions

Five O'Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just

(1/1/1990)

A remarkable collection of letters reveals the most intimate portrait yet available on the private life of Tennessee Williams. Maria St. Just was for 30 years Williams' closest friend, confidant, and reader and the inspiration for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Five O'Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just

Listening Out Loud: Becoming a Composer

(9/1/1989)

The latest entry in Harper & Row's series on the professions explores composition as a career. Best known for her musical theater work (e.g., Doonesbury ), Swados has also written operas, oratorios, and TV and film scores. With this broard perspective, she addresses many musical styles (rock, jazz, classical), work settings (concert hall, theater, recording studio), and the composer's job from creative impulse to the craft of composition to the practical task of getting the music performed. Some...

Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theater

(1/1/1986)

Largely culled from the Dramatists Guild Quarterly, here are reflections about Broadway by many of its most successful professionals. The entries, most in the form of dialogues or panel discussions, are in three sections: analyses of specific shows (Death of a Salesman, Gypsy, Torch Song Trilogy, etc.) by those who created and performed in them; conversations with individual dramatists about their own careers; and group discussions of more general theater topics, such as criticism, librettos and...

Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theater

The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof

(1/1/1971)

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the classic musical 'Fiddler on The Roof'.

The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof

A Tanner's Worth of Tune

(2010)

A Tanner's Worth of Tune is the first book to be written on the post-war British musical, and the first major assessment of the British musical for a quarter of a century, reviving interest in a vast archive of musicals that have been dismissed to the footnotes of theatrical history. This timely reappraisal of the genre and its social background, before the 'international' British musicals began appearing in the 1970s, argues for a radical understanding of the shows and their writers, and a reth...

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