Stephen Sondheim returns with the second volume of his collected lyrics, giving us another remarkable glimpse into his life’s work, and into his life.
As he did in the acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat (one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010), Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with personal and theater history, discussions of his collaborations, and exacting, charming dissections of his work — both the successes and the failures. Picking up where he left off in Finishi...
On December 4, 1963 four young musicians by the names of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins recorded together at Sun Records in Memphis, creating one of the most amazing all-star jams in music history. Our matching songbook to the exciting new musical about this unforgettable night features smash hits from all four legends, including: Blue Suede Shoes * Fever * Folsom Prison Blues * Great Balls of Fire * Hound Dog * I Hear You Knocking * I Walk the Line * Sixteen Tons ...
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...
The only official companion book to the Tony Award winner for Best Musical from the creators of South Park and the co-creator of Avenue Q. Features the complete script and song lyrics, with 4-color spot illustrations throughout, an original introduction by the creators, and a foreword by Mark Harris.
The Book of Mormon, which follows a pair of mismatched Mormon boys sent on a mission to a place that's about as far from Salt Lake City as you can get, features book, music, and lyrics by Trey Pa...
Celebrating its 66th year, Theatre World is the most comprehensive record of the theatrical season on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and in regional theatre. Each of the 1,000-plus entries includes photos, a complete cast listing, producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles, and plot synopses. Theatre World also features the year's obituaries, a listing of all nominees and winners of the major theatrical awards, the longest-running shows on and Of...
"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, ...
Mark Ravenhill is the first book to provide a detailed analysis of the work of arguably the most important dramatist to have emerged from the British theatre over the past twenty years.
Shopping and F***ing (1996), with its unrelenting representation of dysfunctional youth, dark humour and graphic sex and violence, was seen by many to uniquely capture the social and political fallout of a decade, and Ravenhill fast attained a status as the ‘rude boy’ of British theatre. However, the numerous ...
The winner of seven Tonys, seven Grammys, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Sondheim has become synonymous with the best in musical theatre. Now, in Finishing the Hat, he has not only collected his lyrics for the first time, he's giving readers a rare, personal look into his extraordinary shows and life. Along with the lyrics for all of his productions from 1954 to 1981 - including West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd, which have starred some of the mo...
Broadway legend LuPone, a five-time Tony nominee and two-time Tony winner, raises the curtain on her life and career in this engaging memoir. Detailing both her travails and her triumphs, she takes the reader on a guided tour recalling some memorable moments in musical theater. She began in her teens when she and her twin brothers performed on Long Island as the LuPone Trio. On a 1968 scholarship at John Houseman's Juilliard Drama Division, she was "overwhelmed with fear," but then toured with H...
Arthur Miller is regarded as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, and his work continues to be widely performed and studied around the world. This updated Companion includes Miller's work since the publication of the first edition in 1997 - the plays Mr Peters' Connections, Resurrection Blues, and Finishing the Picture - and key productions of his plays since his death in 2005. The chapter on Miller and the cinema has been completely revised to include new films, and d...
Theatregoers' favorite history of Broadway is back in an updated and expanded 2010 edition including more than 500 color production photos, vintage archival photos, and Playbill covers from all forty currently operating Broadway theatres. Thirty-eight of the original chapters have been expanded to cover all the shows that have opened in the ten years since the popular 2000 edition, with two new chapters added to include Broadway theatres recently refurbished and returned to life. This unique chr...
Applause Theatre and Cinema Books is pleased to make this venerable continuing series complete by publishing Theatre World Volume 63. Theatre World remains the authoritative pictorial and statistical record of the season on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and for regional theatre companies. Volume 63 features Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's Tony Award-winning Best Musical Spring Awakening, which also earned a Theatre World Award for actor Jonathan Groff. Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Uto...
This is the long-awaited biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights whose postwar decade of work earned him international critical and popular acclaim. Arthur Miller was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over sixty years, writing a wide variety of plays - including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman - which are still performed, studied and lauded throughout the world. Born in 1915 to moderately affluent Jewish-A...
Rock of Ages tells the tale of a rock star who meets his dream girl at a Los Angeles club performance in the '80s. This Tony Award -nominated Broadway musical features the hits of bands including Journey, Night Ranger, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, and others. Our songbook includes 30 piano/vocal selections: Any Way You Want It * Can't Fight This Feeling * Come On Feel the Noize * Every Rose Has Its Thorn * Heaven * Here I Go Again * Hit Me with Your Best Shot * I Hate Myself for ...
The most complete annual record of American theatre. Celebrating its 62 year, Theatre World remains the authoritative and pictorial record of the season on Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway, and for regional companies. Volume 62 features the Tony Award-winning Best Musical Jersey Boys, which also earned a Theatre World Award and Tony Award for its star, John Lloyd Young, while British imports Richard Griffiths and The History Boys gave lessons on how to earn rave reviews as well. Sex ...
From the silver screen to the Great White Way, small community theatres to television sets, the musical has long held a special place in America's heart and history. Now, in The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, readers who flocked to the movies to see An American in Paris or Chicago, lined up for tickets to West Side Story or Rent, or crowded around their TVs to watch Cinderella or High School Musical can finally turn to a single book for details about them all. For the first time, this...
From every “beautiful mornin’” to “some enchanted evening,” the songs of Oscar Hammerstein II are part of our daily lives, his words part of our national fabric.
Born into a theatrical dynasty headed by his grandfather and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein II breathed new life into the moribund art form of operetta by writing lyrics and libretti for such classics as Rose-Marie (music by Rudolf Friml), The Desert Song (Sigmund Romberg), The New Moon (Romberg) and Song of the Flame (George Gershwin)....
Celebrating its 64th year, Theatre World remains the definitive annual record of the American theatre season - the most complete record of the Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatre season. Volume 64 features Harvey Fierstein's A Catered Affair, starring Faith Prince, and Tracy Lett's moving August: Osage County, the latter part of a strong season for original dramas on Broadway. It was a season also rife with stellar revivals, including Sunday in the Park with George; So...
Tracing the development of the musical on both Broadway and in London's West End, this updated Companion continues to provide a broad and thorough overview of one of the liveliest and most popular forms of musical performance. Ordered chronologically, essays cover from the American musical of the nineteenth century through to the most recent productions, and the book also includes key information on singers, audience, critical reception, and traditions. All of the chapters from the first edition...
One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in an...
Rent can be characterized as a Tony- and Pulitzer-winning rock musical and film, but it can be described also as an ensemble experience that just kept growing. Nobody can describe that deeply human process better than actor Anthony Rapp, who played video artist Mark Cohen in both the Broadway play and the movie. His heartwarming personal memoir shows the continuity between the musical's genesis and the emotional lives of the artists workshopping it. With You takes you backstage and into the hea...
The World of Theatre is the first introduction to theatre book to truly focus on diversity and globalism, integrating coverage of multicultural, international and experimental theatre throughout. Theatre is presented as a global and multicultural form that reflects both traditional and evolving world views. While the American commercial theatre and European forms are central to the text, alternative theatres are placed side by side for comparison and contrast in each chapter, thus avoiding the s...
Presents rare information on traveling circus, minstrel, opera, and Toby shows.
This collection of essays explores an understudied but pervasive aspect of American theatre: theatre on the road, from minstrel shows and Toby shows to contemporary African American theatre, 19th-century circus rail travel, and small-town opera houses.
The challenges in gathering and compiling data on these ephemeral productions, from such far-flung sources as railroad schedules and weather reports, minutes f...
New York Then/New York Now—a collection of essays, memoirs, interviews, commentary, and plays—contemplates New York City’s history and future as a center for groundbreaking theatrical forms and ideas. Featuring the work of theater artists, producers, and critics, this special issue of Theater is concerned with the ideas and practicalities of making theater in and for New York within specific historical, political, and economic contexts. The first section, “New York Then,” reflects on the emerge...
Gathered together in one volume for the first time: all of the incomparable song lyrics of Irving Berlin, whose career and work are the most important and all-encompassing in the history of American popular music.
Berlin came from a poor immigrant family and began his career as a singing waiter, but by the time he was nineteen he was publishing his songs and quickly found fame with "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911. In the extraordinary six decades that followed, Berlin wrote one popular hit...
Edward Albee, perhaps best known for his acclaimed and infamous 1960s drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is one of America's greatest living playwrights. Now in his seventies, he is still writing challenging, award-winning dramas. The essays in this collection provide a comprehensive, multi-faceted survey of Albee's career. Written in an engaging and accessible way, this book should appeal equally to students, scholars, and general readers.
Lovers of Gilbert and Sullivan will be in heaven with the publication of these two books, which nicely complement each other. Stedman (English, Roosevelt Univ., Chicago) offers an outstanding study of this playwright and his often overlooked works, with much of its value deriving from its study of Gilbert without Sullivan. The author is a recognized expert on Gilbert as well as the Victorian time period, and she shows him to be a complex and interesting man who often found himself at odds with ...
This collection of specially written essays offers both student and theatregoer a guide to one of the most celebrated American dramatists working today. Readers will find the general and accessible descriptions and analyses provide the perfect introduction to Mamet's work. The volume covers the full range of Mamet's writing, including now classic plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, and his more recent work, Boston Marriage, among others, as well as his films, such as The Ver...
The sold out off-Broadway smash has moved to Broadway! The rise of Golda Meir from impoverished Russian schoolgirl to Prime Minister of Israel is one of the most amazing stories of the 20th century. Now her life has been transformed into a one-woman play of overwhelming power and triumph by William Gibson, author of The Miracle Worker. Golda's Balcony earned actress Tovah Feldshuh a 2003 Drama Desk award."Enlightening ... Now, hearing from someone who was there at the birth of the country, who ...
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.
Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Don't Put your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington and over 250 more lyrics from Coward's musical masterpieces. Noel Coward is one of the greatest lyricists of the twentieth century. Songs such as A Room with a View, The Stately Homes of England, Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Mrs Worthington are known, sung and loved the world over. This edition gathers together over 250 of Coward's lyrics, arranged in chronological order and grouped by show. In addition, these masterp...
Theatre World, the statistical and pictorial record of the Broadway and off-Broadway season, touring companies, and professional regional companies throughout the United States, has become a classic in its field. The book is complete with cast listings, replacement producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles, and much, much more. There are special sections with biographical data, obituary information, listings of annual Shakespeare festivals and major drama a...
Theatre World, the statistical and pictorial record of the Broadway and off-Broadway season, touring companies, and professional regional companies throughout the United States, has become a classic in its field. The book is complete with cast listings, replacement producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles, and much, much more. There are special sections with biographical data, obituary information, listings of annual Shakespeare festivals and major drama a...
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 ...
Naomi Iizuka’s 1997 play, Polaroid Stories, consciously uses stories, characters and themes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to tell the stories of street kids living on the edge in a desolate, urban landscape. Because these characters are named after Orpheus and Eurydice, and Echo and Narcissus, or based on stories of Dionysus, and Ariadne and Theseus, and because scenes are entitled “The Story of Semele” or “Theseus in the Labyrinth,” Iizuka creates a world that has two dimensions: the gritty realm ...
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...
Starlight Theatre is a magic place where an evening of musical theatre under the stars in Kansas City's Swope Park speaks so strongly of emotion that the audience is transformed by the presence of the creative experience.
This book is filled with historical photos and provides a "behind the scenes" look at the real workings of the second largest outdoor theatre in the United States. A must for theatre goers everywhere.
Unlike many other art forms, live outdoor theatre is a participatory expe...
An emotionally powerful and intimate musical about two New Yorkers in their twenties who fall in and out of love over the course of five years. The show's unconventional structure consists of Cathy, the woman, telling her story backwards while Jamie, the man, tells his story chronologically; the two characters meet only once, at their wedding in the middle of the show. Jason Robert Brown won Drama Desk Awards for the music and the lyrics after the Off-Broadway premiere in 2002 starring Norbert L...
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...
Something's Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination takes a critical, comprehensive look at one of the most inventive, influential, and internationally beloved Broadway musicals of all time - from its inception by a brilliant quartet of creators (Robbins, Bernstein, Sondheim, and Laurents) to its smashing success on film, to its ongoing popularity on stages around the world and its potent impact on the Great American Musical. Featuring intriguing chapters on West Sid...
Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
From the Obie Award-winning author of Quills comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi. In an attempt to d...
Radio Golf is August Wilson’s final play. Set in 1990 Pittsburgh, it is the conclusion of his Century Cycle—Wilson’s ten-play chronicle of the African American experience throughout the twentieth century—and is the last play he completed before his death. With Radio Golf Wilson’s lifework comes full circle as Aunt Ester’s onetime home at 1839 Wylie Avenue (the setting of the cycle’s first play) is slated for demolition to make way for a slick new real estate venture aimed to boost both the depre...
King Hedley II is the 8th work in playwright August Wilson's 10-play cycle chronicling the history of the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century. It's set in 1985 and tells the story of an ex-con in post-Reagan Pittsburgh trying to rebuild his life. Many critics have hailed the work as a haunting and challenging tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
When Herald Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, he is a free man-in body.
But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encount...
In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Two of the plays—Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990)—were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and seven of them received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play. Wilson was indisputably the most significant American playwright to emerge since Edward Albee.
Conversatio...
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.
Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and ...
For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story.
When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the mediathough long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest livi...
Wilde on Sincerity: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Nearly a century after his death, the wit of Oscar Wilde remains as fresh and barbed as ever. This collection of his works, letters, reviews, anecdotes and repartee is ample proof of this iconoclast's enduring place in the world of arts and letters.
