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, ...
Alan Hughes presents a new complete account of production methods in Greek comedy. The book summarises contemporary research and disputes, on such topics as acting techniques, theatre buildings, masks and costumes, music and the chorus. Evidence is re-interpreted and traditional doctrine overthrown. Comedy is presented as the pan-Hellenic, visual art of theatre, not as Athenian literature. Recent discoveries in visual evidence are used to stimulate significant historical revisions. The author ha...
This volume analyzes major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal "proving ground" that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and p...
While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. Billy the Kid and Other Plays collects seven of these works and offers them together for the first time.
Like his novels, many of Anaya’s plays are built from the folklore of the Southwest. This volume opens with The Season of La Llorona, in which Anaya fuses the Mexican legend of the dreaded “crying wom...
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; “More In...
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 wit...
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...
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...
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...
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 inte...
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 still...
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...
Theater is the room where performance happens. Where people sit and watch other people. The moment to moment event that unfolds hinges on our imperfect-ness. . . . Theatre for Beginners is a manual for the actor based in the belief that the person is interesting before the performing happens, and the essence of good stage work is rooted in a constant state of beginning.
Richard Maxwell, the downtown writer and director with a deadpan aesthetic and an ever-innovative body of work, has written ...
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.
As stage and screen artists explore new means to enhance their craft, a new wave of interest in expressive movement and physical improvisation has developed. And in order to bring authenticity and believability to a character, it has become increasingly vital for actors to be aware of movement and physical acting. Stage and screen artists - including dancers, clowns, puppeteers, singers, and other performers who combine acting with their art - must now call upon physical presence, movement on st...
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...
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...
In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’.
Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity.
The book features:
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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...
The Federal Theatre Project stands alone as the only national theatre in the history of the United States. This study re-imagines this vital moment in American history, considering the Federal Theatre Project on its own terms – as a “federation of theatres” designed to stimulate new audiences and create locally-relevant theatre during the turbulent 1930s. It integrates a wealth of previously undiscovered archival materials with cultural history, delving into regional activities in Chicago, Bosto...
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.
