Broadway Bookshelf - Must Read Theater Books

Tony and Olivier Award–winning Bob Avian’s dazzling life story, Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey, is a memoir in three acts. Act I reveals the origins of one of Broadway’s legendary choreographers who appeared onstage with stars like Barbra Streisand and Mary Martin all before he was thirty. Act II includes teaching Katharine Hepburn how to sing and dance in Coco and working with Stephen Sondheim and Michael Bennett while helping to choreograph the original productions of Company...

Playwright Sarah Ruhl’s first book of poetry, 44 Poems for You, offers poems that form a subtle, personal meditation on family, motherhood, and loss. With a finely tuned ear for language, Ruhl’s poetry sings with a humbling honesty about what it means to share our lives with others and with those who form our hollows: a miscarriage, a close friend lost to cancer, and the sublimity of nature. She delves into womanhood through the physical reality of the everyday, and shows us life through her ha...

The Humana Festival of New American Plays has been a leading home for extraordinary playwrights and their imaginations for more than four decades, making Actors Theatre of Louisville one of the nation’s preeminent powerhouses for new play development. For six weeks every spring, Louisville exerts a gravitational pull on producers and theatre lovers from around the country, who travel from far and wide for the adventure of seeing a diverse slate of fully-produced new plays. Many Humana Festival ...

Broadway musicals are one of America’s most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation? Now in a new second edition, The Great White Way is the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years from Show Boat (1927) to Hamilton (2015). This revised edition includ...

Guess How Much I Love You meets Someday in this gentle read-aloud picture book that shows us that with just the right amount of care and support, even the smallest of seeds can grow to stand one hundred feet tall. Thanks for the love that you’ve shown me Right now I’m so very small But with water and light I will keep gaining height And then one day I’ll stand at a hundred feet tall Hundred Feet Tall is a tender ode to the power of unconditional, immutable love. Because no matter how ...

This comprehensive biography, written by celebrated nonfiction author Susan Goldman Rubin, explores the tumultuous and passionate life of activist, singer, and actor Paul Robeson. When faced with the decision to remain silent or be ostracized, Paul Robeson chose to sing, shout, and speak out. Sing and Shout: The Mighty Voice of Paul Robeson explores how Robeson's love of African American spirituals and deep empathy towards the suffering of others drove his long, fervent mission as a civil ri...

Staging Sex lays out a comprehensive, practical solution for staging intimacy, nudity, and sexual violence. This book takes theatre practitioners step-by-step through the best practices, tools, and techniques for crafting effective theatrical intimacy. After an overview of the challenges directors face when staging theatrical intimacy, Staging Sex offers practical solutions and exercises, provides a system for establishing and discussing boundaries, and suggests efficient and effective langu...

Oscar Hammerstein I came to New York in the 1860s, a Prussian runaway with $1.50 his pocket, and found work at a cigar factory. A decade later he was publishing the nation's leading tobacco trade journal and eventually held dozens of patents for cigar-rolling machinery of his own design. He made a fortune and turned his efforts to theater. He built eight of them, including four around Longacre Square--later Times Square--which became a flourishing theater district. Not interested in merely owni...

Musical theatre has a special place in the hearts of Australians. Whether it is The Boy from Oz, Bran Nue Dae or Muriel's Wedding, we love to see Australian stories on the big stage with all the glamour, energy and vibrancy a musical can offer. However magical they are on stage, performances leave behind few traces. Australia has a rich, hidden history of achievement in musical theatre which is now largely forgotten. Drawing on their long careers in musical performance, and extensive researc...

This updated edition of one of the bestselling and comprehensive Broadway reference books, first published in 1985, has been expanded to include many of the most important and memorable productions of American musical theater, including revivals. Arranged chronologically, beginning with musicals from just after the Civil War, each successive edition of the book has added valuable updates about trends in musical theater as well as capsule features on the most significant musicals of the day. The...

Theatre has long been considered a feminine interest for which women consistently purchase the majority of tickets, while the shows they are seeing typically are written and brought to the stage by men. Furthermore, the stories these productions tell are often about men, and the complex leading roles in these shows are written for and performed by male actors. Despite this imbalance, the feminist voice presses to be heard and has done so with more success than ever before.

The National Theatre’s Costume department is one of the theatre’s largest departments. Their skilled practitioners work in a number of areas including tailoring, dyeing, costume props, costume production and maintenance to produce over 10,000 costume elements every year, transforming a designer’s vision for a production into vibrant reality. Accompanying the National Theatre’s showcase Costume exhibition from October 2019 to June 2020, Costume at the National Theatre is a lavish large-format...

Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar, ...

London's West End is a global success story, staging phenomenal hit shows that have delighted millions of spectators and generated billions of pounds in revenue. In Good Nights Out, Aleks Sierz provides a thematic survey of such popular theatre shows that were enormous commercial successes over the past 75 years. He argues that these outstanding hits have a lot to say about the collective cultural, social and political attitudes and aspirations of the country, and about how our national identit...

At an elite East Coast university, an ambitious young black student and her esteemed white professor meet to discuss a paper the college junior is writing about the American Revolution. They’re both liberal. They’re both women. They’re both brilliant. But very quickly, discussions of grammar and Google turn to race and reputation, and before they know it, they’re in dangerous territory neither of them had foreseen – and facing stunning implications that can’t be undone.

Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and ...

Go deeper into the groundbreaking, Emmy-winning series with this must-have collection—“a completist’s dream of a book, including the show’s full scripts and Waller-Bridge’s commentary” (Vogue). “Her coat falls open. She only has her bra on underneath. She pulls out the little sculpture of the woman with no arms. It sits on her lap. Two women. One real. One not. Both with their innate femininity out.” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s critically acclaimed, utterly unique series Fleabag took the wor...

From Anything Goes to Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porter left a lasting legacy of iconic songs including "You're the Top," "Love For Sale," and "Night and Day." Yet, alongside his professional success, Porter led an eclectic personal life which featured exuberant parties, scandalous affairs, and chronic health problems. This extensive collection of letters (most of which are published here for the first time) dates from the first decade of the twentieth century to the early 1960s and features correspon...

The first comprehensive study of August Wilson's drama introduces the major themes and motifs that unite Wilson's ten-play cycle about African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. Framed by Wilson's life experiences and informed by his extensive interviews, this book provides fresh, coherent, detailed readings of each play, well-situated in the extant scholarship. It also provides an overview of the cycle as a whole, demonstrating how it comprises a compelling interrogation of ...

From Audra McDonald to Liza with a "Z," this is a showstopping rythmic alphabet book featuring your favorite leading ladies of the Broadway stage! Step into the spotlight and celebrate a cavalcade of Broadway's legendary leading ladies. Start with "A" for six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, then sing and dance your way through the alphabet with beloved entertainers like Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera, Lea Salonga, and Liza Minnelli! ...

Hasa Diga Eebowai In 2011, a musical full of curse words and Mormon missionaries swept that year’s Tony Awards show and was praised among major media outlets as a triumphant return of the American musical. Has everyone gone insane, or is this show a new milestone for musical theatre? This book explores the inherent achievements and failures of The Book of Mormon--one of the most ambitious, and problematic, musicals to achieve widespread success. The metaphor of boxing helps to explore the me...

Filled with detailed explanations, captivating illustrations, and entertaining trivia, this clearly written, lively, and uniquely designed book offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of the theater from the box office to backstage, and beyond. Readers enter via the front door, where the people and activities of the "front of house" can be examined. And then it's on to the behind-the-scenes magic of the "back of house" is revealed. Using the successful array of Disney's shows as exam...

The official behind-the-scenes book of the record-breaking, award-winning play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is one of the most celebrated stage productions of the past decade. Opening in London's West End in 2016, on Broadway in 2018, in Melbourne in 2019 -- and with more productions worldwide still to come (including San Francisco later this year) -- the play has smashed records, collected countless rave reviews and awards, and captivated audiences ni...

Irresistible and authoritative, The Movie Musical! is an in-depth look at the singing, dancing, happy-making world of Hollywood musicals, beautifully illustrated in color and black-and-white--an essential text for anyone who's ever laughed, cried, or sung along at the movies. Leading film historian Jeanine Basinger reveals, with her trademark wit and zest, the whole story of the Hollywood musical--in the most telling, most incisive, most detailed, most gorgeously illustrated book of her long...

Filled with detailed explanations, captivating illustrations, and entertaining trivia, this clearly written, lively, and uniquely designed book offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of the theater from the box office to backstage, and beyond. Readers enter via the front door, where the people and activities of the "front of house" can be examined. And then it's on to the behind-the-scenes magic of the "back of house" is revealed. Using the successful array of Disney's shows as exam...

(Vocal Collection). Contents: AMELIE: Thin Air * ANASTASIA: My Petersburg * Still * ANNIE: You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile * THE BAND'S VISIT: Papi Hears the Ocean * Answer Me * BE MORE CHILL: Michael in the Bathroom * THE BOOK OF MORMON: I Believe * CANDIDE: Bon Voyage * CATCH ME IF YOU CAN: Goodbye * DEAR EVAN HANSEN: Waving Through a Window * For Forever * Words Fail * EVER AFTER: Right Before My Eyes * FINDING NEVERLAND: If the World Turned Upside Down * Neverland * FROZEN THE BR...

(Vocal Collection). Contents: AMAZING GRACE: I Still Believe * AMELIE: Times Are Hard for Dreamers * Tour de France * Sister's Pickle * ANASTASIA: In My Dreams * Once Upon a December * Journey to the Past * Crossing a Bridge * BIG FISH: Two Men in My Life * THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY: To Build a Home * CARNIVAL: Mira * Yes, My Heart * DARLING: The View from Here * DOCTOR ZHIVAGO: When the Music Played * FINDING NEVERLAND: All That Matters * FROZEN THE BROADWAY MUSICAL: For the First Time in ...

(Vocal Collection). Contents: THE ADDAMS FAMILY: Just Around the Corner * AVENUE Q: Mix Tape * THE BAND'S VISIT: It Is What It Is * Omar Sharif * THE BOOK OF MORMON: Sal Tlay Ka Siti * BRING IT ON: THE MUSICAL: Tryouts * COME FROM AWAY: I Am Here * DAMN YANKEES: A Little Brains, a Little Talent * DEAR EVAN HANSEN: So Big/So Small * FROZEN: THE BROADWAY MUSICAL: Let It Go * Monster * GROUNDHOG DAY: One Day * Playing Nancy * HAMILTON: That Would Be Enough * Burn * INTO THE WOODS: Moments in the W...

(Vocal Collection). Contents: THE BAND'S VISIT: The Beat of Your Heart * Haled's Song About Love * BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017 FILM): Evermore * BIG FISH: How It Ends (cut) * THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY: When I'm Gone * A BRONX TALE: Look to Your Heart * CABARET: Why Should I Wake Up? * CAMELOT: The Seven Deadly Virtues * CATCH ME IF YOU CAN: The Man Inside the Clues * CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: The Candy Man * Pure Imagination * DOCTOR ZHIVAGO: Yurii's Decision * THE FROGS: Ariadne * ...

Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth- century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What Makes It Great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the Great American Songbook, bringing many of our favorite classics to life through the songs and stories of eight of the twentieth century’s most treasured American composers―Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, Rodg...

Comprehensive and beautifully designed, Grease: The Director's Notebook also includes all new exclusive interviews with the key cast members and crew, including Olivia Newton-John, John Travolta, and Stockard Channing, original script pages, call sheets, conceptual images, and more.

Still Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch’s life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway’s great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular televis...

In the overwhelming quiet of the woods, six runaways from city life embark on a silent retreat. As these strangers confront internal demons both profound and absurd, their vows of silence collide with the achingly human need to connect. Filled with awkward and insightful humor, Bess Wohl’s beguiling and compassionate new play brilliantly captures the unique eloquence of a silent retreat and asks how we address life’s biggest questions when words fail us. A major hit of the 2015–16 Off Br...

(Vocal Selections). This folio features 16 vocal selections from the uproarious TONY Award-winning Broadway musical that features music and lyrics by David Yazbek. Songs include: I Won't Let You Down * The Most Important Night of My Life * Talk to Me Dorothy * Unstoppable * Whaddya Do * Who Are You? * and more.

In this follow-up to her critically acclaimed memoir, Home, Julie Andrews shares reflections on her astonishing career, including such classics as Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and Victor/Victoria. In Home, the number one New York Times international bestseller, Julie Andrews recounted her difficult childhood and her emergence as an acclaimed singer and performer on the stage. With this second memoir, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years, Julie picks up the story with her arrival...

A MOMENT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD is an invitation to consider how we make the world, together. It collects the voices of people who respond to this invitation with their living lives and prolific work: artists, social justice practitioners, cultural critics and public intellectuals — Cornel West, Taylor Mac, Alisa Solomon, Robin D.G. Kelley and Laura Flanders among them — whose own inquiries intersected with that of the award-winning Foundry Theatre across its 25-year history.

(Vocal Selections). This folio features 15 vocal selections from the TONY AWARD -nominated Broadway musical about a cynical TV weatherman who is sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day event in the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Caught in a time loop, he's forced to relive the same day again and again ... and again. The musical features music and lyrics by Tim Minchin ( Matilda the Musical ) who wrote an in-depth forward to this souvenir collection. The book also includes performance ...

The titanic choreographer, creator of memorable ballets, master of Broadway musicals, legendary show doctor and director, now revealed in his own words--the closest we will get to a memoir/autobiography--from his voluminous letters, journals, notes, diaries, never before published. Edited, and with commentary by Amanda Vaill, author of Robbins's biography, Somewhere, 2006 ("I can't imagine a better book about Robbins ever being written"--Terry Teachout, chief drama critic, The Wall Street Journ...

From the Wall Street Journal's opera critic, a wide-ranging narrative history of how and why the New York City Opera went bankrupt―and what it means for the future of the arts In October 2013, the arts world was rocked by the news that the New York City Opera―“the people’s opera”―had finally succumbed to financial hardship after 70 years in operation. The company had been a fixture on the national opera scene―as the populist antithesis of the grand Metropolitan Opera, a nurturing home for yo...

When she was fifteen years old, Heidi Schreck earned money for her college tuition by giving speeches about the U.S. Constitution. Decades later, she traces the effect this document has had on four generations of women in her family. Deftly examining how the United States? founding principles are inextricably linked with our personal lives, Schreck also explores the ways in which their misuse has engendered violence and inherited trauma. With passion and wit, this galvanizing new play acknowl...

“I am over the moon that Albert Poland has written STAGES, a fascinating and revelatory memoir of his life in the world of New York Theater and beyond.” –ALAN MENKEN Albert Poland Legendary Broadway and Off Broadway Producer and General Manager presents STAGES – A THEATER MEMOIR

Musical theatre is an international form, not just an American one. It can take root anywhere. Few people would realise that such hit standards as “The Glow Worm”, “Brazil”, “Mack the Knife”, “I Will Wait for You” and “El Condor Pasa” came from foreign language musicals.

When his friend George Gershwin persuaded Vladimir Dukelsky to change his name to Vernon Duke, what the music world already knew became apparent to the public at large—the man had two musical personas—one as a composer, the other as a tunesmith. One wrote highbrow music, the other lowbrow. Yet the two sides complemented each other. Neither could function without the other. Born and classically trained in imperial Russia, Vladimir Dukelsky (1903–1969) fled the Bolshevik Revolution with his fa...

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated...

In 2008, in an alternate universe where anything can happen, a woman named Hillary Clinton is running for president in the United States of America. Struggling in Iowa against her more charismatic opponent (?The Other Guy?), she calls on her husband Bill for support. Bill offers her a deal, but when Hillary agrees to his help, she gets far more than she bargained for. Bucking the traditional trappings of the political play, Hnath takes a layered look at a political climate much like our own and...

Richard Wesley was witness to a revolution. As both a celebrated participant and eager student of the Black Theater Movement in the late 1960s, he became part of a seismic force in American culture, breaking down barriers and helping to disrupt the cultural landscape. It?s Always Loud in the Balcony: A Life in Black Theater, from Harlem to Hollywood and Back is both history and memoir, tracing Wesley?s roots from riot-torn Newark, New Jersey, across the rocky terrain of Harlem, and finally to H...

Never have musicals been more popular than they are today. With live television broadcasts of shows like Rent and Hairspray and films like Mean Girls and Shrek being adapted to the stage, musicals?as well as the creators and artists who bring them to life?are at the forefront of popular culture. In 100 Most Important People in Musical Theatre, Andy Propst profiles the individuals who have helped shape this beloved art form. Songwriting greats such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodge...

A comprehensive companion to the six-part Emmy-winning PBS documentary series, Broadway: The American Musical is the gold standard of musical theater history books, tracing the roots of the art form at the turn of the twentieth century through the smashing successes of the new millennium. The in-depth text is lavishly illustrated with a treasure trove of photographs, scenic renderings, production stills, and rehearsal shots, many previously unpublished. With a foreword by Julie Andrews, thi...

With an Introduction by the author. "The prolific master of suburban mayhem has still got his mojo."?Evening Standard Time of My Life "One of Mr. Ayckbourn's most virtuosic experiments in postmodern narrative."?Wall Street Journal Neighbourhood Watch "Ayckbourn?s tartly topical, pitch-black comedy, a startling evocation of the panic induced by nightmarish notions of ?broken Britain?... An arresting, nastily comic cautionary tale."?The Times Arrivals and Departures "Ayckbourn's ge...

Andr and Madeleine have been in love for over fifty years. This weekend, as their daughters visit, something feels unusual. A bunch of flowers arrive, but who sent them? A woman from the past turns up, but who is she? And why does Andr feel like he isn't there at all? Christopher Hampton's translation of Florian Zeller's The Height of the Storm was first performed at Richmond Theatre, London, and opened in the West End at Wyndham's Theatre in October 2018.