Using the tools of performance studies, gender theory, and cultural history, Brenda Foley explores the striking similarities between beauty pageantry and striptease. For example, women in both project a 'normal' femininity and adhere to a strict hierarchy (Miss America contestants look down upon Miss Universe contestants, while theatrical 'burlesque artists' saw themselves as far above mere carnival strippers). Undressed for Success collects extensive primary source research - newspapers, journals, trade publications, photography collections, press releases, memoirs, and interviews with both strippers and pageant contestants - and employs a wide array of gender, feminist, and performance theory to analyze them.

David Garrick played over 90 roles on the British stage as well as writing plays, songs, and innumerable letters. As a theatrical manager he watched over the Drury Lane theater for 29 seasons.

Because of its contemporary coverage, this volume is particularly interesting and useful. . . . Reference collections that deal with theater questions could find it a good source even without its two predecessor volumes, but the set as a whole is recommended. "Choice"

An outstanding reference collection is completed with the publication of DurhaM's "American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986," an indispensable guide to an aspect of American theatre not covered elsewhere. The American theatre has undergone a process of decentralization and the focus has shifted from Broadway, once the proving ground for all nationally known theatre talent, to fine regional theatres across the nation. This volume surveys the fifty-year period in which this transformation occurred. The work consists of seventy-eight entries that profile a wide range of types of theatre companies including art theatres, units of the Federal Theatre project, workers' theatre, experimental theatre groups, ethnic theatre groups, children's theatre companies, and regional repertory companies, large and small. The Profiles section contains information-packed narratives from both published and unpublished sources that describe, analyze, and evaluate management policies, facilities, personnel, and repertories of these organizations. Each entry contains an extensive list of key personnel, including managers, designers, actors, and actresses, as well as plays that company produced. A bibliography of sources and a guide to archival resources for further study follows each entry. Two additional appendices are devoted to chronological and state-by-state listings of theatre companies. The volume concludes with an index of personal names and play titles.

This important resource should be a part of every university's reference collection. It will be consulted by students and scholars of theatre and drama, American history, American popular culture, and American social and cultural history, as will its companion volumes "American Theatre Companies, 1749-1887" (Greenwood Press, 1986) and "American Theatre Companies, 1888-1930" (Greenwood Press, 1987).

In this dynamic collection a team of experts map the development of Live Art culturally, thematically and historically. Supported with examples from around the world, the text engages with a number of key practices, asking what these practices do and how they can be contextualized and understood.

Theatre has often found itself at the centre of recent debates over censorship and the arts, as a result of coverage of events such as the protests against the play "Behzti" and the controversy over "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This book offers the first sustained study of censorship of the British stage from 1968 into the twenty-first century.

This book investigates the shifting relationship between performance and subjectivity over the course of the Modern era. Each chapter details a different set of performance strategies designed to grant the subject a stable sense of self-identity, and each explores the fallout from the ultimate failure of these strategies to offer the subject a fixed and enduring image of itself. The conclusion examines the implications of this failure for new Postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and poses questions about the use of performance in the self-fashioning of future generations.

What do you do if you find yourself weeping in the stalls? How should you react to Jude Law's trousers or David Tennant's hair? Are you prepared to receive toilet paper in the post? What if the show you just damned turns out to be a classic? If you gave it a five-star rave will anyone believe you? Drawing on his long years of experience as a national newspaper critic, Mark Fisher answers such questions with candour, wit and insight. Learning lessons from history's leading critics and taking examples from around the world, he gives practical advice about how to celebrate, analyse and discuss this most ephemeral of art forms - and how to make your writing come alive as you do so. Today, more people than ever are writing about theatre, but whether you're blogging, tweeting or writing an academic essay, your challenges as a critic remain the same: how to capture a performance in words, how to express your opinions and how to keep the reader entertained. This inspirational book shows you the way to do it. Foreword by Chris Jones, Chief theater critic, Chicago Tribune

Although the venue Off Broadway has long been the birthplace of innovative and popular musicals, there have been few studies of these influential works. Long-running champs, such as The Fantasticks and Little Shop of Horrors, are discussed in many books about American musicals, but what of the hundreds of other Off-Broadway musicals? In Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919, Thomas Hischak looks at more than 375 musicals, which are described, discussed, and analyzed, with particular attention given to their books, scores, performers, and creators. Presented chronologically and divided into chapters for each decade, beginning with the landmark musical Greenwich Village Follies (1919), the book culminates with the satiric The Toxic Avenger (2009). In this volume, any work of consequence is covered, especially if it was popular or influential, but also dozens of more obscure musicals are included to illustrate the depth and breadth of Off Broadway. Works that introduced an important artistic talent, from performers to songwriters, are looked at, and the selection represents the various trends and themes that made Off Broadway significant. In addition to essential data about each musical, the plot and score are described, the success (or lack of) is chronicled, and an opinionated commentary discusses the work's merits and influences on the musical theatre in general. The first book of its kind, this highly readable volume will please both the theatre scholar and the average musical theatre patron or fan.

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective based in New York that operated from 1931 to 1941, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history of the group, based on more than thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy. She begins the story of the Group's remarkable ten years at the end of the experiment, then resets the narrative against the Depression years and introduces the cast of youthful characters and their issues with the American theatre of their day. Tracing the careers of Group Theatre actors and directors including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harry Morgan, Chinoy follows with their collective vision for a new theatre developed around their grand idea for a new approach to an acting process based on an ordered training of the actor's imagination and emotions in exercises and in plays that confront social issues important to the Group.

"Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England" is the first book-length study of the relationship between early modern drama and sacramental ritual and theology. The book examines a range of dramatic forms, including morality plays, Tudor interludes and the Elizabethan professional stage. Offering new insights into the religious practices on which early modern subjectivity is founded, David Coleman both uncovers neglected texts and documents, and offers radical new ways of reading canonical Renaissance plays.

At Work in the Early Modern English Theater: Valuing Labor explores the economics of the theater by examining how drama seeks to make sense of changing conceptions of labor. With the growth of commerce and market relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England came the corresponding degradation and exploitation of workers, many of whom made their frustrations known through petitions and pamphlets. Poverty affected all sectors of society in early modern England and many laborers, even London citizens from more prosperous trades, could expect to experience periods of impoverishment. This group of precarious laborers included actors and playwrights, many of whom had direct connections to London's more established trades and occupations. Scholars have argued that dispossessed laborers turned to other forms of labor in lieu of their traditional livelihoods, including brigandage, piracy, begging, and cozening. To this list of alternative communities and applications of labor in the early modern period, Matthew Kendrick's scholarship adds the London theaters. Each chapter is guided by the central premise that anxiety over the objectification and dispossession of labor in its various forms is enacted on stage, and that drama helps to formulate, by merit of the theater's socioeconomic identity, an emerging laboring subjectivity engendered by the violent development of capitalism. As the nexus of a declining feudal social structure and an emerging capitalist regime of commodity production, a location in which dispossessed labor intersected with traditions of skilled labor and the unwieldy consumerist energies of the marketplace, the space of the theater was uniquely situated to channel and give dramatic form to the growing antagonisms and tensions that shaped labor. The stage offers a space in which to negotiate the value and meaning of labor in an increasingly exploitative society.

The Italian Renaissance produced a new type of stage comedy, experimental and even revolutionary in its time, by copying and updating the dramatic formats of Plautus and Terence from ancient Rome. These scripted comedies, first written and performed for private audiences, ranged in tone from sober moralism to scurrilous farce, and influenced European dramatists from Shakespeare to Moliere and Lope de Vega. This book gives an account of how the new dramatic experiment was born and grew, moving from closed courtly audiences to a wider public. It examines the performing values of these scripts rather than their literary qualities, in order to demonstrate their links with improvised commedia dell'arte, and thus explores a crucial phase in the development of European theatre. It will be of interest to scholars and students in both theatre history and Italian studies.

This book examines Field Day's cultural intervention into the Northern Irish 'Troubles' through individual readings of the fourteen plays produced by the enterprise. It argues that at the heart of this project were performances, in a variety of different forms and registers, of an ethics of translation that disrupted notions of Irish identity.

This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.

London's West End has a rich and unique collection of theatres, ranging in date from early the early 19th century to the end of the 20th;more than fifty are located within an area of two square miles. This book celebrates the working buildings at the heart of the British theatrical industry. Focusing on the theatres in the West End, it looks at their architecture and history as well as examining what it is that constitutes a West End Theatre. The exquisite photographs in the book lead the reader on a tour - taking in the front -of -house areas, the auditoria and the backstage spaces - of some of London's most famous theatres. From the Palladium to the Lyceum, it offers glimpses of those areas not normally seen by the public, Such as rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, backstage areas and even a Royal reception room. In doing so, it enters the private realms of the theatre technicians and actors, and brings to light the theatre's hidden world.

This study by Monica Prendergast offers a curriculum theory for audience in performance presented in a series of essays and poems on this key yet neglected educational topic. In a contemporary world that has been described as the "society of the spectacle" and the "performative society," it becomes a significant task for educators to find ways to assist students in becoming more active and critical spectators. This unique book is presented in seven chapters that survey how audience has been taken up (or ignored) across many disciplines, including aesthetic philosophy, performance theory, cultural studies, and arts education. Drawing on key findings discovered in this extensive literature review, the author goes on to present a number of chapters that theorize how spectatorship may become a central concern of curriculum through committed and teacher-facilitated attendance of live performance. These performance experiences-which may be community-based or professional-then serve as catalysts for creative postperformance interactions with artists and further classroom explorations. Throughout the text, the author makes use of an emergent arts-based methodology called poetic inquiry. The poems she creates offer readers other perspectives on the investigation and act as a reminder that cultural performance, like poetry, is an aesthetic event that calls us to attention, to wide-awakeness in the world. Teaching Spectatorship is a groundbreaking study that makes a critical contribution to the fields of performance studies, curriculum theory, and drama/theatre education.

The coronation was, and perhaps still is, one of the most important ceremonies of a monarch's reign. This book examines the five coronations that took place in England between 1509 and 1559: those of Henry VIII, Anne Bolyen, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. It considers how the sacred rite and its related ceremonies and pageants responded to monarchical and religious change and charts how they were interpreted by contemporary observers. Hunt challenges the popular position that has conflated royal ceremony with political propaganda and argues for a deeper understanding of the symbolic complexity of ceremony. At the heart of the study is an investigation into the vexed issues of legitimacy and representation which leads Hunt to identify the emergence of an important and fruitful exchange between ceremony and drama. This exchange will have significant implications for our understanding both of the period's theatre and of the cultural effects of the Protestant Reformation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of late medieval and early modern history and literature.

David Greig has been described as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation' ("Daily Telegraph") and 'one of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around' ("Guardian"). Since he began writing for theatre in the early nineties, his work has been both copious and remarkably varied, defying neat generalisations or attempts to pigeon-hole his work. Besides his original plays, he has adapated classics, is co-founder of the Suspect Culture Theatre Group and is currently Dramaturge for the National Theatre of Scotland. This Critical Companion provides an analytical survey of his work, from his early plays such as "Europe" and "The Architect "through to more recent works "Damascus," "Dunsinane "and "Ramallah"; it also considers the plays produced with Suspect Culture and his work for young audiences. As such it is the first book to provide a critical account of the full variety of his work and will appeal to students and fans of contemporary British theatre.Clare Wallace provides a detailed analysis of a broad selection of plays and their productions, reviews current discourses about his work and offers a framework for enquiry. The Companion features an interview with David Greig and a further three essays by leading academics offering a variety of critical perspectives.

This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws upon the available literature and visual representations of the hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch, skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including emigration from Russia, world war, revolutionary activities in both Russia and the United States, and developments in modernism in the American theatre influenced the way those performances were received by American artists and audiences. Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman demonstrates how a variety of Russian theatrical styles were introduced and incorporated into American theatre and dance.

This book examines sexuality, gender and race in Australia's vibrant independent theatre and performance culture. It analyses selected feminist and queer performances that interrogate the cultural construction of sexuality and gender, challenge the normative trends of mainstream Australian society and culture and open up spaces for alternative representations of gender identity and sexual expression. Offering the first full-length study on sexuality and gender in Australian theatre since 2005, this book reveals a resurgence of feminist themes in independent performance and explores the intersection of feminist and queer politics. Ranging across drag, burlesque, cabaret, theatre and performance art, the book provides an accessible and engaging account of some of the most innovative, entertaining and politically subversive Australian theatrical works from the past decade.

What does it mean for early modern theatre to be 'live'? How have audiences over time experienced a sense of 'liveness'? This collection extends discussions of liveness to works from the 16th and 17th centuries, both in their initial incarnations and contemporary adaptations. Drawing on theatre and performance studies, as well as media theory, this volume uses the concept of liveness to consider how early modern theatre - including non-Western and non-traditional performance - employs embodiment, materiality, temporality and perception to impress on its audience a sensation of presence. The volume's contributors adopt varying approaches and cover a range of topics from material and textual studies, to early modern rehearsal methods, to digital and VR theatre, to the legacy of Shakespearean performance in global theatrical repertoires. This collection uses both early modern and contemporary performance practices to challenge our understanding of live performance. Productions and adaptions discussed include the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream (2021), CREW's Hands on Hamlet (2017), Kit Monkman's Macbeth (2018), Arslankoey Theatre Company's Kralice Lear (2019), and a season of productions by the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival. Early Modern Liveness looks beyond theatrical events as primary sites of interpretive authority and examines the intimate and ephemeral experience of encountering early modern theatre in its diverse manifestations.

"They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad/Wednesday's worse, and Thursday's also sad." There's a lot more to the blues than three chords played on an old beat-up guitar. Squeeze My Lemon is a collection of some of the best bluues lines ever recorded. From birth ("Born under a bad sign/I've been down since I began to crawl") to death ("Everybody wants to go to heaven/But nobody wants tto die") and everything in between, this volume quotes classic blues phrases by ssongwriter/artists B.B. King, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Robert JJohnson and many, many others. Compiled by award-winning author/Grammy-nominated record producer Randy Poe, Squeeze My Lemon: A Collection of Classic Blues Lyriics features classic photos of many leading blues artists. A great gift book, itt is highly entertaining not only for blues lovers, but for anyone who appreciatees great lyrics. Categorized by subject matter (Love - Or the Lack Thereof, Bluess and Booze, Blues Behind Bars, Make Mine a Double Entendre, etc.), Squeeze My Lemmon is a book you'll return to - and quote from - again and again.

"Exploring the themes of the event, ephemerality and democracy that mark the encounter between performance and philosophy, this original study elaborates fresh perspectives on the experiences of undoing, fiasco and disaster that shadow both the both stage and everyday life"--