Charlotte Cushman, one of the great actors of 19th century American theatre, was a lesbian who kept her identity hidden by focusing her career on male characters (Romeo, Claude Melnotte, Wolsey), but also on strong and passionate women (Lady Macbeth, Bianca in Fazio, and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII). This is the first book-length biography of Cushman, covering both her personal and professional lives. Part One is a biography; Part Two is a performance history listing all of Cushman's known performances, often with a description of her role and critical commentary by the author.

Though starring in only some twenty films and two engagements on Broadway, Audrey Hepburn earned her reputation through the quality of her work rather than the quantity of her performances. She was never driven by her career, and took years off between movies to spend with her family. As a child growing up in Arnhem when the Nazis invaded Holland, Hepburn witnessed the tragedy of war first-hand, and the impact of her experiences led her to a strong devotion to humanitarian causes. This book chronicles the career of Audrey Hepburn and sheds light on her private and enigmatic life. The brief biography included in the volume overviews her experiences and provides a context for her work as a performer. The entries that follow are devoted to her individual performances and include cast and credit information, plot synopses, excerpts from reviews, and critical commentary on her work. Entries are grouped in chapters devoted to her stage, film, radio, and television appearances, while appendices list her awards. An annotated bibliography lists and describes sources of additional information about this enchanting performer.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance is an unparalleled resource, providing comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date information about theatre and performance from ancient Greek theatre to the latest developments in London, Paris, New York, and around the globe. Written in accessible language, it will appeal broadly to readers interested in theatre and performance, from occasional playgoers to newspaper critics, students, and scholars.

With an exclusive focus on text-based theatre-making, Inside the Rehearsal Room is both an instructional and conceptual examination of the rehearsal process. Drawing on professional practice and underpinned by theory, this book moves through each stage of rehearsals, considering the inter-connectivity between the actor, director, designers and the backstage team, and how the cumulative effect of the weeks in rehearsal influences the final production. The text also includes: - Auto-ethnographic and fully ethno-graphic case study approaches to different rehearsal rooms - Interviews with directors, actors, designers and actor trainers - A consideration of the ethics of the rehearsal room and material selected for production - Practical exercises on how to creatively read a text from an acting and directing perspective Informed by over 20 years of directing experience in the UK and Europe, Robert Marsden's book offers a practical guide that ultimately demystifies the rehearsal process and challenges how the rehearsal room should be run in the twenty-first century.

This is a biography of Dan Levenson, an old-time banjo and fiddle player from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Between 1987 and 1991, Dan worked for Goose Acres Folk Music Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he dove deeply into old-time music. In the late 1980s, he formed the Boiled Buzzards; they recorded four albums between 1989 and 1994 and were a consistently active presence at old-time music festivals. During that time, he also played with Bob Frank as one-half of the Hotfoot Duo. In 1995, he teamed up with Kim Murley and recorded New Frontier: Instrumentals from China and America. Levenson undertook his first cross-country trip as a solo performer in 1996. His traveling program, "Meet the Banjo," ran as a workshop with the sponsorship of Deering Banjos from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Dan recorded three projects in the first five years of the 2000s and began editing the quarterly "Old Time Way" section for Banjo Newsletter in 2005. He continues performing old-time music, teaching fiddle and banjo, writing instructional and repertoire books featuring banjo and fiddle tunes for Mel Bay, and making plans for more old-time music projects.

Werner Schroeter was a leading figure of New German Cinema. In more than forty films made between 1967 and 2008, including features, documentaries, and shorts, he ignored conventional narrative, creating instead dense, evocative collages of image and sound. For years, his work was eclipsed by contemporaries such as Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Alexander Kluge. Yet his work has become known to a wider audience through several recent retrospectives, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Written in the last years of his life, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy sees Schroeter looking back at his life with the help of film critic and friend Claudia Lenssen. Born in 1945, Schroeter grew up near Heidelberg and spent just a few weeks in film school before leaving to create his earliest works. Over the years, he would work with acclaimed artists, including Marianne Hopps, Isabelle Huppert, Candy Darling, and Christine Kaufmann. In the 1970s, Schroeter also embarked on prolific parallel careers in theater and opera, where he worked in close collaboration with the legendary diva Maria Callas. His childhood; his travels in Italy, France, and Latin America; his coming out and subsequent life as an gay man in Europe; and his run-ins with Hollywood are but a few of the subjects Schroeter recalls with insights and characteristic understated humor. A sharp, lively, even funny memoir, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy captures Schroeter's extravagant life vividly over a vast prolific career, including many stories that might have been lost were it not for this book. It is sure to fascinate cinephiles and anyone interested in the culture around film and the arts.

Born in 1893 into the only African American family in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893-1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. With his musical partner, J. Rosamond Johnson, Gordon was a crucially important figure in popularizing African American spirituals as an art form, giving many listeners their first experience of black spirituals. Despite his fame, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten, until now. Michael K. Johnson illuminates Gordon's personal history and his cultural importance to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that during the height of his celebrity, Gordon was one of the most significant African American male vocalists of his era. Gordon's story-working in the White Sulphur Springs brothels as an errand boy, traveling the country in John Ringling's private railway car, performing on vaudeville stages from New York to Vancouver to Los Angeles, performing for royalty in England, becoming a celebrated author with a best-selling 1929 autobiography, and his long bout of mental illness-adds depth to the history of the Harlem Renaissance and makes him one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century. Through detailed documentation of Gordon's career-newspaper articles, reviews, letters, and other archival material-the author demonstrates the scope of Gordon's cultural impact. The result is a detailed account of Taylor's musical education, his career as a vaudeville performer, the remarkable performance history of Johnson and Gordon, his status as an in-demand celebrity singer and author, his time as a radio star, and, finally, his descent into madness. Can't Stand Still brings Taylor Gordon back to the center of the stage.

Always in competition with her older, more famous sister, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine had a varied and successful career of her own. She eventually attained stardom for her work in the film Rebecca, which won the 1940 Academy Award for best picture. The following year, she won the Academy Award for best actress in Suspicion, beating out her sister for the coveted prize. This book tells the story of her fascinating career and provides full information for her many performances. A short biography of Fontaine begins the book and overviews the rivalry between Fontaine and her sister, her disappointing marriages, her illnesses, and her productive and rewarding career as an entertainer. Chapters then provide detailed information for her films, radio and television shows, and stage appearances. Each chapter contains individual entries for her productions, with entries providing cast and credit information, a plot summary, a critical analysis, and excerpts from reviews. An annotated bibliography provides information about books and articles related to every aspect of Joan Fontaine's life and work.

This book examines the history, ethics, and intentions of staging personal stories and offers theatre makers detailed guidance and a practical model to support safe, ethical practice. Contemporary theatre has crossed boldly into therapeutic terrain and is now the site of radical self-exposure. Performances that would once have seemed shockingly personal and exposing have become commonplace, as people reveal their personal stories to audiences with ever-increasing candor. This has prompted the need for a robust and pragmatic framework for safe, ethical practice in mainstream and applied theatre. In order to promote a wider range of ethical risk-taking where practitioners negotiate blurred boundaries in safe and artistically creative ways, this book draws on relevant theory and practice from theatre and performance studies, psychodrama and attachment narrative therapy and provides detailed guidance supporting best practice in the theatre of personal stories. The guidance is structured within a four-part framework focused on history, ethics, praxis, and intentions. This includes a newly developed model for safe practice, called the Drama Spiral. The book is for theatre makers in mainstream and applied theatre, educators, students, researchers, drama therapists, psychodramatists, autobiographical performers, and the people who support them.

Beckett's plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances - that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as 'disabled' in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett's work and a new theorising of Beckett's treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett's plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett's work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett's theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.

The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not begin to take notice until he released his 1987 feature Where's the Friend's House? His films defy established conventions, placing audiences as active viewers who must make decisions about actions and characters while watching the narratives unfold. He asks viewers to question the genre construct (Close-Up) and challenges them to determine how to watch and imagine a narrative (Ten and Shirin). In recognition for his approach to the craft, Kiarostami was awarded many honors during his lifetime, including the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for Taste of Cherry. In Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews, editor Monika Raesch collects eighteen interviews (several translated into English for the first time), lectures, and other materials that span Kiarostami's career in the film industry. In addition to exploring his expertise, the texts provide insight into his life philosophy. This volume offers a well-rounded picture of the filmmaker through his conversations with journalists, film scholars, critics, students, and audience members.

For over three decades, renowned Japanese voice actress Megumi Hayashibara has breathed life into countless iconic characters-including Ranma Saotome (Ranma 9;), Rei Ayanami (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Lina Inverse (Slayers), Jessie (Pokemon), Faye Valentine (Cowboy Bebop), and Paprika (Paprika)! In this new autobiographical memoir, Megumi provides an in-depth look at her illustrious career, and how the very characters she has portrayed have impacted her life on both personal and professional levels.

Recent technological and scientific developments have demonstrated a condition that has already long been upon us. We have entered a posthuman era, an assertion shared by an increasing number of thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Richard Grusin, and Bernard Stiegler. The performing arts have reacted to these developments by increasingly opening up their traditionally 'human' domain to non-human others. Both philosophy and performing arts thus question what it means to be human from a posthumanist point of view and how the agency of non-humans - be they technology, objects, animals, or other forms of being - 'works' on both an ontological and performative level. The contributions in this volume brings together scholars, dramaturgs, and artists, uniting their reflections on the consequences of the posthuman condition for creative practices, spectatorship, and knowledge.

As a handsome and popular romantic actor with a fan club rivalling that of Ivor Novello, John Stuart was frequently mobbed by his adoring fans. He starred in films by Alfred Hitchcock and G.W. Pabst, played opposite British stars such as Madeleine Carroll, Fay Compton, Gracie Fields, and German actor Conrad Veidt, and was also the first actor to ever speak on screen in Britain. Yet despite a film career lasting six decades and comprising 172 films, his name and achievement are little known today. With access to Stuart's private archive, his surviving films, press cuttings, film reviews, interviews, profiles, features, and gossip columns, his son Jonathan Croall presents a detailed account of an actor who made a significant contribution to the British film industry of the 20th century.

"Who doesn't know Paul Newman? The man with the beautiful blue eyes, the chiselled face and body, the 50-plus years of memorable acting and directing roles, the awards, the movie-star marriage. Well, it turns out, there is lots more to know." - Parade Magazine "Newman's preternaturally piercing baby blue eyes shine through in every picture, and he was well aware of how his fame rested on the colour of his irises." - Peter Sheridan, Daily Express "Hollywood Hunk Paul Newman as you've never seen him before." - Yahoo! News "Paired with raw and unvarnished commentary from the photographers themselves, Newman's incomparable authenticity and appealing persona bleed through each page." - Newsweek Once, when asked how he'd like to be remembered, Paul Newman replied: "I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried. Tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being." As an actor who became a film star, Newman repeatedly tapped into his times and in doing so redefined what movie stardom could be. Newman was a new kind of movie star, bringing a particular authenticity, intensity and sensitivity to his performances. Throughout his career, Newman was extensively photographed: these images enriched film audiences' connection to him as a cool and graceful presence both on and off-screen. Milton Greene, Douglas Kirkland, Lawrence Fried, Terry O'Neill, Al Satterwhite and Eva Sereny are amongst the photographers who worked with Newman on and off-set across his career. From early stage work with his wife, Joanne Woodward, to his love of racing cars, to the essential 1980s drama Absence of Malice to the great success of the new western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the cult favourites, Pocket Money and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Newman's movies were an essential part of American culture. With comment and contributions from the photographers, Paul Newman: Blue Eyed Cool, gathers together portraits, stage, racing and on-set photography - including never before seen images - in a celebration of an actor who was always... cool. Paul Newman: Blue Eyed Cool is a must-have for fans who see in Newman's work and in his life a true hero.

DISCOVER THE NEW MEMOIR FROM ALAN CUMMING. BAGGAGE: TALES FROM A FULLY PACKED LIFE PUBLISHES 28 OCT '21 'One of the most memorable, heart-stopping autobiographies I have ever read' STEPHEN FRY WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2015 THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ATTITUDE MAGAZINE'S BOOK OF THE YEAR A beloved star of stage and screen, Alan Cumming's life and career have been shaped by a complex and dark family past - full of troubled memories, kept buried away. But then an unexpected phone call from his long-estranged father brought the pain of the past hurtling back into the present, and unravelled everything he thought he knew about himself. Not My Father's Son is the story of his journey of discovery, both a memoir of his childhood in Scotland, and an investigation into his family history which would change him forever. 'Equal parts memoir, whodunnit and manual for living . . . beautifully written, honest . . . I was completely sucked in' NEIL GAIMAN

Performing Music History offers a unique perspective on music history and performance through a series of conversations with women and men intimately associated with music performance, history, and practice: the musicians themselves. Fifty-five celebrated artists-singers, pianists, violinists, cellists, flutists, horn players, oboists, composers, conductors, and jazz greats-provide interviews that encompass most of Western music history, from the Middle Ages to contemporary classical music, avant-garde innovations, and Broadway musicals. The book covers music history through lenses that include "authentic" performance, original instrumentation, and social context. Moreover, the musicians interviewed all bring to bear upon their respective subjects three outstanding qualities: 1) their high esteem in the music world as immediately recognizable names among musicians and public alike; 2) their energy and devotion to scholarship and the recovery of endangered musical heritages; and 3) their considerable skills, media savvy, and showmanship as communicators. Introductory essays to each chapter provide brief synopses of historical eras and topics. Combining careful scholarship and lively conversation, Performing Music History explores historical contexts for a host of fascinating issues.

The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not begin to take notice until he released his 1987 feature Where's the Friend's House? His films defy established conventions, placing audiences as active viewers who must make decisions about actions and characters while watching the narratives unfold. He asks viewers to question the genre construct (Close-Up) and challenges them to determine how to watch and imagine a narrative (Ten and Shirin). In recognition for his approach to the craft, Kiarostami was awarded many honors during his lifetime, including the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for Taste of Cherry. In Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews, editor Monika Raesch collects eighteen interviews (several translated into English for the first time), lectures, and other materials that span Kiarostami's career in the film industry. In addition to exploring his expertise, the texts provide insight into his life philosophy. This volume offers a well-rounded picture of the filmmaker through his conversations with journalists, film scholars, critics, students, and audience members.

Deirdre McFeely presents the first book-length critical study of Dion Boucicault, placing his Irish plays in the context of his overall career. The book undertakes a detailed examination of the reception of the plays in the New York-London-Dublin theatre triangle which Boucicault inhabited. Interpreting theatre history as a sociocultural phenomenon that closely approximates social history, McFeely examines the different social and political worlds in which the plays were produced, demonstrating that the complex politics of reception of the plays cannot be separated from the social and political implications of colonialism at that time. The study argues for a shift in focus from the politics of the plays, and their author, to the politics of the auditorium and the press, or the politics of reception. It is within that complex and shifting field of stage, theatre and public media that Boucicault's performance as playwright, actor and publicist is interpreted.

In this book, Lorraine York examines the figure of the celebrity who expresses discomfort with his or her intense condition of social visibility. Bringing together the fields of celebrity studies and what Ann Cvetkovich has called the "affective turn in cultural studies", York studies the mixed affect of reluctance, as it is performed by public figures in the entertainment industries. Setting aside the question of whether these performances are offered "in good faith" or not, York theorizes reluctance as the affective meeting ground of seemingly opposite emotions: disinclination and inclination. The figures under study in this book are John Cusack, Robert De Niro, and Daniel Craig-three white, straight, cis-gendered-male cinematic stars who have persistently and publicly expressed a feeling of reluctance about their celebrity. York examines how the performance of reluctance, which is generally admired in celebrities, builds up cultural prestige that can then be turned to other purposes.

The Ritual Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos outlines the story of the Athenian-based Attis Theatre and the way its founder and director, Theodoros Terzopoulos, introduced bio-energetic presences of the body on the stage, in an attempt to redefine and reappraise what it means today not only to have a body, but to fully be a body. Terzopoulos created a very specific attitude towards life and death, and it is this broad perspective on energy and consciousness that makes his work so appealing both to a general public and to students of arts, theatre and drama. Freddy Decreus' study charts the career of Greece's most acclaimed theatre director and provides a spiritual and philosophic answer in times where former Western meta-narratives have failed.