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.

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.

Rochelle Hudson's career as an actress was planned from the start by her ambitious stage mother, who gave birth to her in 1916. Given rigorous dance and musical training as a child, Hudson won her first film contract at the age of fourteen. A WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931, she co-starred with actors such as W.C. Fields, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, Will Rogers and Fredric March in classic films like Imitation of Life (1934) and Les Miserables (1935). But within a few years, she was stuck in B movies and frustrated. Stepping away from Hollywood, Hudson worked as a realtor and a rancher, and even did wartime espionage work for the Navy. She continued acting occasionally, in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the TV sitcom That's My Boy (1954-55), and the campy horror film Strait-Jacket (1964). A timeless beauty, she was married (and divorced) four times before her untimely death in 1972 at age 55. Drawing on personal papers, interviews with family and friends and genealogical research, this first account of Rochelle Hudson's life and work depicts a talented and outspoken woman who built a successful career on her own terms. The annotated filmography provides synopses, critical commentary and reviews for nearly 60 feature films.

Laugh along with Michael McIntyre as he lifts the curtain on his life in his long-awaited new autobiography.

Michael’s first book ended with his big break at the 2006 Royal Variety Performance. Waking up the next morning in the tiny rented flat he shared with his wife Kitty and their one-year-old son, he was beyond excited about the new glamorous world of show business. Unfortunately, he was also clueless . . .

In A Funny Life, Michael honestly and hilariously shares the highs and the lows of his rise to the top and desperate attempts to stay there. It’s all here, from his disastrous panel show appearances to his hit TV shows, from mistakenly thinking he’d be a good chat show host and talent judge, to finding fame and fortune beyond his wildest dreams and becoming the biggest-selling comedian in the world. Along the way he opens his man drawer, narrowly avoids disaster when his trousers fall down in front of three policemen and learns the hard way why he should always listen to his wife.

Michael has had a silly life, a stressful life, sometimes a moving and touching life, but always A Funny Life.

This book theorizes auteur Robert Lepage's scenography-based approach to adapting canonical texts. Lepage's technique is defined here as 'scenographic dramaturgy', a process and product that de-privileges dramatic text and relies instead on evocative, visual performance and intercultural collaboration to re-envision extant plays and operas. Following a detailed analysis of Lepage's adaptive process and its place in the continuum of scenic writing and auteur theatre, this book features four case studies charting the role of Lepage's scenographic dramaturgy in re-'writing' extant texts, including Shakespeare's Tempest on Huron-Wendat territory, Stravinsky's Nightingale in a twenty-seven ton pool, and Wagner's Ring cycle via the infamous, sixteen-million-dollar Metropolitan Opera production. The final case study offers the first interrogation of Lepage's twenty-first century 'auto-adaptations' of his own seminal texts, The Dragons' Trilogy and Needles & Opium. Though aimed at academic readers, this book will also appeal to practitioners given its focus on performance-making, adaptation and intercultural collaboration.

In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the titular movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation, via her extra-cinematic image as a jet-setting wanton seductress and oriental in whiteface in the early 1960, through her repatriation to the U.S. in the 1970s via her marriage to and the election of her pro-military husband John Warner to the U.S. Senate, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.

Using the techniques and insights of clowning, this book draws on original workshops and research to provide practical clowning exercises to develop wider acting practice in innovative ways. The book offers guidance and explanation to key concepts in clowning, including the dynamics of the clown-audience relationship; the relationship between script, text and improvisation; and movement and voice, offering fresh and inspiring angles from which to view actor training. The Clowning Workbook for Actors and Performers is part of the acclaimed Theatre Arts Workbooks series and features its characteristic blend of student-focused exercises with pedagogical tips for teachers.

The origin story of a groundbreaking album The 1971 Allman Brothers Band album At Fillmore East was a musical manifesto years in the making. In Play All Night!, Bob Beatty dives deep into the motivations and musical background of band founder Duane Allman to tell the story of what made this album not just a smash hit, but one of the most important live rock albums in history. Featuring insights from bootleg tapes, radio ads, early reviews, never-before-published photos, and the memories of band members, fans, and friends, Beatty chronicles how Allman rejected the traditional route of music business success-hit singles and record sales-and built a band that was at its best jamming live on stage, feeding off the crowd's energy, and pushing each other to new heights of virtuosic improvisation. Every challenge, from recruiting a group of relatively unknown but established musicians like Jaimoe and Dickey Betts, touring the American South as an interracial band, and the failure of their first two studio albums, sharpened Allman's determination to pursue the band's truly unique sound. He made a bold choice-to record their next album live at Bill Graham's famous concert hall in New York's Lower East Side, a gamble that launched a new strand of American music to the top of the charts. Four days after the album went gold, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 24. This book explores how At Fillmore East cemented Allman's legacy as a strong-willed, self-taught visionary, giving fans of Southern rock and all readers interested in the role of rock music in American popular culture a new appreciation for this pathbreaking album.

For years, Todd Snider has been one of the most beloved country-folk singers in the United States, compared to Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, John Prine, and dozens of others. He's become not only a new-century Dylan but a modern-day Will Rogers, an everyman whose intelligence, self-deprecation, experience, and sense of humor make him a uniquely American character. In live performance, Snider's monologues are cheered as much as his songs. But never before has he told the whole story. Running the gamut from personal memoir to shaggy-dog comedy to rueful memories of his troubles and triumphs with drugs and alcohol to sharp-eyed observations from years on the road, "I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like" is for fans of Snider's music, but also for fans of America itself: the broad, wild country that has produced figures of folk wisdom like Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Tonya Harding, Garrison Keillor, and more. There are storytellers and there are performers and there are stand-up comedians. And then there's Todd Snider, who is all three in one, and something else entirely.

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943-2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

Actress, singer, indie icon and embodiment of Parisian cool, Charlotte Gainsbourg is one of the most intriguing yet understated stars of our time. This book, the first detailed study of Gainsbourg, charts the trajectory of her star persona across four decades, from her early work with her father and ground-breaking collaboration with Claude Miller to her more recent collaborations with Lars von Trier and music producers like Beck and Air. The book combines textual analysis of performance, costume, place, characterisation and narrative with archival research and extra-cinematic materials to interrogate the construction of Gainsbourg's persona. As well as providing a comprehensive overview of her career to date, it examines her circulation in a transnational context and across a range of media platforms, exploring notions of gender, beauty and nationality in relation to her embodiment of femininity, Frenchness and transnationality. -- .

King Lear is arguably the most complex and demanding play in the whole of Shakespeare. Once thought impossible to stage, today it is performed with increasing frequency, both in Britain and America. It has been staged more often in the last fifty years than in the previous 350 years of its performance history, its bleak message clearly chiming in with the growing harshness, cruelty and violence of the modern world. Performing King Lear offers a very different and practical perspective from most studies of the play, being centred firmly on the reality of creation and performance. The book is based on Jonathan Croall's unique interviews with twenty of the most distinguished actors to have undertaken this daunting role during the last forty years, including Donald Sinden, Tim Pigott-Smith, Timothy West, Julian Glover, Oliver Ford Davies, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Plummer, Michael Pennington, Brian Cox and Simon Russell Beale. He has also talked to two dozen leading directors who have staged the play in London, Stratford and elsewhere. Among them are Nicholas Hytner, David Hare, Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Jonathan Miller and Dominic Dromgoole. Each reveals in precise and absorbing detail how they have dealt with the formidable challenge of interpreting and staging Shakespeare's great tragedy.

Stage rights! explores the work and legacy of the first feminist political theatre group of the twentieth century, the Actresses' Franchise League. Formed in 1908 to support the suffrage movement through theatre, the League and its membership opened up new roles for women on stage and off, challenged stereotypes of suffragists and actresses, created new work inspired by the movement and was an integral part of the performative propaganda of the campaign. Introducing new archival material to both suffrage and theatre histories, this book is the first to focus in detail on the Actresses' Franchise League, its membership and its work. The volume is formulated as a historiographically innovative critical biography of the organisation over the fifty years of its activities, and invites a total reassessment of the League within the accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in the UK. -- .

'Destined to be a classic' Sunday Independent 'Gabriel Byrne tells his story brilliantly' - Edna O'Brien 'Dazzles with unflinching honesty' Washington Post 'An absolutely marvellous book' - Colm Toibin Born to working-class parents and the eldest of six children, Gabriel Byrne harboured a childhood desire to become a priest. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled from an English seminary and he quickly returned to his native Dublin. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory labourer to get by. In his spare time he visited the cinema, where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of '60s Ireland. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theatre. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and on Broadway, often through the lens of addiction. Hilarious and heartbreaking Walking With Ghosts is a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies.

Insightful, in-depth and evocative, this book is a collection of conversations with nine of the most innovative theatre directors of our time in Europe and North America: * Eugenio Barba * Lev Dodin * Declan Donnellan * Elizabeth LeCompte * Robert LePage * Simon McBurney * Katie Mitchell * Peter Sellars * Max Stafford-Clark. All these directors have developed their own highly individual theatre language and have been influential, nationally and internationally, across a wide range of theatre practices. The length, depth and scope of the discussions distinguishes this collection from others, each director providing a fascinating insight into his/her particular working processes. The book reveals the complex world of directors and their creative relationships with actors, in rehearsal and performance, and playwrights. Each conversation is framed by an introduction to the work of the director, a detailed chronology of productions and an indicative bibliography to inspire further reading and research.