The Shubert name has been synonymous with Broadway for almost as long as Broadway entertainment itself. With seventeen Broadway theatres including the Ambassador, the Music Box, and the Winter Garden, The Shubert Organization perpetuates brothers Lee and Jacob Shubert's business legacy. In The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld's Rivals, author Jonas Westover investigates beyond the Shuberts' business empire into their early revues and the centrifugal role they played in developing American theatre as an art form. The Shubert-produced revues, titled Passing Shows, were terrifically popular in the teens and twenties, consistently competing with Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies for the greatest numbers of stars, biggest spectacles, and ultimately the largest audiences. The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows is the first-ever book to unpack the colorful history of the productions, delving into their stars, costumes, stagecraft, and orchestration in unprecedented detail. Providing a fresh and exciting window into American theatrical history, Westover traces the fascinating history of the Shuberts' revue series, presented annually from 1912-1924, and covers more broadly the glorious days of early Broadway. In addition to its compelling history of Broadway's Golden Age, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows also provides a revisionary argument about the overarching history of the revue. Bolstered by a rich collection of documents in the Shubert Theater Archive, Westover argues against the popular misconception that the Shubert's competitor, producer Florenz Ziegfield - responsible for the better-known Follies - was the sole proprietor of Broadway audiences. As Westover proves, not only were the Passing Shows as popular as the Follies but also a key component in a history of the revue that is vastly more complex than previous scholarship has shown. The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows brings to fruition years of original research and invaluable insights into the gilded formation of present day Broadway.

The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh. Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices. This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.

The Irish Renaissance encompassed one of the western world's most powerful dramatic movements. But most lists of productions have only included certain premieres, while ignoring all revivals and the productions of lesser-known theatres. This reference is a comprehensive list of all theatrical productions of the early modern Irish dramatic movement, including all premieres and revivals. The volume includes productions from the 1899 founding of the Irish Literary Theatre through the April 1916 Easter Rising, when British martial law significantly altered the course of Irish drama.

Entries are provided for more than 1,000 productions, with each entry offering the play's title, author, producing organization, building, city, and dates of performance. The entries are grouped in chapters devoted to particular years and are arranged chronologically within each chapter. The chronological arrangement of the entries reveals the development of Irish theatre, while an extensive index allows alphabetical access to the contents. By including entries for all productions, the volume indicates that many plays that are now neglected were produced numerous times and were central to the drama of the period. This work will force scholars to reconsider the major plays of the period, due to the record of their revivals, and the importance of many neglected plays will now have to be reassessed.

How do performers and artists use media technologies to create live events? How have developments in audio-visual technology changed the relationship between the spectator and the performer? How can performance respond to the technology-saturated consciousness of contemporary culture? What are the key concepts and terms needed to understand multimedia performance? Multimedia Performance provides a comprehensive overview of the development, theory and definitive characteristics of this rapidly developing and popular area of practice. Drawing on case studies from across a wide range of contemporary performance, the book introduces key artists, companies and debates. Klich and Scheer describe new and emergent forms including video performance, digital theatre, interactive dramaturgies and immersive environments, presenting an up-to-date analysis of the evolving relationship between technology and aesthetics in contemporary performance culture. Exploring the different ways in which technology can activate new aesthetic potentials and audience experiences, Multimedia Performance demonstrates the vital role of multimedia technologies in contemporary theatre practice. Supported by illustrations, media theory and textboxes, this is important reading for anyone interested in questions of the live and the mediated aspects of performance, and essential reading for students of theatre and performance.

Lawrence J. Quirk delves into every personal and professional aspect of Bob Hope's long, complex and dramatic life; rising by sheer dint of will to great wealth and fame. Why did Hope become so identified with sponsoring the Vietnam War? What's the real scoop on his relationship with Bing Crosby? How far astray did Hope's frankly oversexed nature lead him from the marriage he successfully maintained with Dolores for over sixty years? Quirk writes about Hope based on long experience. He knew and interviewed Bob Hope while serving as an army seargeant during the Korean war and later as entertainment editor, and interviewer of top stars for over forty years. Quirk approaches his subject with original observations born of years of studying this most celebrated, yet in some ways most mysterious of entertainment giants.

The figure of Stella Adler towers high among the memorable acting teachers in American theatre. Her methods of training, her principles of acting and character interpretation, her analyses of the seminal plays of the modern theatre comprise a legacy for everyone who followed her. In this book, that legacy gains the special immediacy and authenticity of her own spoken words. Over three years in the 1970s, Joanna Rotte worked with Adler as a student and as an actress under her direction, all the white taking the copious notes that have become the heart of this book. Throughout, Adler speaks about her principles in a tough minded and demanding way, inspired by her overriding conviction that as a person an actor 'becomes bigger through working'. This book provides an opportunity to sit in on the classes of this remarkable woman of whom her student Marlon Brando said, "My debt and gratitude to her are enormous. As a teacher of acting, she has few peers. As a human being, few equals."

Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Celestine Galli-Marie; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.

This book asks important questions about making performance through the means of collaboration and co-created practice. It argues that we can align ethics and aesthetics with collaborative performance to realise the importance of being in association with one another, and being engaged through our shared imaginations. Evident in the examples of practice visited in this study is the attention given by a number of practitioners to the development of shared, co-operative modes of creation. Here, we can appreciate ethical work as being relational, forged in association with the others as we cultivate ideas that matter. In looking at a range of work from practitioners including Meg Stuart, Rosemary Lee, Deufert&Philschke and Fevered Sleep, Considering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and Performance explores ways that we rehearse by attending to ethics, aesthetics and co-creation. In learning to listen, to observe, to co-operate and to negotiate, these practitioners reveal the ways that they bring their work into existence through the transmission of shared meaning.

"An important resource for any scholar working on the production history of Shakespeare's plays. . . . Because each entry has a complete list of sources, the book can be used as a helpful bibliography for locating reviews of productions." Choice

Tallulah Bankhead was an actress whose talents were greatly overshadowed by her antics. Indeed, the Bankhead personality was much better known than her acting roles. While it is impossible to study her career without exploring her highly charged personality, this bio-bibliography honors Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. In a career that spanned five decades, she conquered practically every medium of entertainment--theater, film, radio, and television--leaving her mark in each one. Biographers have several times attempted to chronicle her life, but Bankhead remains too original, too unconventional, too colorful to be captured fully on paper. What can be noted are her many accomplishments--which have previously been ignored. This book corrects that oversight by documenting her 19 motion pictures, 56 stage plays, 167 radio appearances, and 56 television appearances, and also listing other professional appearances, recordings, awards and tributes. Additional features include a biographical sketch based on research and interviews with associates, a chronology of highlights in her life, an annotated bibliography of books and magazine articles about her or referring to her, and interesting photographs illustrating her career. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, this is a complete source for any research about Bankhead and will also provide helpful data and insights into the theater, films, persons, and events of her world.

From director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook, "The Empty Space" is a timeless analysis of theatre from the most influential stage director of the twentieth century.
As relevant as when it was first published in 1968, groundbreaking director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing a theatrical performance--of any scale. He describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht's revolutionary alienation technique to the free form happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war.
Passionate, unconventional, and fascinating, this book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions, and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

This book was written between 1946 and 1952, and first published in 1953. It is now widely regarded as the standard portrait of the European and American theater in the turbulent and seminal years following World War II; but it is far more than that. It ranges back as far as Ibsen and even Shakespeare, and has contributed very substantially to a number of reputations that would long outlast 1950, such as those of Bertolt Brecht, Charles Chaplin and Martha Graham. For Bentley fans, it is an essential link in a chain that runs from The Playwright as Thinker to The Life of the Drama to The Brecht Memoir and Thinking About the Playwright.

This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period's changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century. Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson, Diderot's Le Fils naturel, Schiller's Die Rauber, and Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.

The seven acts of the drama The First Day are set in the Kingdom of the Great Spirit as this Kingdom might have been imagined by Crazy Horse, the legendary war chief of the Lakota Sioux who was assassinated by the U.S. government in 1877, after he had surrendered. The action occurs on January 5, 1960 when Crazy Horse welcomes the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus to the Kingdom. Camus had been killed in an automobile accident the night before. Following introductions, the two begin a walk that lasts from dawn to dusk and traverses a variety of landscapes. Periodically they stop to converse with others in the Kingdom. These include Native Americans Chief Joseph and Chief Seattle, Jesus, and the poets Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca. Walt Whitman is accompanied by a young friend named Jimmy, and Jesus finds himself leading a band of some twenty children. The travelers discuss various subjects, personal, historical and philosophical. Their principal interest, however, is the mysterious Almighty Power whose grace makes possible their eternal life. Considering this mystery, they also discuss justice and injustice among mortals, why men who struggled to do good often suffered at the hands of those who did evil, and whether poets and poetry are an influence for good in the affairs of mortals. At the end of the day, having bid good day to their fellow travelers and sitting on a mountain ledge overlooking expansive valleys as the night sky is illuminated by an astounding show of lights, Crazy Horse and Camus are joined by Socrates. Socrates explains why it is no evil on Earth can ultimately hurt a virtuous person and how it is the Almighty is revealed to humans during their mortal lives.

"Staging Stigma "is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers' analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

Actresses and Mental Illness investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation. By focusing specifically on actresses' encounters with mental illness, Fiona Gregory builds on this earlier work and significantly supplements it. Through detailed case studies of both well-known and neglected figures in theatre and film history, including Mrs Patrick Campbell, Vivien Leigh, Frances Farmer and Diana Barrymore, it shows how mental illness - actual or supposed - has impacted on actresses' performances, careers and celebrity. The book covers a range of topics including: representing emotion on stage; the 'failed' actress; actresses and addiction; and actresses and psychiatric treatment. Actresses and Mental Illness expands the field of actress studies by showing how consideration of the personal experience of the actress influences our understanding of her work and its reception. The book underscores how the actress can be perceived as a representative public woman, acting as a lens through which we can examine broader attitudes to women and mental illness.

A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome and crossed; motivates bodies to climb over; and threatens physical harm. This book critically examines a range of cultural performances produced in relation to the tensions and movements of/about the borders dividing North America, including the Caribbean.

Immigrants from the Low Countries constituted the largest population of resident aliens in early modern England. Possessing superior technology in a number of fields and enjoying governmental protection, the Flemish were charged by many native artisans with unfair economic competition. With xenophobic sentiments running so high that riots and disorders occurred throughout the sixteenth century, Elizabeth I directed her dramatic censor to suppress material that might incite further disorder, forcing playwrights to develop strategies to address the alien problem indirectly. Representations of Flemish Immigrants on the Early Modern Stage describes the immigrant community during this period and explores the consistently negative representations of Flemish immigrants in Tudor interludes, the impact of censorship, the playwrighting strategies that eluded it, and the continuation of these methods until the closing of the theatres in 1642.

(Applause Books). Including Antoin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, E. Gordon Craig, Luigi Pirandello, Konstantin Stanislavsky, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zolaing.

Few musicals have had the impact of Lerner and Loewe's timeless classic "My Fair Lady." Sitting in the middle of an era dominated by such seminal figures as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, and Leonard Bernstein, "My Fair Lady" not only enjoyed critical success similar to that of its rivals but also had by far the longest run of a Broadway musical up to that time. It remains a staple of the musical theater canon today, an oft-staged show in national, regional, and high school theaters across the country. Using previously-unpublished documents, Dominic McHugh presents a completely new behind-the-scenes look at the five-year creation of the show, revealing the tensions and complex relationships that went into the making of this beloved show. Two detailed chapters describe the show's tortured journey to Broadway, in which Lerner and Loewe were just one of many creative teams trying to turn Shaw's Pygmalion into a musical. A further chapter examines Lerner's different drafts of the script and demonstrates how he managed to retain Shaw's style and meanings while adding layers of his own and finding ways to set some of the scenes to song. Three other chapters go into unprecedented detail about the writing of the score, while the final chapters examine the show's legacy on the stage and in print. Overall, the book helps readers understand what makes this such a special musical.