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Acting in Musical Theatre: A Comprehensive Course
Acting in Musical Theatreis the only complete course in approaching a role in a musical. It is the first to combine acting, singing and dancing into a comprehensive guide, combining what have previously been treated as three separate disciplines. This book contains fundamental skills for novice actors, practical insights for professionals, and even tips to help veteran musical performers refine their craft. Drawing on decades of experience in both acting and teaching, the authors provide crucial advice on all elements of the profession, including: fundamentals of acting applied to musical theatre script, score and character analysis personalizing your performance turning rehearsal into performance acting styles in the musical theatre practical steps to a career. Acting in Musical Theatre's chapters divide into easy-to-reference units, each containing related group and solo exercises, making it the definitive textbook for students and practitioners alike.
American Musical Theater: A Chronicle
Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theatre has become a landmark book since its original publication in 1978. In this third edition, he offers authoritative summaries on the general artistic trends and developments for each season on musical comedy, operetta, revues, and the one-man andone-woman shows from the first musical to the 1999/2000 season. With detailed show, song, and people indexes, Bordman provides a running commentary and assessment as well as providing the basic facts about each production.
The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett
The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio. 'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,...but the clouds...,A Piece ofMonologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.
Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber
This new second edition of Enchanted Evenings offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America's best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals. Readers will find such all-time favorites as Show Boat, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Phantom of the Opera. Geoffrey Block provides a documentary history of each of the musicals, showing how each work took shape and revealing, at the same time, how the American musical evolved from the 1920s to today, both on stage and on screen. The book's particular focus is on the music, offering a wealth of detail about how librettist, lyricist, composer, and director work together to shape the piece. Block also includes trenchant social commentary and lively backstage anecdotes. Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and other luminaries emerge as hardworking craftsmen under enormous pressure to sell tickets without compromising their dramatic vision. The second edition includes a greatly expanded chapter on Sondheim, a new chapter on Lloyd Webber, and two new chapters on the film adaptations of the main musicals featured in the text (including such hard to find films as the original 1936 version of Anything Goes and the 1959 film adaptation of Porgy and Bess). Packed with information, including a complete discography and plot synopses and song-by-song scenic outlines for each of the fourteen shows, Enchanted Evenings is an essential reference as well as a riveting history. "A solid and fascinating work that should become a model of how to investigate and report on the evolution of a musical. Block's research is persuasive and his writing vivid. . . Indispensable for anyone who cares to know more about Broadway musicals than Playbill can provide." --Steven Bach, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
The George Gershwin Reader
George Gershwin is one of the giants of American music, unique in that he was both a brilliant writer of popular songs ("Swanee," "I Got Rhythm," "They Can't Take That Away From Me") and of more serious music, including "Rhapsody in Blue," "An American in Paris," and "Porgy and Bess." Now, inThe George Gershwin Reader, music lovers are treated to a spectacular celebration of this great American composer.The Reader offers a kaleidoscopic collection of writings by and about Gershwin, including more than eighty pieces of superb variety, color, and depth. There is a who's who of famous commentators: bandleader Paul Whiteman; critics Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and Brooks Atkinson;fellow musicians Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Alec Wilder (who analyzes the songs "That Certain Feeling" and "A Foggy Day"), Leonard Bernstein, and the formidable modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg (who was Gershwin's tennis partner in Hollywood). Some of the most fascinating and important writingshere deal with the critical debate over Gershwin's concert pieces, especially "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris," and there is a complete section devoted to the controversies over "Porgy and Bess," including correspondence between Gershwin and DuBose Hayward, the opera's librettist (aseries of excerpts which illuminate the creative process), plus unique interviews with the original Porgy and Bess--Todd Duncan and Anne Brown. Sprinkled throughout the book are excerpts from Gershwin's own letters, which offer unique insight into this fascinating and charming man. Along with adetailed chronology of the composer's life, the editors provide informative introductions to each entry.Here then is a book for anyone interested in American music. Scholars, performers, and Gershwin's legions of fans will find it an irresistible feast.
Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration
Group Creativity explores the unique form of creativity that emerges from collaborating groups. Dr. Sawyer draws on his studies of jazz ensembles and improvisational theater groups to develop a model of creative group processes. He applies this model of group creativity to a wide range of collaborating groups, including group learning in classrooms and innovative teams in organizations. In group creativity, a group comes together to collaboratively create in real time. The creative inspiration emerges from the interaction and communication among the members, and makes the result more than the sum of its parts. The dynamic, moment-to-moment communication among jazz musicians and improvising actors is the primary topic of the book. Sawyer explores performers' close listening and sensitivity, the submerging of the ego to the group mind, and the ways that performers work together to create something better than and different from what one solitary individual could create alone. These explorations provide insight into all forms of group creativity and collaboration.
Historical Dictionary of American Theater
The fifty-year period from 1880 to 1929 is the richest era for theater in American history, certainly in the great number of plays produced and artists who contributed significantly, but also in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism began to gradually seep into American theater during the 1880s and quite importantly in the 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. American playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and George S. Kaufman ushered in the Golden Age of American drama. The Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism focuses on legitimate drama, both as influenced by European modernism and as impacted by the popular entertainment that also enlivened the era. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries on plays; music; playwrights; great performers like Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, Julia Marlowe, and E.H. Sothern; producers like David Belasco, Daniel Frohman, and Florenz Ziegfield; critics; architects; designers; and costumes.
Making Theatre: From Text to Performance
The reality of a play is in its performance. Making Theatre focuses on the processes by which performance is realized, analyzing three major areas: "Words" and the interpretation of text; "Vision" including scenery, costume and lighting; and "Music" which illustrates the importance of music in all stage action.The forms of theater covered include straight drama, the musical and opera. Taking productions well-known on both sides of the Atlantic, Peter Mudford examines plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and David Mamet; musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim; and operas by Verdi, Wagner and Berg.This account of what makes theater important and how it works will be invaluable to teachers and students of drama and performance, as well as all those interested in theater as art.
The Musical As Drama: The Musical As Drama : A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows From Kern to Sondheim
Derived from the colorful traditions of vaudeville, burlesque, revue, and operetta, the musical has blossomed into America's most popular form of theater. Scott McMillin has developed a fresh aesthetic theory of this underrated art form, exploring the musical as a type of drama deserving the kind of critical and theoretical regard given to Chekhov or opera. Until recently, the musical has been considered either an "integrated" form of theater or an inferior sibling of opera. McMillin demonstrates that neither of these views is accurate, and that the musical holds true to the disjunctive and irreverent forms of popular entertainment from which it arose a century ago. Critics and composers have long held the musical to the standards applied to opera, asserting that each piece should work together to create a seamless drama. But McMillin argues that the musical is a different form of theater, requiring the suspension of the plot for song. The musical's success lies not in the smoothness of unity, but in the crackle of difference. While disparate, the dancing, music, dialogue, and songs combine to explore different aspects of the action and the characters. Discussing composers and writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern, The Musical as Drama describes the continuity of this distinctively American dramatic genre, from the shows of the 1920s and 1930s to the musicals of today.
Oklahoma! The Making of a Musical
A complete behind-the-scenes look at the landmark show that launched Rodgers and Hammerstein's creative partnership​ Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and today it is performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In this book Tim Carter offers the first fully documented history of the making of this celebrated American musical. Drawing on research from rare theater archives, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources, Carter records every step in the development of Oklahoma! The book is filled with rich and fascinating details about how Rodgers and Hammerstein first came together, the casting process, how Agnes de Mille became the show's choreographer, and the drafts and revisions that ultimately gave the musical its final shape. Carter also shows the lofty aspirations of both the creators and producers and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, and demonstrates just what made it part of its times.
The One-Act Play Companion: A Guide to Plays, Playwrights and Performance
The one-act play stands apart as a distinct art form with some well known writers providing specialist material, among them Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill. Alan Ayckbourn, Edward Albee and Tennesee Williams. There are also lesser-known writers with plenty of material to offer, yet sourcing one-act plays to perform is notoriously hard. This companion is the first book to survey the work of over 250 playwrights in an illuminating A-Z guide. Multiple styles, nationalities and periods are covered, offering a treasure trove of compelling moments of theatre waiting to be discovered. Guidance on performing and staging one-act plays is also covered as well as essential contact information and where to apply for performance rights. A chapter introducing the history of the one-act play rounds off the title as a definitive guide.
Theatre Studies: The Basics
This is an essential read for anyone setting out to study the thrilling world of theatre for the first time. Introducing you to all the aspects of drama, theatre and performance you will be studying in your course, from the theoretical to the practical, Theatre Studies: The Basicswill take you through such topics as: dramatic genres, from tragedy to political documentary theories of performance the history of the theatre in the West acting, directing and scenography the audience. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannusto Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's controversial Behzti, and including chapter summaries and pointers to further reading, Theatre Studies: The Basicshas all you need to get your studies off to a flying start.
Theory/Theatre: An Introduction
Theory/Theatre: An Introduction provides a unique and engaging introduction to literary theory as it relates to theatre and performance. Mark Fortier lucidly examines current theoretical approaches, from semiotics, poststructuralism, to cultural materialism, postcolonial studies and feminist theory. Drawing upon examples from Shakespeare and Aphra Behn, to Chekhov, Artaud, Cixous and Churchill, the author examines the specific realities of theatre in order to come to a richer understanding of the relations between performance and cultural theory. Theory/Theatre: An Introduction is the only study of its kind and will be invaluable reading for new students and scholars of performance studies.