In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a coterie of desperate and dedicated theater artists staged an experimental, four-hour, entirely unauthorized adaptation of William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying. Its centerpiece was an enormous wooden coffin that dominated the space, leaving room for fewer audience ......
Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate--or undermine--romance and happy endings? How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen scholar Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey ......
Working within the limits of a popular song, the songwriters of the Great American Songbook wrote with a combination of familiarity and freshness, sentiment, and wit. The songwriters were masters of craft who created a distinctively American popular music that still resonates strongly today. This book looks at the Great American Songbook's ......
Theatre has long been considered a feminine interest for which women consistently purchase the majority of tickets, while the shows they are seeing typically are written and brought to the stage by men. Furthermore, the stories these productions tell are often about men, and the complex leading roles in these shows are written for and performed by ......
Behind the Scenes of the Worldwide Musical Phenomenon
Almost thirty years after Rock Opera, his first book on Jesus Christ Superstar, Ellis Nassour returns to the world of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to complete the fascinating story of the Broadway musical that rocked the stage and pushed boundaries. Nassour goes behind the scenes to show the evolution of Jesus Christ Superstar from an album ......
From Scarabea, Artusa's old nurse in Francesco Mannelli's La Maga Fuminata (1638 Venice) through the Canadian nursing sisters in Stephanie Martin's Llandovery Castle (2018 Toronto), over one hundred nurse characters appear in opera roles ranging from silent cast extra to principal singer. The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister ......
While there are many books that attempt to teach people how to act, there are few that show aspiring actors what it takes to succeed as a working professional.
The Professional Actor’s Handbook: From Casting Call to Curtain Call provides struggling artists—stage and screen actors, dancers, singers—with strategies that will help them ......
Inspired by Edouard Glissant's and Marta Aponte Alsina's critical-creative work, this book explores how Puerto Rico's affective archive of Caribbean relations, from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first, has envisioned and embodied decolonization and sovereignty in relation to the archipelagic, the sea, and Caribbean regionalism. The ......
The Music Man stands as one of the greatest achievements in American musical theatre, but few know about its rocky beginnings and the against-all-odds success story of its creator Meredith Willson. Mark Cabaniss steps back into the Golden Age of Broadway and brings to life the origins of this classic show, the music behind it, and the unlikely ......
