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Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (Routledge Library Editions: Victorian Theatre #3)
by Michael R. BoothOriginally published in 1981. This study concentrates on one aspect of Victorian theatre production in the second half of the nineteenth century – the spectacular, which came to dominate certain kinds of production during that period. A remarkably consistent style, it was used for a variety of dramatic forms, although surrounded by critical controversy. The book considers the theories and practice of spectacle production as well as the cultural and artistic movements that created the favourable conditions in which spectacle could dominate such large areas of theatre for so many years. It also discusses the growth of spectacle and the taste of the public for it, examining the influence of painting, archaeology, history, and the trend towards realism in stage production. An explanation of the working of spectacle in Shakespeare, pantomime and melodrama is followed by detailed reconstructions of the spectacle productions of Irving’s Faust and Beerbohm Tree’s King Henry VIII.
Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (Routledge Library Editions: The Victorian World)
by Richard W. SchochFirst published in 2003. Wildly popular in their own day, Victorian burlesques are now little read, scarcely studied, and never performed. Giving long overdue emphasis to an unjustly neglected theatrical tradition, this critical edition - the first to focus on Victorian burlesques of Victorian plays - represents a valuable scholarly tool for students and scholars of modern drama, theatre history, and nineteenth-century popular culture. Victorian Theatrical Burlesques includes a 'state-of-the-art' introduction which provides a general overview of theatrical burlesques in the Victorian era, emphasising performance history. Sustained reference is made to burlesques other than those presented in the anthology. Through its general introduction, prefaces and annotations to individual plays, checklist of burlesque plays, and bibliography, the unique volume allows both specialist and non-specialist readers to see Victorian burlesques as a rich historical record of shifting attitudes toward drama and the theatre.
Victorian Vocalists
by Kurt GanzlVictorian Vocalists is a masterful and entertaining collection of 100 biographies of mid- to late-19th-century singers and stars. Kurt Gänzl paints a vivid picture of the Victorian operatic and concert world, revealing the backgrounds, journeys, successes, failures and misdemeanours of these singers. This volume is not only an outstanding reference work for anyone interested in vocalists of the era, but also a compelling, meticulously researched picture of life in the vast shark tank that was Victorian music.
Victorian Writers and the Stage
by Richard PearsonThis book comprises a study of the plays of Dickens, Browning, Wilkie Collins and Tennyson, alongside the fiction and periodical writings of Thackeray and others. These major Victorian writers authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked? Victorian Writers and the Stage brings together comprehensively, for the first time, the professionally performed plays of a group of well-known authors – some of which plays enjoyed long and successful seasons,but all of which have been largely forgotten. The author examines the goal of these writers to become part of an expanding theatrical industry and the problems they encountered in risking their reputations on a literature felt by many to be vulgar and illegitimate. A wealth of new detail carefully positions the plays within the context of the changing Victorian theatre industry and the great battle between the Major and Minor theatres for the future of the modern stage.
Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical
by Sharon Aronofsky WeltmanBroadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture.Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway’s debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.
Vicuña: A Play
by Jon Robin BaitzA play centering on the tensions between a political demagogue and the tailor who makes his suitIn his Upper East Side atelier, a bespoke tailor, Anselm Kassar, is persuaded by the vulgar real estate mogul turned presidential candidate Kurt Seaman to make him the perfect suit. A suit to “stun them” at the final debate before the election, a suit for him to wear while he takes on his unnamed female opponent. Kassar agrees to make Seaman a suit with magical powers of persuasion, to allow him to “close the deal with the American people.”Over the course of three fittings for this exorbitantly expensive and totemic vicuña suit, Seaman cajoles and spars with the tailor and his young Muslim apprentice, Amir. Amir’s challenges to Seaman and Seaman’s daughter Srilanka over the dangerously xenophobic and inflammatory rhetoric coming out of the campaign make the fittings increasingly volatile in the genteel atelier. Vulnerabilities are exploited masterfully by the candidate, in the manner of a true sociopath with a perfect instinct for other people’s weaknesses. Coming out of an election season that laid bare the rage in much of America, Jon Robin Baitz’s Vicuña is an astute satire of what—or who—it takes to bring those anxieties to the fore.
A Vida é Cheia de Surpresas
by Giuseppina Valla InnocentiAda nasceu em Torino e é uma ex-livreira amedrontada por uma ligação que não dá trégua. Depois de toda uma vida dedicada ao trabalho, se vê diante de um destino que está para lhe virar as costas. O sabor de uma amizade antiga e outra nova lhe devolverá o sentido da vida e a obriga a entrar em cena. Afastada do convívio social volta à vida com todas as suas surpresas. Ada analisa o rumo que a sua vida tomou e sentindo um desejo grande de voltar atrás e, de repente, muda tudo assumindo o risco de atrapalhar tudo. Depois, como num passe de mágica, chega a vida com as suas regras que transforma tudo e nos ensina o quanto somos pequenos e tão insignificantes diante dos nossos desejos. Isto aconteceu com a protagonista de “A Vida é Cheia de Surpresas”.
The Videofag Book
by Jordan Tannahill William EllisLonglisted for the 2018 Toronto Book AwardsIn October 2012, lovers William Ellis and Jordan Tannahill moved into a former barbershop in Toronto's Kensington Market neighbourhood and turned it into an art space called Videofag. Over the next four years Videofag became a hub for counterculture in the city, playing host to a litany of performances, screenings, parties, exhibitions, and all manner of queer fuckery. But hosting a city in their house took its toll and eventually William and Jordan broke up, closing the space for good in June 2016.The Videofag Book is a chronicle of those four years told through multiple voices and mediums: a personal history by William and Jordan; a love letter by Jon Davies; a communal oral history compiled by Chandler Levack; a play by Greg MacArthur; a poem by Aisha Sasha John; a chronological history of Videofag's programming; and a photo archive curated by William and Jordan in full colour.
Vietgone
by Qui NguyenAn all-American love story about two very new Americans. It's 1975. Saigon has fallen. He lost his wife. She lost her fiancé. But now in a new land, they just might find each other. <p><p> Using his uniquely infectious style The New York Times calls "culturally savvy comedy" - and skipping back and forth from the dramatic evacuation of Saigon to the here and now - playwright Qui Nguyen gets up-close-and-personal to tell the story that led to the creation of...Qui Nguyen.
The Vietnam Plays: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones (Books That Changed the World)
by David Rabe&“The only Vietnam plays to appear on Broadway while the war was raging&” from the Tony Award–winning playwright of Hurlyburly (Observer). David Rabe has been a major voice and crucial force in American drama since 1971 when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, he startled the nation with The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. The story of a native recruit&’s initiation into war, it is by turns brutal and hilarious. It won the young playwright an Obie and was hailed by The New York Times as &“rich humor, irony, and insight.&” More than four decades later, Rabe continues to be one of our most compelling dramatists. In this, the first of two volumes of The Vietnam Plays, Pavlo Hummel is paired with the equally intense Sticks and Bones, in which a blinded Vietnam veteran returns home numbed by the war and is astonished by his family&’s inability to comprehend their country&’s politics and his rage. &“Pavlo won Al Pacino a Tony, and Sticks and Bones won one for its Harriet, Elizabeth Wilson—plus a nomination for its Oz, Tom Aldredge. It also won the Best Play Tony&” (Observer). &“Defies a million slogans to become a contemporary masterpiece.&” —The Harvard Crimson on The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel &“Sticks and Bones is still a searing critique of America&’s willful ignorance in the face of an ultra-violent international war machine operating in our name.&” —TheaterMania &“This scalding work scores direct hits on the stubborn obliviousness of the folks back home to the realities of that dirtiest of 20th century wars.&” —The Hollywood Reporter on Sticks and Bones
Vieux Carre
by Robert Bray Tennessee WilliamsBorn out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carré: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making at last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love--both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, and education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget. Building on two decades of Williams scholarship since Vieux Carré was originally published, Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, has provided a new introduction for this edition, giving the most authoritative account yet of its background and genesis.
A View from A Broad
by Bette MidlerBette Midler, also known as Divine Miss M--the indomitable and incomparable singer, actor, and musical theater extraordinaire, with a career spanning almost half a century--revisits her classic memoir, now with a new introduction.This book was a kind of last hurrah. When I read it, I hear a disarmingly younger, sweeter voice...I am not sure that this little confection captures a whole time, but I think it's an accurate picture of the spirit and tone of what I was doing in those days...I hope it holds up, and that you find your best younger self in it as I do... With her brassy voice and bold performances making the world finally pay attention, this ambitious Jewish girl from Hawaii, needs no introduction. Grammy award-winning singer, Academy Award-nominee, Broadway star of her critically acclaimed one-woman show, and beloved actress in The Rose, Beaches, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills--Bette Midler is a household name whose career and fans span generations. In A View from A Broad, Bette relives her career through memories of endless rehearsals, her fear of flying, crazy schedules, and wisdom she learned from Thai Gondoliers with her trademark razor-blade wit that her fans have grown to know, love, and expect. Filled with photographs, a new introduction, and heartwarming stories that highlight only a portion of a brilliant career, A View from a Broad is the perfect gift for anyone who loves music, theater, or just plain fun--and will be cherished by the fans of Divine Miss M for years to come.
A View from the Bridge
by Arthur MillerSet in the 1950s on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, A View from the Bridge follows the cataclysmic downfall of Eddie Carbone, who spends his days as a hardworking longshoreman and his nights at home with his wife, Beatrice, and orphan niece, Catherine. But the routine of his life is interrupted when Beatrice's cousins, illegal immigrants from Italy, arrive in New York. As one of them embarks on a romance with Catherine, Eddie's envy and delusion plays out with devastating consequences. This edition includes a forward by Philip Seymour Hoffman and an introduction by Arthur Miller.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.From the Trade Paperback edition.
A View from the Bridge (York Notes Ser.)
by Arthur Miller Philip Seymour HoffmanSet in the 1950s on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, A View from the Bridge follows the cataclysmic downfall of Eddie Carbone, who spends his days as a hardworking longshoreman and his nights at home with his wife, Beatrice, and orphan niece, Catherine. But the routine of his life is interrupted when Beatrice's cousins, illegal immigrants from Italy, arrive in New York. As one of them embarks on a romance with Catherine, Eddie's envy and delusion plays out with devastating consequences. This edition includes a forward by Philip Seymour Hoffman and an introduction by Arthur Miller.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Viewpoints Book
by Tina Landau Anne BogartThe Viewpoints is a technique of improvisation that grew out of the postmodern dance world. It was first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie, who broke down the two dominant issues performers deal with--space and time--into six categories. Since that time, directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau have expanded her notions and adapted them for actors to function together spontaneously and intuitively and to generate bold, theatrical work.The Viewpoints are a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space--they constitute a language for talking about what happens on stage. Coupling this with Composition, which is the practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art, provides theatre artists with an important new tool for creating and understanding their art form.Primarily intended for the many theatre artists who, in the last several years, have become intrigued with Viewpoints yet have had no single source to refer to in their investigations. It can also be used by anyone with a general interest in collaboration and the creative process, whether in art, business or daily life.Anne Bogart is Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is the recipient of two OBIE Awards and a Bessie Award, and is an associate professor at Columbia University. Her recent works include Alice's Adventures; Bobrauschenbergamerica; Small Lives, Big Dreams; Marathon Dancing; and The Baltimore Waltz.Tina Landau, noted director and playwright, whose original work includes Space (Time magazine 10 Best), Dream True (with composer Ricky Ian Gordon) and Floyd Collins (with composer Adam Guettel), which received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical, an OBIE Award and seven Drama Desk nominations. She has been an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1997.
Vigil
by Morris PanychA man returns after thirty years to sit with a relative on her deathbed. Kemp's problem is: she's not dying fast enough. Through Kemp's own errors and inattentiveness, the visit that he thinks will take a day or two stretches into a year. A play of mistaken identity, twisted circumstance, and surprising turns, this is one Vigil worth keeping.
Viktor Simov: Stanislavsky’s Designer
by Paul Fryer Anastasia TorosViktor Simov is the first English-language biography of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s principal scenic designer at the Moscow Art Theatre from the company’s formation in 1898. His ground-breaking work included the designs for the premieres of Anton Chekhov’s major stage plays, and his approach to theatre design still influences contemporary scenography. Translated from the original Russian text written by author, editor, and literary critic Yuri Ivanovich Nekhoroshev, the book provides a revealing insight into the staging and technical practices of one of the world’s most influential theatre companies. Supported by 60 illustrations representing the full range of Simov’s designs, this volume provides a historical account of Simov’s career and a vivid description and critical assessment of his work. The book traces the artist’s development from his early years as a painter to his later experiments in early silent film design, including his work for the classic Russian science fiction film Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924). Written for theatre scholars and students of Scenic Design and Drama courses, Viktor Simov: Stanislavsky’s designer re-establishes Simov as one of the most influential theatre designers of the 20th century.
Villainy and Vengeance, 1773-1799 (Kabuki Plays On-Stage #2)
by James R. Brandon Samuel L. LeiterKabuki Plays On Stage represents a monumental achievement in Japanese theatre studies, being the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in twenty-five years. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. <p><p>Volume 1 consists of thirteen plays that showcase early kabuki's scintillating and boisterous styles of performance and illustrates the contrasting dramatic techniques cultivated by actors in Edo (Tokyo) and Kamigata (Osaka and Kyoto). The twelve plays translated in Volume 2 cover a brief period, but one that saw important developments in kabuki architecture, acting, dance, and the manipulation of characters and themes. <p><p>As the series title indicates, the plays were translated to capture the vivacity of performances on stage. The translations, each accompanied by a thorough introduction that contextualizes the play, are based not only on published texts, but performance scripts and the study of the plays as they are performed in theatres today. <p><p>Each volume is lavishly illustrated with rare woodblock prints in full color of Tokugawa- and Meiji-period productions as well as color and black-and-white photographs of contemporary performances.
Vimy
by Vern ThiessenFrance, 1917. Four wounded Canadian soldiers recover in a field hospital in the wake of the battle for Vimy Ridge, waiting to find out where they’ll be sent next: back home or back to the front. Along with a young nurse from Nova Scotia, they share their stories, reasons for fighting, and treasured memories. In Vimy, Governor General’s Literary Award–winner Vern Thiessen brings us a classic play that is not about war, but a reflection of the everyday lives of soldiers—their hopes and their dreams—and how actions can define individuals and nations. In the brand-new piece Bluebirds, Thiessen brings to light the stories of three Canadian nurses who crossed oceans to take care of others in the war. Bonding over their duties and patients, the nurses keep up a positive atmosphere, even as the front line draws closer to their field hospital.
Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres
by Nancy Taylor PorterThis book brings together the fields of theatre, gender studies, and psychology/sociology in order to explore the relationships between what happens when women engage in violence, how the events and their reception intercept with cultural understandings of gender, how plays thoughtfully depict this topic, and how their productions impact audiences. Truthful portrayals force consideration of both the startling reality of women's violence -- not how it's been sensationalized or demonized or sexualized, but how it is -- and what parameters, what possibilities, should exist for its enactment in life and live theatre. These women appear in a wide array of contexts: they are mothers, daughters, lovers, streetfighters, boxers, soldiers, and dominatrixes. Who they are and why they choose to use violence varies dramatically. They stage resistance and challenge normative expectations for women. This fascinating and balanced study will appeal to anyone interested in gender/feminism issues and theatre.
Viral Dramaturgies: Hiv And Aids In Performance In The Twenty-first Century
by Alyson Campbell Dirk GindtThis book analyses the impact of HIV and AIDS on performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective. It marks a necessary reaffirmation of the productive power of performance to respond to a public and political health crisis and act as a mode of resistance to cultural amnesia, discrimination and stigmatisation. It sets out a number of challenges and contexts for HIV and AIDS performance in the twenty-first century, including: the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry; the unequal access to treatment and prevention technologies in the Global North and Global South; the problematic division between dominant (white, gay, urban, cis-male) and marginalised narratives of HIV; the tension between a damaging cultural amnesia and a potentially equally damaging partner ‘AIDS nostalgia’; the criminalisation of HIV non-disclosure; and, sustaining and sustained by all of these, the ongoing stigmatisation of people living with HIV.This collection presents work from a vast range of contexts, grouped around four main areas: women’s voices and experiences; generations, memories and temporalities; inter/national narratives; and artistic and personal reflections and interventions.
Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic (Elements in Shakespeare Performance)
by Pascale AebischerThis Element offers a first-person phenomenological history of watching productions of Shakespeare during the pandemic year of 2020. The first section of the Element explores how Shakespeare 'went viral' during the first lockdown of 2020 and considers how the archival recordings of Shakespeare productions made freely available by theatres across Europe and North America impacted on modes of spectatorship and viewing practices, with a particular focus on the effect of binge-watching Hamlet in lockdown. The Element's second section documents two made-for-digital productions of Shakespeare by Oxford-based Creation Theatre and Northern Irish Big Telly, two companies who became leaders in digital theatre during the pandemic. It investigates how their productions of The Tempest and Macbeth modelled new platform-specific ways of engaging with audiences and creating communities of viewing at a time when, in the UK, government policies were excluding most non-building-based theatre companies and freelancers from pandemic relief packages.
The Virgin Trial
by Kate HennigFifteen-year-old Bess has no idea when she heads to London to see her Uncle Ted that she is about to find herself at the heart of a scandal involving sexual impropriety; her stepfather, Thom; and an attempted overthrow of the government. What does all this have to do with her? How adroitly can Bess manoeuvre through a series of interviews to avoid being swept up in the peril that might ensue? And will she be able to spin the facts to create a myth based on her own innocence?
Virtual Theatres: An Introduction
by Gabriella GiannachiThe first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre, performance and digital arts, Virtual Theatres presents the theatre of the twenty-first century in which everything - even the viewer - can be simulated. In this fascinating volume, Gabriella Giannachi analyzes the aesthetic concerns of current computer-arts practices through discussion of a variety of artists and performers including: * blast Theory* Merce Cunningham* Eduardo Kac* forced entertainment* Lynn Hershman* Jodi Orlan* Guillermo Gómez-Peña* Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca* Jeffrey Shaw* Stelarc. Virtual Theatres not only allows for a reinterpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice, but also demonstrates how 'virtuality' has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.
Vision 2020: Reordering Chaos For Global Survival
by Ervin LaszloThis revised edition of the classic text of the period provides both the student and the specialist with an informative account of post-Roman English society.