Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience's aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals still continue to function today as "cultural Ellis Islands" for fringe populations seeking acceptance...

The first book-length study in any language of the presence and influence of Mei Lanfang, the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles on the twentieth-century international stage. Tian investigates Mei Lanfang's presence and influence and the transnational and intercultural appropriations of his art.

Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are drawn to butoh's ability to enact paradox and contradiction, audiences are less knowledgeable about the contributions and innovations of the founder of butoh. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh traces the rollicking history of the creation and initial maturation of butoh, and locates Hijikata's performances within the intellectual, cultural, and...

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, NoAl Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England and Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William...

In 1845, John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition disappeared. The expedition left a remarkable archive of performative remains that entice one to consider the tension between material remains and memory, to contemplate how affect influences historical narratives, and to reflect on how substitution and surrogation work alongside mourning and melancholia as responses to loss. This book proposes that performances generate critical insights into how those affected by the expedition's disappearance understood the losses they experienced and makes the broader argument that performance...

Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.

Through his study of American masculinity, Kippola constructs a theatrical history inextricably linked to the dynamic social, political, and cultural changes of the nineteenth-century American stage. The shift from the passionate muscularity of Edwin Forrest to the intellectual restraint of Edwin Booth was not a linear journey toward national refinement; but rather, a multitude of masculinities simultaneously fighting for dominance and recognition. Actors and audiences mutually constructed male ideals unique to each splintered group, while simultaneously seeking national identity and communal...

Christin Essin documents theatre's backstage history through the cultural roles played by designers during the modern development of their profession. Featuring work by Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Aline Bernstein, Norman Bel Geddes, Mordecai Gorelik

In Shanghai in the early twentieth century, a hybrid theatrical form, wenmingxi, emerged that was based on Western spoken theatre, classical Chinese theatre, and a Japanese hybrid form known as shinpa. This book places it in the context of its hybridized literary and performance elements, giving it a definitive place in modern Chinese theatre.