By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.

Vaudeville is often viewed as the source of some of the crudest Irish stereotypes - violent, drunken men and ignorant, unfeminine women - that served to position the Irish immigrant in America as the antithesis of native-born American citizens. However, through the use of previously unexplored primary archive material, and by giving particular focus to the role of gender in constructing images of Irish America, Mooney questions this view. Instead, she argues that the vaudeville stage was an important venue in which an Irish-American identity was constructed, negotiated, and refined, not just...

Drawing upon Broadway musicals ranging from Irene (1919) to Gypsy (1959), Maya Cantu considers how Cinderella Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1950s adapted and transformed Perrault's fairy tale icon in order to address changing social and professional roles for American women.

No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through "modern" versions on film. Frick examines the major productions, companies, and influential persons in the long, complex history of theatrical Toms, providing a broad overview of what has been labeled the "Uncle Tom phenomenon." Unlike previous studies about Uncle Tom's Cabin, Frick introduces the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created...

Child labor greatly contributed to the cultural and economic success of the British Victorian theatrical industry. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, there was an unprecedented increase in the national labor force of theatrical child employees, followed by its subsequent, slow decline. It was during this time that wide public debate ensued and child performers were taken under the umbrella of protective child legislation. A careful examination of the many off-stage identities inhabited by the performing child reveals a significant space, crucial to our understanding...

The 1960s American hippie-clown boom fostered many creative impulses, including neo-vaudeville and Ringling's Clown College. However, the origin of that impulse, clowning with a circus, has largely gone unexamined. David Carlyon, through an autoethnographic examination of his own experiences in clowning, offers a close reading of the education of a professional circus clown, woven through an eye-opening, sometimes funny, occasionally poignant look at circus life. Layering critical reflections of personal experience with connections to wider scholarship, Carlyon focuses on the work of clowning...

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...

No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film. Frick introduces the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created theatre history.

Using the famed Hedgerow Theatre as an example, Witham illustrates how theatres can be self-sufficient and experimental (outside of the establishment.)