Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Theater - Broadway & Musicals

Pierre Corneille, in his original dedication for The Theatre of Illusion, described the play as a "strange monster." He first called these five acts a comedy; later, a "caprice" and an "extravagant trifle." Written in 1635 and staged in 1636, the play vanished from the stage for the next three hundred years to be revived in 1937 by Louis Jouvet and the Comedie Francaise. Since then it has been widely considered, in Virginia Scott s words, "Corneille s baroque masterpiece."

Today this brilliant piece of wit and drama is available in a new translation from one of America s finest poets...

Steven Suskin's acclaimed new theatre annual delivers a vibrant, candid, and thoughtful account of every show to hit the boards: exciting musicals such as The Full Monty and the revival of 42nd Street; intriguing new plays like Proof and The Tale of the Allergist's...

It would be difficult, indeed, to imagine anyone more qualified to give us a celebration, from the perspective of an insider, of the Broadway musical. From the first run of Guys and Dolls in 1950 to the recent debut of Rent, Stuart Ostrow, a prot DEGREESD'eg DEGREESD'e of the great composer-lyricist Frank Loesser, has been personally involved in many of the major Broadway productions of our time. The steadily growing number of fans of the Great White Way will delight in his reminiscences about the shows that have shaped musical theater, such as Hello Dolly, Funny...

For Ethan Mordden, the closing night of the hit musical, 42nd St. sounded the death knell of the art form of the Broadway musical. After that, big orchestras, real voices, recognizable books and intelligent lyrics went out the window in favor of cats, helicopters, yodeling Frenchmen, and the roof of the Paris Opera. Mordden takes us through the aftermath of the days of the great Broadway musical. From the long-running Cats to Miss Saigon, Phantom, and Les Miserables, to gems like The Producers, he is unsparing in his look at the remains of the...

Jerry Herman is one of Broadway's most celebrated composers and lyricists, this book includes early lyrics from Herman's first Broadway revues and shows, songs cut from his best-loved shows, and new lyrics.

"Sitting in an automobile was where I first remember understanding how drama works...Hidden in the back seat of a sedan, I quickly realized how deep the chasm or intense the claustrophobia could be inside your average family car." --Neil LaBute

Be it the medium for clandestine couplings, arguments, shelter, or ultimately transportation, the automobile is perhaps the most authentically American of spaces. In Autobahn, Neil LaBute's provocative new collection of one-act plays set within the confines of the front seat, the playwright employs his signature plaintive insight to...

."a beautifully balanced assessment.The author has obviously drawn extensively on personal experience and he expresses himself with clarity, precision and a refreshing impartiality.Robinson displays a scrupulous knowledge of the scores and of the ethos of the works in question."

-Jeffrey Joseph, "Music and Musicians," September, 1979. Excerpts from a review of the first edition of "Solti."

When Sir Georg Solti died in 1997 he was at the height of his powers and one of the conducting titans of his generation. The Hungarian-born Solti conducted like a man...

At a critical, transitional moment in the history of Broadwayand, by extension, of American theatre itselfformer Broadway stage manager Steven Adler" "enlists insider perspectives from sixty-six practitioners and artists to chronicle the recent past and glimpse the near future of the Great White Way. From marquee names to behind-the-scenes power brokers, Adler has assembled a distinctly knowledgeable cast of theatre s elite, including Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Des McAnuff, Frank Rich, Robin Wagner, Rocco Landesman, Robert Longbottom, Todd Haimes, Bernard Gersten, and Alan...

In this fresh approach to musical theatre history, Bruce Kirle challenges the commonly understood trajectory of the genre. Drawing on the notion that the world of the author stays fixed while the world of the audience is ever-changing, Kirle suggests that musicals are open, fluid products of the particular cultural moment in which they are performed. Incomplete as printed texts and scores, musicals take on unpredictable lives of their own in the complex transformation from page to stage.

Using lenses borrowed from performance studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and ethnoracial...

Three out of four Broadway-bound musicals fail to get there, and many of those that do, ultimately fail. The Broadway Musical takes an engrossing look at the industry's successes and failures in an effort to understand the phenomenon of mass collaboration that is Broadway.
The authors investigate the complicated machinery of show business from its birth around the turn of the century through its survival of the cost explosions of the 1980s. Through interviews with many of Broadway's top producers, directors, designers, actors, songwriters, lyricists, librettists, musicians, and other...