Characters: 4 females and 1 male

Scenery: Simple set

In a festive mood, the ladies mount another assault on the classics with their stage version of A Christmas Carol. They enthusiastically portray a dizzy array of characters from the Dickensian favorite (and a few which aren't), engineer some novel audience participation while bravely contending with an intrusive PA system and a real Farndale first rap their vocal cords and feet around two original, show stopping songs.

Norman Robbins

Characters: 4 males, 6 females

Scenery: Interior

Months have passed since the ghastly events in Monument House occurred that are related in A Tomb with a View. Mortimer Crayle, the crusty lawyer, and his secretary have gathered the remaining members of the Tomb family at the house, ostensibly to inform this off beat bunch about their inheritance. In reality, Crayle has designs on the estate that necessitate eliminating all Tombs. Fog descends on the gloomy mansion. In the cobwebby corridors things and people are seldom what they seem. Poison is...

Characters: Various males and females, extras

In each of these masterpieces from the authors of Four Plays for Coarse Actors, sets collapse, actors fail to appear and props fall to pieces while the casts carry on, believing that the audience won't notice. Moby Dick is an ambitious attempt to reduce the epic novel to a series of quick fire scenes. The Cherry Sisters, a previously undiscovered Chekhov fragment, is a desperately sincere piece with a teary ending (spoiled by a faulty prop that necessitates a standing death). Last Call for Breakfast is an avant garde play...

The comedic work of the children of modern Jewish immigrants overturned the prevailing languages and imageries with which an Anglocentric United States had traditionally represented and expanded itself. In DEGREESIGravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of Modern America DEGREESR, James D. Bloom approaches these developments by first surveying this transformation as it affected literature, entertainment, commerce, and politics, and then offers sharply focused chapters that look at changes in sexual candor, reactions to the Holocaust, and critiques of race.

Indeed, the personae discussed...

In Egypt, singing and dancing are considered essential on happy occasions. Professional entertainers often perform at weddings and other celebrations, and a host family's prestige rises with the number, expense, and fame of the entertainers they hire. Paradoxically, however, the entertainers themselves are often viewed as disreputable people and are accorded little prestige in Egyptian society.

This paradox forms the starting point of Karin van Nieuwkerk's look at the Egyptian entertainment trade. She explores the lives of female performers and the reasons why work they regard as "a...

Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown.

Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why...

Do you think you're funny? Do you want to turn your sense of humor into a career? If the answer is yes, then Judy Carter's The Comedy Bible is for you. The guru to aspiring stand-up comics provides the complete scoop on being--and writing--funny for money.

If you've got a sense of humor, you can learn to make a career out of comedy, says...