- PERFORMING ARTS: Theater: Broadway & Musical Revue
- PERFORMING ARTS: Theater: Direction & Production
- PERFORMING ARTS: Theater: General
- PERFORMING ARTS: Theater: History & Criticism
- Actors in the Audience
- This is a book about language, theatricality, and empire--about how the Roman emperor dramatized his rule and how his subordinates in turn staged their response. Informed by theories of dramaturgy, sociology, new historicism, and cultural criticism, this close reading of literary and historical texts gives us a new perspective on the politics of the Roman empire--and on the languages and representation of power.
- Hardcover 1998
- The Culture of Kitharoidia
- The Culture of Kitharoidia is the first study dedicated exclusively to the art, practice, and charismatic persona of the citharode. Traversing a wide range of discourse and imagery about kitharoidia--poetic and prose texts, iconography, inscriptions--the book offers a nuanced account of the aesthetic and sociocultural complexities of citharodic song and examines the iconic role of the songmakers in the popular imagination.
- Paperback 2009
- The Death of Comedy
- In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries, Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its early origins in a misogynistic quip by the sixth-century B.C. Susarion, through countless weddings and happy endings, to the exasperated monosyllables of Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor
Contemporary Afro–American theatre is an exciting spectacle of an emerging black identity during a period when blacks have come to the forefront of political activity in the United States. Geneviève Fabre brings us the vast and rich production of black drama since 1945, placing it in historical and cultural context as a platform for political statement. Two strains emerge: the militant theatre of protest, and the ethnic theatre of black experience.
- Hardcover 1983
- Female Spectacle
- When the French actress Sarah Bernhardt made her first American tour in 1880, the term "feminism" had not yet entered our national vocabulary. But over the course of the next half-century, a rising generation of daring actresses and comics brought a new kind of woman to center stage. Exploring and exploiting modern fantasies and fears about female roles and gender identity, these performers eschewed theatrical convention and traditional notions of womanly modesty. Female Spectacle reveals the theater to have been a powerful new source of cultural authority and visibility for women.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Genos Dikanikon
- Under the Athenian democracy, litigants were expected to speak for themselves, though they could memorize a speech written for them. These amateur performances often manifested an unmanly yielding to emotions of anger or fear; professional speech, Bers seeks to demonstrate, was to a large degree crafted in reaction to amateur stumbling.
- Paperback 2009
- The King's Theatre Collection
- The John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection of the Harvard Theatre Collection is comprised of thousands of books, scores, librettos, playbills, illustrations, and ephemera relating to public performances that incorporate music and dance in an essential way. With over 1,600 entries and 40 color illustrations, this volume provides a window into the historical significance of the King's Theatre to the cultural life of London and abroad.
- Paperback 2006
- Making Americans
- This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. We see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.
- Hardcover 2004
- Munich and Theatrical Modernism
- This is the first cultural exploration of playwriting, directing, acting, and theater architecture in fin-de-siècle Munich. Peter Jelavich examines the commercial, political, and cultural tensions that fostered modernism's artistic revolt against the classical and realistic modes of nineteenth-century drama.
- Hardcover 1985 / Paperback 1996
- No Author Better Served
- Samuel Beckett claimed he couldn't talk about his work, but he proves remarkably forthcoming in these pages, which document the thirty-year working relationship between the playwright and his principal producer in the United States, Alan Schneider. The 500 letters capture the world of theater as well as the personalities of their authors.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- On Stage, Off Stage
- Paperback
- Place for Us
- Although the once silent social fact that the Broadway musical recruited a massive underground following of gay men currently spawns jokes that every sitcom viewer is presumed to be in on, it has not necessarily become better understood.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000
- Worldly Stage
- The goal of Worldly Stage is to show how the theater acquired the figurative power to animate diverse aspects of literati cultural production. Conceptions of theatrical spectatorship, Sophie Volpp argues, helped shape a discourse on social spectatorship that suggested how a discerning person might evaluate the performance of status.
- Hardcover