Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography
Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

Author: Amanda Weldy Boyd

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1783086688

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“Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies’ 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre’s history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin’s story at the turn of the century and James Boaden’s theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work’s predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to “co-author” biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.

Lives in Play
Lives in Play

Author: Ryan Claycomb

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2012-08-08

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0472118404

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Lives in Play explores the centrality of life narratives to women’s drama and performance from the 1970s to the present moment. In the early days of second-wave feminism, the slogan was “The personal is the political.” These autobiographical and biographical “true stories” have the political impact of the real and have also helped a range of feminists tease out the more complicated aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality in a Western culture that now imagines itself as “postfeminist.” The book’s scope is broad, from performance artists like Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Bobby Baker to playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sarah Kane. The book links the narrative tactics and theatrical approaches of biography and autobiography and shows how theater artists use life writing strategies to advance women’s rights and remake women’s representations. Lives in Play will appeal to scholars in performance studies, women’s studies, and literature, including those in the growing field of auto/biography studies. “ A fresh perspective and wide-ranging analysis of changes in feminist theater for the past thirty years . . . a most welcome addition to the literature on theater, in particular scholarship on feminist practices.” —Choice “Helps sustain an important history by reviving works of feminist theater and performance and giving them a new and refreshing context and theorical underpinning . . . considering 1970s performance art alongside more conventional play production.” —Lesley Ferris, The Ohio State University

Peter Brook
Peter Brook

Author: Michael Kustow

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-17

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1408852284

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Peter Brook is one of the most influential directors of our time, whose productions are a byword for imagination, energy and innovation. He was born into a Russian émigré family in London and, after a turbulent time at Oxford University, he veered between directing West End comedy, new work from abroad and opera at Covent Garden. By the 1960s he was moving towards greater experimentation, with controversial works like The Marat/Sade, films like Lord of the Flies, and landmark stagings of Shakespeare of which the most famous was the 'white box' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1970, at the height of his success, he moved to Paris and immediately set off with a group of actors to Persia, Africa, Mexico and the USA in an attempt to discover a universal language of theatre. Since then, Brook has continued pushing at the boundaries of theatre and film. In this first authoritative biography, arising out of an association and friendship with Brook of more than forty years, Michael Kustow tells the revealing story of a man whose life has been a never-ending quest for meaning.

The Theatre of Erwin Piscator
The Theatre of Erwin Piscator

Author: John Willett

Publisher: New York : Holmes & Meier

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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This is the first book in English to cover the theatrical career of Erwin Piscator. As one of the leading authorities on 20th century German theatre, the author is well-equipped to write about this important director. Most of the text is devoted to the Weimar period and is illustrated with rare pictures and documents.

Victor Herbert
Victor Herbert

Author: Neil Gould

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13:

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Victor Herbert is one of the giants of American culture. As a musician, conductor, and, above all, composer, he touched every corner of American musical life at the turn of the century, writing scores of songs, marches, concerti, and other works. But his most enduring legacy is on a different kind of stage, as one of the grandfathers of the modern musical theater. Now, Victor Herbert has the biography he deserves. Neil Gould draws on his own experience as a director, producer, and scholar to craft the first comprehensive portrait in fifty years of the Irish immigrant whose extraordinary talents defined the sounds of a generation and made contemporary American music possible. Mining a wealth of sources--many for the first time--Gould provides a fascinating portrait of Herbert and his world. Born in Dublin in 1859, Herbert arrived in the United States in 1886. From his first job in the orchestra pit of the Metropolitan Opera, Herbert went on to perform in countless festivals and concerts, and conduct the Pittsburgh Orchestra. In 1894, he composed his first operetta, Prince Ananias, and by the time of his death in 1924, he'd composed forty-two more--many of them, such as Naughty Marietta, spectacular Broadway hits. Along the way, he also wrote two operas, stage music for the Ziegfeld Follies, and the first full score for a motion picture, The Fall of a Nation. Gould brilliantly blends the musical and the theatrical, classical and popular, the public and the private, in this book. He not only gives a revealing portrait of Herbert the artist, entrepreneur, and visionary, but also recreates the vibrant world of the Herbert's Broadway. Gould takes us inside the music itself--with detailed guides to each major work and recreations of great performances. He also makes strong connections between Herbert's breakthrough compositions, such as the operetta Mlle. Modiste, and the later contributions of Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, Jerome Kern and other giants of the musical theater. As exuberant as Herbert himself, this book is also a chronicle of American popular culture during one of its most creative periods. For anyone enraptured by the sound of the American musical, this book is delightfully required reading.

Jacques Copeau
Jacques Copeau

Author: Maurice Kurtz

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780809322572

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The French writer, editor, and drama critic Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) opened his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris in 1913. Copeau was well on his way to exerting a major influence in the theater in the year that saw the end of the career of the dominant innovator of an earlier generation, André Antoine, whose Théâtre Libre (Free Stage) had featured an uncompromising realism. In marked contrast to Antoine, Copeau returned the poetry and freshness to Shakespeare and Moliére. By May 1914, Paris and Europe had recognized his genius and his special gift to the theater. Yet like Antoine, Copeau wanted to sweep "staginess" from the stage, to banish overacting, overdressing, and flashy house trappings. To cleanse the stage of its artificiality, he created a fixed, architectural acting space where dramatic literature and theater technique could live in harmony and thrive in freedom of thought and movement. A major part of his program was teaching actors and actresses their craft. Maurice Kurtz points out that the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier incarnates the "ideal of Copeau's stubborn struggle to remain strong in the face of indifference, independent in the face of success, proud in the face of defeat. It is the story of group spirit in its purest, most eloquent form, the spirit of personal sacrifice of all for the dignity of their art." Kurtz here re-creates the vitality Copeau imbued in theater artists throughout the world. He conveys Copeau's enthusiasm, the crusading spirit that enabled Copeau and his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier to transform experimentation into tradition, into the heritage of civilization. He has written a biography of a theater that was tremendously influential in Europe and America.