Besides containing abridged excerpts from the most important plays and musicals, the Theater yearbook also gives information about the New York season, on and off Broadway, about the season throughout the U.S., and gives facts and figures about the American theater.
Live theatre was once the main entertainment medium in the United States and the United Kingdom. The preeminent dramatists and actors of the day wrote and performed in numerous plays in which crime was a major plot element. This remains true today, especially with the longest-running shows such as The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and Sweeney Todd. While hundreds of books have been published about crime fiction in film and on television, the topic of stage mysteries has been largely unexplored. Covering productions from the 18th century to the 2013-2014 theatre season, this is the first history of crime plays according to subject matter. More than 20 categories are identified, including whodunits, comic mysteries, courtroom dramas, musicals, crook plays, social issues, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie. Nearly 900 plays are described, including the reactions of critics and audiences.
An alphabetical listing of plays that have been banned throughout history with a short synopsis and reason for banning as well as profiles of the playwrights and other resource material.
Sad single teachers get together. Drink tequila, get very pissed and reveal secrets and then stagger home at four in the morning, with some dim light in your brain saying "Shit. Year seven first lesson."' David Eldridge's Under the Blue Sky premiered at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London, in September 2000. Methuen's Royal Court Writers Series was launched in 1981 to celebrate 25 years of the English Stage Company and 21 years since the publication of the first Methuen Modern Play. Published to coincide with specific productions in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs and the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, the series fulfils the dual role of programme and playscript.
(Applause Books). For over 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and more. In this volume, the plays capture the struggle between "hot tempers and cold decrees." Humans love to think of themselves as rational beings well in control of their lives and surroundings from sunup to sundown, sundown to sunrise. We learn to follow rules of proper behavior and more than happily issue out advice to our friends who just can't get a handle on themselves. Restraint and order, after all, are the cornerstones of human society and civilization. The problem is that human nature bucks and bridles at every attempt to socialize and civilize. Shakespeare got it right when he penned the observation, "The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree." In those few words he has managed to capture precisely why it is so difficult to be human; if it were okay simply to let our hot tempers prevail, life would be so much easier. But cold decrees are what prevent us from self-destruction, and so we endure the struggle.
Covers plays produced in New York, theater awards, details of productions, prizes, people, and publications, as well as the editors' choices of the ten best plays.
This book offers a critical examination of Friel's dramatic writing both within the context of Irish storytelling and considering his crucial position as a writer from the north of Ireland negotiating between the responsibilities of art and the demands of violent conflict.
"A major new voice in British theatre" (Scotsman) Set around Limehouse Cut and the Lee River in East London, Herons is the disturbing and moving story of fourteen-year-old Billy, whose life has been made a misery by his father's actions. As the teenagers that surround him on the estate step up their campaign of bullying, the play escalates to a violent climax.Commissioned by the Royal Court, Herons premiered there on 18 May 2001.