An overview of the 2009-2010 theatre season includes photos, a complete cast listing, producers, directors, authors, composers, opening and closing dates, song titles and plot synopses for more than 1,000 Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway and regional shows, as well as the past year's obituaries, a listing of all award nominees and winners and an index.
(Theatre World). Applause Theatre & Cinema Books is pleased to make this venerable continuing series complete by publishing Theatre World Volume 63 . Theatre World remains the authoritative pictorial and statistical record of the season on Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and for regional theatre companies. Volume 63 features Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's Tony Award-winning Best Musical Spring Awakening , which also earned a Theatre World Award for actor Jonathan Groff. Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia captured the Best Play Tony Award, as well as Tonys for featured actors Billy Crudup and Jennifer Ehle. Frasier star David Hyde Pierce returned to his theatre roots to capture a Tony for Kander and Ebb's Curtains , and other highlights of the season include the Off-Broadway musical In the Heights as well as Passing Strange , which debuted at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Both have since transferred to Broadway and become critical and popular hits. As always, Theatre World 's outstanding features include: * An expanded section of professional regional productions from across the U.S. * The longest running shows on and Off-Broadway * Full coverage of the Theatre World Awards for Broadway and Off-Broadway debuts * Expanded obituaries and a comprehensive index
Edited by Ian Herbert, President of the International Association of Theatre Critics, Secretary of the Drama Section of the Critics' Circle in London, and editor of Theatre Record, the chronicle of the British stage, and Nicole Leclercq, Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Brussels, the World of Theatre is a lavishly illustrated biennial publication providing on-the-spot and authoritative surveys of current theatrical activity from across the globe. The content of the book is as varied as the theatrical situations it describes, from magisterial round-ups by leading critics in Europe to desperate and pitiful reports from the battlefield in war-torn countries. With expanded coverage, this new edition encompasses the three seasons from 1999 to 2002 and contains articles from over seventy countries. The contributors include leading commentators such as Jim O'Quinn, editor of American Theatre, and England's Peter Hepple, the longest serving London theatre critic and a former editor of The Stage. The World of Theatre will be welcomed by theatre scholars as an ongoing revision of another Routledge reference work, the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and is essential reading for anyone seeking up-to-date information on the developments in the leading theatre nations as well as those countries whose theatre is little known outside their boundaries.
If you’re a preservice teacher planning to teach the theatre arts, an in-service secondary teacher considering a foray into teaching theatre, or a theatre professional considering the classroom, there’s a lot to learn. But you don’t have to know everything to teach well from the start, you just need Theatre in the Secondary School Classroom. Theatre in the Secondary School Classroom is the trusty guide that every new theatre teacher will be grateful to have as a ready reference. It’s not an encyclopedia on secondary theatre, but a collection of musts that every beginning instructor needs to know. Theoretical, practical, and friendly, Theatre in the Secondary School Classroom introduces key instructional methods and successful strategies, and works through the problems of practice that face all instructors, regardless of their experience. With discussions of finding appropriate spaces (both personal and physical), assessing students’ learning, encouraging involvement, and more, you’ll find the crucial information you need to hit the ground running. Patterson, McKenna-Crook, and Ellington provide numerous illustrations, model letters to parents, work samples, rubrics, checklists, and example test questions to show you precisely how the nitty-gritty of theatre education plays out. In addition each chapter contains suggested extension activities for students, Internet links to valuable resources and research materials, and experience-won hints on topics of specific interest to the new theatre teacher.
To metaphorize the world as a theatre has been a common procedure since antiquity, but the use of this trope became particularly prominent and pregnant in early modern times, especially in England. Old and new applications of the “theatrum mundi” topos pervaded discourses, often allegorizing the deceitfulness and impermanence of this world as well as the futility of earthly strife. It was frequently woven into arguments against worldly amusements such as the stage: Commercial theatre was declared an undesirable competitor of God’s well-ordered world drama. Early modern dramatists often reacted to this development by appropriating the metaphor, and in an ingenious twist, some playwrights even appropriated its anti-theatrical impetus: Early modern theatre seemed to discover a denial of its own theatricality at its very core. Drama was found to succeed best when it staged itself as a great unmasking. To investigate the reasons and effects of these developments, the anthology examines the metaphorical uses of theatre in plays, pamphlets, epics, treatises, legal proclamations and other sources.
This book proposes a new way to consider theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to reality, truth and authenticity. It documents innovations in devising and staging theatre and performance that takes reality as its subject, cultural shifts that have generated theatre of the real, some of its problems and some possibilities.
Newly adapted for the Anglophone reader, this is an excellent translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s groundbreaking study of the new theatre forms that have developed since the late 1960s, which has become a key reference point in international discussions of contemporary theatre. In looking at the developments since the late 1960s, Lehmann considers them in relation to dramatic theory and theatre history, as an inventive response to the emergence of new technologies, and as an historical shift from a text-based culture to a new media age of image and sound. Engaging with theoreticians of 'drama' from Aristotle and Brecht, to Barthes and Schechner, the book analyzes the work of recent experimental theatre practitioners such as Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller, the Wooster Group, Needcompany and Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Illustrated by a wealth of practical examples, and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby providing useful theoretical and artistic contexts for the book, Postdramatic Theatre is an historical survey expertly combined with a unique theoretical approach which guides the reader through this new theatre landscape.
This collection in part examines the legacy of the consummate Nigerian stage artist and scholar, Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010). Poems, tributes, and studies cele¬brate Irobi’s significance as actor, play¬wright, director, poet, and theatre theorist. Irobi’s life, temper, times, and career are inextricably linked to the history, devel¬opment, concerns, and uses of drama and theatre in Africa. The contributions high¬light the evolution of autochthonous thea¬trical practices: the interaction between Western and indigenous African perfor¬mance traditions; colonial/postcolonial government policies and the mutations of drama and theatre (and critical commen¬tary); the tensions inherent in postcolonial conceptions of history, identity, nation¬hood, and articulations of alternative aes¬thetics, pedagogies, and epistemologies for postcolonial African theatre; staging African plays in the West; and the con-stituencies of the contemporary African playwright and director. The strength of these studies derives primarily from nuanced examinations of the concerns and careers of particular African playwrights; the history, offerings, and fortunes of particular theatrical arenas, and close explorations of specific performances and texts. The foregrounding of correspon¬dences in the dramaturgies and intellec¬tual ferment of the continent critically accentuates equally privileged regional, historical, and other crucial specificities. Situated in time and place while under¬scoring the political and intellectual inter¬sections of a shared history of colonial-ism, the contributions to Syncretic Arenas, individually and collectively, reveal the transformations and growing strengths of postcolonialism as an analytical strategy. Isidore Diala is Professor of African literature in the Department of English and Literary Studies at Abia State University, Uturu, and author of Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance (2013).
Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular. The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual. By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.
