This book represents one of the most exciting and bold periods in the career of one of America's most popular and imaginative playwrights.

    An unprepared actor in an unnamed play is forced to take the place of a leading actor.

    In roaring twenties Chicago, chorine Roxie Hart murders a faithless lover and convinces her hapless husband Amos to take the rap...until he finds out he's been duped and turns on Roxie. Convicted and sent to death row, Roxie and another Merry Murderess Velma Kelly, vie for the spotlight and the headlines, ultimately joining forces in search of the American Dream fame, fortune and acquittal. This sharp edged satire features a dazzling score that sparked immortal staging by Bob Fosse. 'A pulse racing revival that flies us right into musical heaven.-The New York Times Wildly entertaining...[with a] dazzling score.-New York Daily News

    Full of practical aids: checklists, diagrams, examples, forms and step-by-step directions, this book has been used and admired by students and theater professionals alike. It eschews excessive discussion of philosophy and, instead, gets right to the essential materials and processes of putting on a production. In addition to sharing his own expertise, the author has gathered practical advice from working stage managers of Broadway, off-Broadway, touring companies, regional, community, and 99-seat Equity waiver theaters.

    The book earned the American Theater Association's Barnard Hewitt Award for outstanding research in theater history

    

    The first to insist on the primacy of the director's role, indeed the first to conceive of it as a role, this passionately dedicated Russian director tore down the fourth wall and forced the actors and audience together into one inescapable community of experience. Yet Meyerhold recorded few of his theories in writing, and the intensity and brilliance of his work must be recaptured through the actors and artists who helped create the performances. Focusing on Meyerhold's postrevolutionary career, Paul Schmidt has assembled in this book journals, letters, reminiscences, and, of special interest, actual rehearsal notes that build a fascinating, intimate picture of Meyerhold as a theorist and as a man. Included are Meyerhold's frantic notes to his teacher, friend, and bete noire Stanislavsky; detailed descriptions of how he trained his actors in "biomechanics"; and memories by such students as Eisenstein and such friends as Pasternak and Ehrenburg. One chapter deals with Meyerhold's never-realized conception of Boris Godunov, while another describes his direction of Camille, which starred Zinaida Raikh, his wife, and which played its 725th and last performance on the day Stalin's government liquidated Meyerhold's theater. Paul Schmidt's introduction and headnotes enhance our understanding of Meyerhold as a pioneer of modern theater.

    Includes an introduction, two complete commedia scenarios, and a glossary of commedia characters.

    The book records a series of talks given to students at Cambridge University.