Best of
Theatre

1983

Sunday in the Park with George


Stephen Sondheim - 1983
    A complex work revolving around a fictionalized Seurat immersed in single-minded concentration while painting the masterpiece, the production has evolved into a meditation on art, emotional connection, and community. This publication contains the entire script of the musical. "Sunday is itself a modernist creation, perhaps the first truly modernist work of musical theatre that Broadway has produced ... a watershed event that demands nothing less than a retrospective, even revisionist, look at the development of the serious Broadway musical."- Frank Rich, The New York Times Magazine

Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays


David Ball - 1983
    The text is full of tools for students and practitioners to use as they investigate plot, character, theme, exposition, imagery, motivation/obstacle/conflict, theatricality, and the other crucial parts of the superstructure of a play. He includes guides for discovering what the playwright considers the play’s most important elements, thus permitting interpretation based on the foundation of the play rather than its details.Using Hamlet as illustration, Ball assures a familiar base for illustrating script-reading techniques as well as examples of the kinds of misinterpretation readers can fall prey to by ignoring the craft of the playwright. Of immense utility to those who want to put plays on the stage (actors, directors, designers, production specialists) Backwards and Forwards is also a fine playwriting manual because the structures it describes are the primary tools of the playwright.

Christopher Durang Explains it All for You


Christopher Durang - 1983
    ' dentity CrisisRecovering from a nervous breakdown, Jane is nursed and nagged by her energetic and overwhelming mother, Edith Fromage, who claims to have invented cheese. She also criticizes Jane for her suicide attempt, but then claims it never happened. Plus Jane is very confused by the fact that her mother and her brother Dwayne seem to be having an affair. But then at other times, her brother turns into her father, and then into her grandfather, and sometimes into a French count. So Jane isn’t really sure who he is. Her psychiatrist makes a house call and listens sympathetically to Jane’s recurring memory of attending a nightmarish production of “Peter Pan” in her youth. But then he goes off and has sex change, and returns as a woman, and Jane has trouble recognizing him. Then his wife shows up, also with a sex change, and the wife now looks like the psychiatrist. So poor Jane feels crazier still, though Edith and Dwayne/father/ grandfather/count think the new company is great fun, and everybody ends by conjugating the verb “dentity” : I dentity, you dentity, he she or it denties.The Actor's NightmareThe Actor's Nightmare is a short comic play by Christopher Durang. It involves an accountant named George Spelvin, who is mistaken for an actor's understudy and forced to perform in a play for which he doesn't know any of the lines.

Stage Makeup


Richard Corson - 1983
    Hundreds of illustrations including color charts and plates of period hairstyles supplement information on designing and applying theatrical makeup, stippling, and quick changes.

La Cage Aux Folles


Jerry Herman - 1983
    Complete vocal score to the Broadway sensation with 11 songs: The Best of Times * I Am What I Am * A Little More Mascara * Look over There * Song on the Sand (La Da Da Da) * With You on My Arm * and more.

Peter Hall's Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle


Peter Hall - 1983
    In his startlingly frank, incisive style, he creates sometimes affectionate, sometimes acid portraits of his friends and enemies, of great actors in rehearsal. In his foreword, Hall casts a critical eye over the state of British theatre today and, through a discussion of politics and the arts in the eighties and nineties, contemplates its future.

Little Shop of Horrors: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack


Alan Menken - 1983
    This souvenir songbook from the 1986 film adaptation of the musical features 13 songs arranged for piano and voice with guitar chord frames. Titles include: Dentist! * Feed Me (Git It) * Little Shop of Horrors * Somewhere That's Green * Suddenly Seymour * and more. Also includes black and white photos from the film.

Fiddler on the Roof: Vocal Score


Hal Leonard Corporation - 1983
    The vocal score from this Broadway musical includes 30 songs, including: Anatevka * Do You Love Me? * The Dream * Far from the Home I Love * If I Were a Rich Man * Matchmaker * Miracle of Miracles * Now I Have Everything * The Rumor * Sabbath Prayer * Sunrise, Sunset * To Life * Tradition * Wedding Dance, No. 1. Includes composer bios.

Fool for Love


Sam Shepard - 1983
    May is hiding out at an old motel in the Mojave Desert. Eddie, an old flame and childhood friend, finds her there and threatens to drag her back into the life from which she had fled. Reality and dream; truth and lies; past and present mingle in an explosive, emotional experience.

Farewell in June: Four Russian Plays (Contemporary Russian Writing)


Aleksandr Vampilov - 1983
    

Boys From The Blackstuff


Alan Bleasdale - 1983
    This book contains the complete scripts of all five plays from the original TV drama series, clearly organised for reading or studying in class, with an introduction and suggestions for related work.

The Diviners


Jim Leonard - 1983
    platforms Winner of the American College Theatre Festival, this marvelously theatrical play is the story of a disturbed young man and his friendship with a disenchanted preacher in southern Indiana in the early 1930s. When the boy was young he almost drowned. This trauma and the loss of his mother in the same accident has left him deathly afraid of water. The preacher, set on breaking away from a long line of Kentucky family preachers, is determined not to do what h

Company


Hal Leonard Corporation - 1983
    16 vocal selections from the Broadway musical, including: Another Hundred People * Company * Getting Married Today * Have I Got a Girl for You * The Ladies Who Lunch * The Little Things You Do Together * Side by Side by Side * Sorry - Grateful * Tick Tock * and more.

Costume Design


Barbara Anderson - 1983
    The text is thoroughly illustrated, providing guidelines for the student for creating the figure and the costume design, examples of many styles of costume presentation, a guide to historical costume shapes, and scale drawings of the basic historical patterns with photos of them made up in muslin. Many theatre departments require all theatre majors take a course in costume design.

Follies


S. Sondheim - 1983
    (Oliver James, Contact Magazine) A novel and comprehensive approach to transferring from the C to F instrument. 430 music examples include folk and national songs (some in two parts), country dance tunes and excerpts from the standard treble repertoire ofBach, Barsanti, Corelli, Handel, Telemann, etc. An outstanding feature of the book has proved to be Brian Bonsor's brilliantly simple but highly effective practice circles and recognition squares designed to give, in only a few minutes, concentrated practice on the more usual leaps to and from each new note and instant recognition of random notes. Quickly emulating the outstanding success of the descant tutors, these books are very popular even with those who normally use tutors other than the Enjoy the Recorder series.

Engineers Of The Imagination: Welfare State Handbook


Tony Coult - 1983
    This is first and foremost a practical book rather than an academic treatise.

BEST AMERICAN PLAYS 8TH SER 19 (Best American Plays)


John Gassner - 1983
    Charlie; The Last Analysis.

The Dog It Was That Died and Other Plays


Tom Stoppard - 1983
    

Best American Plays: Fifth Series 1958-1963, Complete (The John Gassner Best Play Series)


John Gassner - 1983
    Screenplays, Theatre, Drama, American Theatre and Drama

A Valuable Property: The Life Story of Michael Todd


Michael Todd Jr. - 1983
    

A Pictorial History of the American Theatre, 1860-1980


Daniel C. Blum - 1983