Best of
Theatre

1994

The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged)


Adam Long - 1994
    The playtext is reproduced here with footnotes which will be of no help to anyone and a letter from the authors to the Queen.

All in the Timing


David Ives - 1994
    Ives's characters plunge into black holes called "Philadelphias," where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which "hello" translates as "velcro" and "fraud" comes out as "freud."At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this original paperback edition of Ives's plays includes "Sure Thing," "Words, Words, Words," "The Universal Language," "Variations on the Death of Trotsky," "The Philadelphia," "Long Ago and Far Away," "Foreplay, or The Art of the Fugue," "Seven Menus," "Mere Mortals," "English Made Simple," "A Singular Kinda Guy," "Speed-the-Play," "Ancient History," and "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread."

Gypsy


Arthur Laurents - 1994
    The musical tale of a domineering stage mother's inadvertent creation of a burlesque stripper, now available in paperback for the first time.

Impro for Storytellers (Theatre Arts)


Keith Johnstone - 1994
    Impro for Storytellers aims to take jealous and self-obsessed beginners and teach them to play games with good nature and to fail gracefully.

The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy


Augusto Boal - 1994
    It is Augusto Boal's bold and brilliant statement about the therapeutic ability of theatre to liberate individuals and change lives. Now translated into English and comprehensively updated from the French, Rainbow of Desire sets out the techniques which help us `see' for the first time the oppressions we have internalised. Boal, a Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician, has been confronting oppression in various forms for over thirty years. His belief that theatre is a means to create the future has inspired hundreds of groups all over the world to use his techniques in a multitude of settings. This, his latest work, includes such exercises as: * The Cops in the Head and their anti-bodies * The screen image * The image of the future we are afraid of * Image and counter-image ....and many more. Rainbow of Desire will make fascinating reading for those already familiar with Boal's work and is also completely accessible to anyone new to Theatre of the Oppressed techniques.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays


Steve Martin - 1994
    He is also an accomplished screenwriter who has in the past few years turned his hand to writing plays. The results, collected here, hilariously explore serious questions of love, happiness and the meaning of life; they are rich with equal parts of pain and slapstick humour, torment and wit.

Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation


Charna Halpern - 1994
    It involves six to seven players and many kinds of scenes: games, monologues, songs, skits and more, all of which are bound to keep both actors and audience members guessing. The Harold is non-linear entertainment that remembers everything and wastes nothing the key to successful improvising and has become a standard in comedy clubs and improv theatres around the globe.

Disney's Beauty and the Beast: The Broadway Musical


Hal Leonard Corporation - 1994
    Features piano/vocal/guitar arrangements of 21 songs by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice from this Disney Broadway smash: Be Our Guest * Beauty and the Beast * Belle * Gaston * Home * How Long Must This Go On? * Human Again * If I Can't Love Her * Maison des Lunes * Me * The Mob Song * No Matter What * Something There * Transformation/Beauty and the Beast (Reprise).

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992


Anna Deavere Smith - 1994
    From nine months of interviews with more than two hundred people, Smith has chosen the voices that best reflect the diversity and tension of a city in turmoil: a disabled Korean man, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenage black gang member, a macho Mexican-American artist, Rodney King's aunt, beaten truck driver Reginald Denny, former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, and other witnesses, participants, and victims. A work that goes directly to the heart of the issues of race and class, Twilight ruthlessly probes the language and the lives of its subjects, offering stark insight into the complex and pressing social, economic, and political issues that fueled the flames in the wake of the Rodney King verdict and ignited a conversation about policing and race that continues today.

Lonely Planet - Acting Edition


Steven Dietz - 1994
    Jody is in his forties and runs a map store. Not one for the outside world, he stays in his store all the time. His friend, Carl is in his late thirties and has been bringing chairs of dead friends into Jody's store and leaving them there. When Jody needs to take an AIDS test, Carl tries to convince him it is not only okay to leave the store, but also that he must take responsibility for his life. If he doesn't, he will join the set of chairs that Carl has taken great pains to place in the right spots around the store. Jody finally leaves the map store to take his HIV test and return to find Carl sitting in a chair of his own. With this gesture, we know that Carl has joined the many of their friends who have died, but now Jody must take Carl's place as the caretaker.

The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Stage Plays


Paddy Chayefsky - 1994
    Includes an introduction by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Show Networks and Control Systems: Formerly "Control Systems for Live Entertainment"


John Huntington - 1994
    With a unique combined focus on computers, networks, control systems, art and practice, the book offers an in-depth examination of the control and networking technology used in lighting, lasers, sound, stage machinery, animatronics, special effects, and pyrotechnics for concerts, theme parks, theatre, themed-retail, cruise ships, museums, interactive performing arts, and special events. This completely revised, reorganized and updated edition includes more than 30 new pages and dozens of brand-new graphics, with dramatically expanded coverage of show networking technology and fresh real-world examples. Drawing upon his extensive experience in the field and classroom, John Huntington clearly explains everything that goes on behind the scenes and inside the machines to bring bold visions to life in real-world settings. * Formerly Control Systems for Live Entertainment

The Essential Bogosian: Talk Radio / Drinking in America / Funhouse / Men Inside


Eric Bogosian - 1994
    "What Lenny Bruce was to the 1950s, Bob Dylan to the 1960s, Woody Allen to the 1970s--that's what Eric Bogosian is to this frightening moment of drift in our history."--Frank Rich, The New York Times

A Bright Room Called Day


Tony Kushner - 1994
    His intellectual characters are tremendously passionate and expressive, so it's hard not to care about what they care about, and what happens to them.” –Washington Post“A juggernaut of a play.” -San Francisco Weekly“Unabashedly political, thought-provoking, a little scary and frequently a good deal of theatrical fun… intoxicatingly visionary.” –Sid Smith, Chicago TribunePulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner’s powerful portrayal of individual resolution, irresolution and dissolution in the face of political catastrophe, A Bright Room Called Day follows a group of artists and political activists struggling to preserve themselves in 1930s Berlin as the Weimar Republic surrenders to the seduction of fascism. Often exquisitely lyrical, always exhilaratingly intelligent, the poetic world of the play moves beyond the bounds of historical reality with the morally outraged outpourings of a contemporary New York woman. Her fury at the Reagan and British presidencies brings into stark relief the discomfiting similarities between then and now, and challenges us to remember that although evil may seem inevitable, it is never irresistible.Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Cornelle; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

Shakespeare Set Free: Hamlet and Henry IV, Part 1


William Shakespeare - 1994
    Providing real help to teachers at all levels--from elementary school through college--this guide presents crucial information on scholarship, performance, and curriculum.

Commedia Dell'arte: An Actor's Handbook


John Rudlin - 1994
    And it remians a central part of many drama school courses. In Commedia dell'arte in the Twentieth Century John Rublin first examines the orgins of this vital theatrical form and charts its recent revival through the work of companies like Tag, Theatre de Complicite and the influential methods of Jacques Lecoq. The second part of the book provides a unique practical guide for would-be practitioners: demonstrating how to approach the roles of Zanni, Arlecchion, Brighella, Pantalone, Dottore, and the Lovers in terms of movement, mask-work and voice. As well as offering a range of lazzi or comic business, improvisation exercises, sample monologues, and dialogues. No other book so clearly outlines the specific culture of Commedia or provides such a practical guide to its techniques. This immensely timely and useful handbook will be an essential purchase for all actors, students, and teachers.

Joe Papp: An American Life


Helen Epstein - 1994
    He was the first to demand and to provide—against enormous odds—free Shakespeare to the public, and the first to pioneer colorblind casting and minority-group theater. He discovered and showcased at the Public Theater playwrights like David Rabe, John Guare, and Vaclav Havel; directors like Michael Bennet and James Lapine; actors like Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Denzel Washington; and produced such classic American plays as Hair, Sticks and Bones, Streamers, The Normal Heart, and A Chorus Line, the longest running musical in Broadway history. Joe Papp offers readers a compassionate, unsparing portrait of a complex man who inspired both anger and admiration, but whose far-reaching impact on American theater remains unsurpassed.

Sure Thing


David Ives - 1994
    

Sondheim's Broadway Musicals


Stephen Banfield - 1994
    Each of his shows has presented new challenges to audiences, and each has cast fresh perspectives on the nature and potential of the American musical, as well as probing deeply, often painfully, into the nature of our culture. Sondheim's Broadway Musicals is the first book to take an in-depth look at Sondheim's work. Stephen Banfield examines each of Sondheim's musicals for Broadway, from West Side Story and Gypsy to the 1987 musical Into the Woods, and includes A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George. Banfield also discusses Sondheim's other work, such as the 1991 show Assassins and his music for the 1990 film Dick Tracy--for which "Sooner or Later" won him an Academy Award for Best Song. "Banfield seems almost to hear Sondheim's music with Sondheim's ears. This extremely valuable work discusses Sondheim's early training and subsequent career, his general compositional concerns, and his style. The meat of the book is a musical-dramatic analysis of his musicals . . . . For each musical, Banfield places the work and its components in a historical and typological text. He also treats in welcome detail the musical profile or universe of each show: Sondheim's use of generative intervals or interval complexes as source material, motifs that reappear in various guises in various songs, the sound world that defines the musical's emotional mind. The book will be as useful to those who are cool to Sondheim's work as to his fans." --Choice

Passion


Stephen Sondheim - 1994
    The newest Broadway musical by Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborators Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical, 1994.

Kiss of the Spider Woman and Two Other Plays


Manuel Puig - 1994
    This is convincing proof that Manual Puig was one of our most talented writers - no matter what the medium. Puig is the author of seven novels, translated into fourteen languages.

Hysteria


Terry Johnson - 1994
    It is "one of the most brilliantly original and entertaining new plays I have seen in years: wild, weird and funny, serious, compassionate and shocking, blasphemous and reverential, intellectual and frivolous, a factual fantasy, a demented farce, a black nightmare." (Sunday Times)

Jeffrey


Paul Rudnick - 1994
    From the publisher's synopsis: "Jeffrey, a gay actor/waiter, has sworn off sex after too many bouts with his partners about what is "safe" and what is not. In gay New York, though, sex is not something you can avoid. Whether catering a ditzy socialite's "how-down for AIDS" or cruising at a funeral; at the gym or in the back rooms of an anonymous sex club; at the annual Gay Pride Parade, or in the libidinous hands of a father-confessor, Jeffrey finds the pursuit of love and just plain old physical gratification to be the number one preoccupation of his times - and the source of plenty of hilarity."

The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains


Lee Irwin - 1994
    This comprehensive work is not a recital but an understandable exploration of the religious world of Plains Indians.The different means of acquiring visions that are described include the spontaneous vision experience common among Plains Indian women and means such as stress, illness, social conflict, and mourning used by both men and women to obtain visions.

Plays 2: Can't Pay? Won't Pay! / Elizabeth / The Open Couple / An Ordinary Day


Dario Fo - 1994
    Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satiresCan't Pay Won't Pay is set in Milan, but "the problems are desperately familiar…Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times); Elizabeth "It portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo's characteristically rollicking vein…A triumph for Gillian Hanna as translator" (Marin Hoyle, Financial Times); The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a society in which both the social system in which they live and its dominant ideology are shaped by men.

Designing and Drawing for the Theater


Lynn Pecktal - 1994
    It presents a realistic professional picture of the designing process from the point of view of the stage designer and the scenic artist. Illustraed with detailed line drawings and photographs, the book aims to convey the beauty and excitement of stage aand see design. Each chapter is followed by a transcipt of a conversation with an American stage designer.

El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement


Yolanda Broyles-González - 1994
    This study demythologizes and reinterprets the company's history from its origins in California's farm labor struggles to its successes in Europe and on Broadway until the disbanding of the original collective ensemble in 1980 with the subsequent adoption of mainstream production techniques. Yolanda Broyles-González corrects many misconceptions concerning the Teatro's creation and evolution. She draws from a rich storehouse of previously untapped material, such as interviews with numerous ensemble members, production notes, and unpublished diaries, to highlight the reality of the collective creation that characterized the Teatro's work. Writing within contemporary cultural studies theory, Broyles-González sheds light on class, gender, race, and cultural issues. Her work situates the Teatro within working-class Mexican performance history, the Chicano movement, gender relations, and recent attempts to mainstream.

Women of Troy/Hecuba/Helen: Three Plays


Euripides - 1994
    Each play shows the aftermath of war from a different standpoint. Women of Troy is set amongst a group of captives waiting to be shipped from Troy as slaves - Queen Hecuba is their comforter but in Hecuba she is driven to the edge of insanity by her own great personal loss. Helen takes place seven years after the end of the War. In Egypt - treated as a backwater, far from 'real' events - Helen waits anxiously for her husband Menelaus to rescue her. One of the greatest and most influential of the Greek tragedians, Euripides, is said to have produced 92 plays, the first of which appeared in 455BC.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company


Adam Long - 1994
    The "complete" works of Shakespeare, this is reminiscent of the Marx Brothers: rollicking and irreverent.

Dada And Surrealist Performance


Annabelle Melzer - 1994
    In Dada and Surrealist Performance Annabelle Melzer describes the founding of the movement among the Zurich performance collective known as the Cabaret Voltaire -- including Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Francois Picabia, and Wassily Kandinksy -- and traces its scandalous history through the rift in the 1920s that separated Dada, with its dedication to political provocation, from the more contemplative Surrealism.

The Antliaclasts And Related Texts


Alfred Jarry - 1994
    MEET THE SHIT-PUMP!

The Usborne Book Of Dressing Up


Cheryl Evans - 1994
    -- Step-by-step instructions outline simple things to make and do-- All projects require minimal supervision-- Shopping lists show what is needed for each project

Tom Stoppard in Conversation


Paul Delaney - 1994
    The interviews include the playwright's unguarded comments to the daily press, from those of a dazzled young Stoppard the morning after the triumphant opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to those of a veteran playwright still smarting from caustic reviews 36 hours after the opening of Hapgood. The interviews cover the full range of Stoppard's work, from his adaptations for the stage to his increasing involvement in film, and this volume makes many of them available for the first time. Also appearing for the first time in print are transcripts of radio interviews and an informal lecture by Stoppard called "The Event and the Text."Tom Stoppard's conversations about his work shed light on questions of authorial intent and the creative process. Debates over interpretations of the plays will be enhanced by this record of Stoppard's own perceptions and insights. The collection also includes the most extensive bibliography and discography ever compiled of Stoppard's print interviews, broadcast interviews, and lectures.Witty, illuminating, and informative, Tom Stoppard in Conversation will be of interest to scholars, students, directors, actors, and fans of Stoppard's work.

The Big Book of Broadway


Hal Leonard Corporation - 1994
    This 4th edition includes 70 Broadway favorites from contemporary shows, including: The Book of Mormon, Bye Bye Birdie, A Chorus Line, Guys and Dolls, Les Miserables, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, Singin' in the Rain, South Pacific, and more. Songs include: All I Ask of You * Bali Ha'i * Beauty and the Beast * Bring Him Home * Brotherhood of Man * Camelot * Close Every Door * Falling Slowly * Hello, Dolly! * I Believe * I Dreamed a Dream * If I Loved You * The Impossible Dream (The Quest) * It's Too Late * Kids! * Let's Misbehave * Luck Be a Lady * Mamma Mia * Memory * One * Over the Rainbow * Part of Your World * People * Seasons of Love * Singin' in the Rain * This Is the Moment * Tomorrow * Unusual Way * Welcome to the 60's * When I Grow Up * (I Wonder Why?) You're Just in Love * You've Got a Friend * and more!

The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre


Simon Trussler - 1994
    Taking a broad view of theater, the book covers everything from the minor and illegitimate to the mainstream and official--whether the mystery plays of the Middle Ages or the real time drama of Coronation Street, the courtly theater of Shakespeare or the contemporary fringe. The book is aimed at both students and general readers. Simon Trussler is a retired drama professor at the University of London and the editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama


Alison Findlay - 1994
    One only has to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realize the challenge presented by the illegitimate child.Drawing on a wide rage of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crises in early modern England, reading them in relation to witch craft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State.The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstanding heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of the book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority.

Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theatre in New York, 1890-1915


Thomas L. Riis - 1994
    

Hated Nightfall; Wounds to the Face


Howard Barker - 1994