The cruel bon mot which has its sting drawn from the laughter that ensues. It was Oscar Wilde who pointed out that no comment was in bad taste if it was amusing - and if for that reason alone it is worth while preserving these delightful examples of verbal dexterity.

    Features his compelling adaptation of Clytemnestra--finding an astonishing parallel between ancient Greek and modern Japanese society, Suzuki melds traditional and avant-garde techinques to shed new light on this primal tale.

    Focusing primarily on six shows, Passion, Assassins, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, and Pacific Overtures, Sondheim talks about his approaches to musicalizing characters and dramatic moments; how motifs and thematic material are created and used; how musical components like harmony, melody, and rhythm reflect character; the structuring of a score; the use of pastiche; and the practical aspects of collaboration. In addition, the book includes Sondheim's list of "Songs I wish I'd Written," his reasons behind some of those choices, and the messages he received from composers and lyricists whose songs were included on the list. An exhaustive Songlisting and a Discography follow, cataloging commercial recordings of Sondheim songs, vocal ranges, and publishing information for his songs and scores.

    Actors need representation: they need managers to help guide them through the process of becoming working actors. Or do they? Self-Management for Actors guides actors through the process of taking control of the business side of their careers. There is no secret method, no password entry system to the Working Actor's Club. What does exist is a simple, self-management concept that allows any actor to handle the business of an acting career without losing the ability to be a creative artist. Balance is key, and the tips in Self-Management for Actors will put every actor on the way to having the best manager they deserve: themselves!

    Never feel awkward again when you meet new people. If you've worried about social anxiety, how to listen, what to say, and how to be interesting in your communication, this quick-read small talk guide will make you someone with charisma who people love to talk to. *New 2nd Edition: Updated & Expanded! Includes new chapter: Small Talk for Dating and expanded chapter on Reading Body Language* If you’ve ever felt nervous before a work party, blind date, or friend’s dinner, worry no more after reading this book and getting awesome tips on improving your social skills, listening and charisma. If you buy Small Talk today, you will: Learn simple but effective techniques for starting and keeping conversations going Get dozens of new conversation starters you can use on anyone Master your listening ability with three simple tricks Discover why you already have great charisma, and you just need to practice Revolutionize how you think about your own communication skills Enhance the signals you are sending and receiving with body language Understand the ways people are communicating with you in a conversation Build confidence in your social skills Get ready to use questions and answers in conversation with charisma Develop new ways to understand communication See why small talk is actually very important to your success in work, social settings and your love life And much, more more! Download the ultimate small talk guide today to have better conversations Download our book to learn how to start conversations, how to improve your social skills and what kind of questions to ask people you’ve just met, when you learn how to be a better listener, how to start and end conversations, how to move on from social skill “mistakes,” and how to calm your nerves. Also learn what not to talk about and see a list of awesome questions to ask new acquaintances to get the conversation flowing and keep it interesting. The book is simple, short, has proven strategies, and you’ll be better right away at conversation and small talk. Download our Small Talk book and practice your new social skills tonight Instantly click and download to get all the strategies you need to become a better conversationalist tonight. Note: You don’t need a Kindle to read this small talk conversation book — read it in your browser with the Kindle Cloud Reader right now by clicking the buy button

    All worth can be quantified. Artistic worth. Human worth. Material worth. Everything. Some food is simply better than other food. Isn't it? Some clothes are better than other clothes. Aren't they?The last week of a massive international tour and rock star Paul is at the height of his fame. Everybody knows his name. Whatever he wants he can have. He can screw anybody he wants to. He can buy anything he desires. He can eat anything. Drink anything. Smoke anything. Go anywhere. As the inevitability of the end of the road looms closer and a return home becomes a reality, for Paul the music is starting to jar.Birdland received its world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs on 3 April 2014.

    But within four weeks they themselves had experienced the "impossible."In An Acrobat of the Heart, teacher-director-playwright Stephen Wangh reveals how Jerzy Grotowski's physical exercises can open a pathway to the actor's inner creativity. Drawing on Grotowski's insights and on the work of Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, and others, Wangh bridges the gap between rigorous physical training and practical scene and character technique. Wangh's students give candid descriptions of their struggles and breakthroughs, demonstrating how to transform these remarkable lessons into a personal journey of artistic growth. Courageous and compelling, An Acrobat of the Heart is an invaluable resource for actors, directors, and teachers alike.

    He explores the queasy relationships between life and art, love and estrangement, and the bane that is American identity drift, with unsparing but compassionate candor.” –Misha Berson, Seattle Times“Margulies’s remarkable gift of building characterization through realistic dialogue is undiminished. Full of aching ruefulness that underlies the comedy, Brooklyn Boy’s scenes are written with precision and humor. The play isn’t about Brooklyn, nor is it about a boy—it’s about a man without a home.” –Don Shirley, Los Angeles TimesThis new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner with Friends follows the career of Eric Weiss, a writer whose novel hits the bestseller list the same time his life begins to unravel. His wife is out the door, his father is in the hospital, and his childhood friend thinks he has sold himself to the devil. A funny and emotionally rich look at family, friends and fame.Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends. The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance, his many plays include Collected Stories, The Country House, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still. Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.

    "Peter Brook is one of the artistic geniuses of our time."--The San Francisco Chronicle¶The first paperback edition of this major collection of essays--the culmination of forty years' work by one of the most thoughtful directors in contemporary theatre.

    Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion, an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete, whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form - Dominic Dromgoole.

    Someone - or something - is leaving bite marks in the avocados, Clay and Kelly's little daughter has an itch, and Carol can't remember who played Gandhi. This work takes a look at phoney liberal values.

    Beginning with his early childhood on New York's prosperous Upper West Side, Secrest describes how Sondheim was taught to play the piano by his father, a successful dress manufacturer and amateur musician. She writes about Sondheim's early ambition to become a concert pianist, about the effect on him of his parents' divorce when he was ten, about his years in military and private schools. She writes about his feelings of loneliness and abandonment, about the refuge he found in the home of Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein, and his determination to become just like Oscar.Secrest describes the years when Sondheim was struggling to gain a foothold in the theatre, his attempts at scriptwriting (in his early twenties in Rome on the set of Beat the Devil with Bogart and Huston, and later in Hollywood as a co-writer with George Oppenheimer for the TV series Topper), living the Hollywood life.Here is Sondheim's ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical, from his chance meeting with play-wright Arthur Laurents, which led to his first success--as co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story--to his collaboration with Laurents on Gypsy, to his first full Broadway score, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And Secrest writes about his first big success as composer, lyricist, writer in the 1960s with Company, an innovative and sophisticated musical that examined marriage à la mode. It was the start of an almost-twenty-year collaboration with producer and director Hal Prince that resulted in such shows as Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and A Little Night Music.We see Sondheim at work with composers, producers, directors, co-writers, actors, the greats of his time and ours, among them Leonard Bernstein, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Robbins, Zero Mostel, Bernadette Peters, and Lee Remick (with whom it was said he was in love, and she with him), as Secrest vividly re-creates the energy, the passion, the despair, the excitement, the genius, that went into the making of show after Sondheim show.A biography that is sure to become the standard work on Sondheim's life and art.From the Hardcover edition.

    The Art of Voice Acting is an excellent introduction to the business and art of voice acting. This new edition also features coverage of specialist areas of voice over: animation/video gaming and film/ movie trailer. Updated to reflect the latest changes in performance techniques and products in the industry, it is essential reading for all voice over actors. Packed with expert advice on job opportunities and career management tips, it is the ideal resource for anyone involved in the industry. The voice over demos and exercises on the expanded CD ROM complete this perfect modern manual to getting established in the voice acting industry. *Learn insider tips on finding work, making audition tapes and establishing yourself as a professional voice over actor*Gain expert advice on how to keep your voice in top condition*Perfect your performing skills using easy-to-follow voice exercises and demos on CD Rom

    He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself -- and to do so takes an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. from the Prologue Uta Hagen, one of the world's most renowned stage actresses, has also taught acting for more than forty years at the HB Studio in New York. Her first book, Respect for Acting, published in 1973, is still in print and has sold more than 150,000 copies. In her new book, A Challenge for the Actor, she greatly expands her thinking about acting in a work that brings the full flowering of her artistry, both as an actor and as a teacher. She raises the issue of the actor's goals and examines the specifics of the actor's techniques. She goes on to consider the actor's relationship to the physical and psychological senses. There is a brilliantly conceived section on the animation of the body and mind, of listening and talking, and the concept of expectation. But perhaps the most useful sections in this book are the exercises that Uta Hagen has created and elaborated to help the actor learn his craft. The exercises deal with developing the actor's physical destination in a role; making changes in the self serviceable in the creation of a character; recreating physical sensations; bringing the outdoors on stage; finding occupation while waiting; talking to oneself and the audience; and employing historical imagination. The scope and range of Uta Hagen here is extraordinary. Her years of acting and teaching have made her as finely seasoned an artist as the theatre has produced.

    Her oldest daughter, Kess, is a university professor in Minneapolis, but she has come home at the request of her sister, Jo who is concerned for Evelyn's mental health. Kess, a professed lesbian, wants to cut her family ties once and for all; Jo, an incurable romantic and longtime virgin, has now become pregnant; while Sherry, salty-tongued and amoral, wants only to finish high school so she can leave home for good. In the end, there is no accommodation possible but, instead, only a kind of arbitrary independence for each of the protagonists, as they come to realize that each must find her own heaven or hell in her own way.