Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway

Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway PDF

Author: R. Wattenberg

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-05-23

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 023011914X

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Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of contemporary dramas not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace.

Screening the Stage

Screening the Stage PDF

Author: Steven Neale

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0861969294

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Introduced by a comprehensive account of the factors governing the adaptation of stage plays and musicals in Hollywood from the early 1910s to the mid-to-late 1950s, Screening the Stage consists of a series of chapter-length studies of feature-length films, the plays and musicals on which they were based, and their remakes where pertinent. Founded on an awareness of evolving technologies and industrial practices rather than the tenets of adaptation theory, particular attention is paid to the evolving practices of Hollywood as well as to the purport and structure of the plays and stage musicals on which the film versions were based. Each play or musical is contextualized and summarized in detail, and each film is analyzed so as to pinpoint the ways in which they articulate, modify, or rework the former. Examples range from dramas, comedies, melodramas, musicals, operettas, thrillers, westerns and war film, and include The Squaw Man, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Merry Widow, 7th Heaven, The Cocoanuts, Waterloo Bridge, Stage Door, I Remember Mama, The Pirate, Dial M for Murder and Attack.

Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage

Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage PDF

Author: M. Tian

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-01-02

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 1137010436

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The first book-length study in any language of the presence and influence of Mei Lanfang, the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles on the twentieth-century international stage. Tian investigates Mei Lanfang's presence and influence and the transnational and intercultural appropriations of his art.

Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America

Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America PDF

Author: E. Essin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-12-23

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1137108398

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By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.

Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and American Musical Identity

Puccini’s La fanciulla del West and American Musical Identity PDF

Author: Kathryn M. Fenton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1351594877

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On 10 December 1910, Giacomo Puccini’s seventh opera, La fanciulla del West, had its premiere before a sold-out audience at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. The performance was the Metropolitan Opera Company’s first world premiere by any composer. By all accounts, the premiere was an unambiguous success and the event itself recognized as a major moment in New York cultural history. The initial public opinion matched Puccini’s own evaluation of his opera. He called it "the best he had ever written" and expected it to become as popular as La Bohème. Yet the music reviews tell a different story. Marked by ambivalence, the reviews expose the New York City critics’ struggle to reconcile the opera they expected to see with the one they actually saw, and the opera itself became embroiled in controversy over the essence of musical Americanness and the nativist perception that a uniquely American national opera tradition continued to elude both American- and foreign-born opera composers. This book seeks to account for the differences between Puccini’s own assessments of the opera and those of its first audience. Offering transcriptions of the central reviews and of letters unavailable elsewhere, the book provides a historically informed understanding of La fanciulla del West and the reception of this European work as it intersected with both opera production and consumption in the United States and with the process of American musical identity formation during the very period that Americans actively sought to eradicate European cultural influences. As such, it offers a window into the development of nativism and "cosmopolitan nationalism" in New York City’s musical life during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama

Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama PDF

Author: L. Vidler

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-09

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1137437073

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Spanish Golden Age drama has resurfaced in recent years, however scholarly analysis has not kept pace with its popularity. This book problematizes and analyzes the approaches to staging reconstruction taken over the past few decades, including historical, semiotic, anthropological, cultural, structural, cognitive and phenomenological methods.

The Group Theatre

The Group Theatre PDF

Author: Helen Krich Chinoy

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-11-06

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1137294604

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The Group Theatre , a groundbreaking ensemble collective, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history, based on over thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy.

Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends

Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends PDF

Author: Verna A. Foster

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2012-10-10

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0786465123

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These new essays explore the ways in which contemporary dramatists have retold or otherwise made use of myths, fairy tales and legends from a variety of cultures, including Greek, West African, North American, Japanese, and various parts of Europe. The dramatists discussed range from well-established playwrights such as Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, and Timberlake Wertenbaker to new theatrical stars such as Sarah Ruhl and Tarell Alvin McCraney. The book contributes to the current discussion of adaptation theory by examining the different ways, and for what purposes, plays revise mythic stories and characters. The essays contribute to studies of literary uses of myth by focusing on how recent dramatists have used myths, fairy tales and legends to address contemporary concerns, especially changing representations of women and the politics of gender relations but also topics such as damage to the environment and political violence.

The Education of a Circus Clown

The Education of a Circus Clown PDF

Author: David Carlyon

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-28

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 113754743X

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2017 Freedley Award Finalist, Theatre Library Association 2016 Best Circus Book of the Year, Stuart Thayer Prize, Circus Historical Society The 1960s American hippie-clown boom fostered many creative impulses, including neo-vaudeville and Ringling's Clown College. However, the origin of that impulse, clowning with a circus, has largely gone unexamined. David Carlyon, through an autoethnographic examination of his own experiences in clowning, offers a close reading of the education of a professional circus clown, woven through an eye-opening, sometimes funny, occasionally poignant look at circus life. Layering critical reflections of personal experience with connections to wider scholarship, Carlyon focuses on the work of clowning while interrogating what clowns actually do, rather than using them as stand-ins for conceptual ideas or as sentimental figures.

American Playwriting and the Anti-Political Prejudice

American Playwriting and the Anti-Political Prejudice PDF

Author: N. Pressley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1137415185

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Twenty years after Tony Kushner's influential Angels in America seemed to declare a revitalized potency for the popular political play, there is a "No Politics" prejudice undermining US production and writing. This book explores the largely unrecognized cultural patterns that discourage political playwriting on the contemporary American stage.