Theatre Books

Now in an updated second edition, Creating Historical Drama: A Guide for Communities, Theatre Groups, and Playwrights is a straightforward manual for transforming events and figures from American history into masterful dramas. Written by three former directors, producers, writers, and teachers of theatre, Creating Historical Drama covers features of biographical, pageant, and epic drama, how to lead and organize a theatrical group, how to energize community resources and evaluate a production site, and much more. An in-depth guide offering sample script excerpts, black-and-white illustrations, and a wealth of expert detail, Creating Historical Drama is an excellent reference and resource for community and professional performance groups, and an invaluable tool for aspiring playwrights seeking to capture the nuances of history upon the stage.

The authors with both academic and working experience in theater production relate general guidance and practical considerations for evaluating resources, organizing activities, and engaging in relevant, skilled, coordinated actions for a community theater group to stage a successful historical drama. The crucial challenge of finding and developing talented actors is not overlooked either. Success for such a community production is measured by standards of artistic performance, community service, and management responsibility. Historical dramas are particularly appealing to community theater groups because of the wide freedom they allow in dealing with different historical times, the range of important and often colorful characters, and recurring issues in human affairs. Historical plays can also have a high education value for a local population when local historical characters, scenes, and topics are portrayed. All dimensions of this type of drama particularly suited to community theaters are dealt with, from developing an idea and perspective, writing a script, staging, and engaging with the larger community. This second edition is an abridged revision of the first edition put out in 1965.

REALLY ENJOYED THIS BOOK, VERY WELL ORGANIZED AND GREAT WAY TO TEACH YOUNGER CHILDREN THE BASICS.

As a teacher of ten years in Physical education and movement and now with a three year old of my own I have found that I use this book every week without fail for lesson plans and ideas. The book includes prop designs for the lesson (which you can make yourself), music and reading references (which are wellknown and easily obtained) as well as the dance notation and sequential lessons. The themes and ideas are just delightful and having seen them put to practice, it is a book well worth obtaining if you are a classroom teacher, a homeschooler or an interested parent.

This is a terrific textbook. It has accurate information, good photos and illustrations, is well organized, and is easy to read. It is not the most detailed theatre history text out there, but, as a college professor who has read a great many of those texts, I find this by far the most effective tool for teaching undergraduate students about theatre.

A Cultural History of Theatre by Grant McKernie and Jack Watson is a terrific tool for learning about the development of dramatic arts. The book traces the history of theatre from the Greeks to modern day. By combining theatrical history with developments in art, science, and politics, the reader gets a clear view of the world that shaped the dramatic performance of the day. I was privilaged to use this book in a class taught by Grant McKernie, a professor who makes theatre interesting for everyone from the serious actor to the serious sports fan. This is a great book for high schoolers through adults trying to understand how and why the dramatic arts developed.

This is an indispensable resource for the physical therapist or Pilates instructor who works with dancers. It covers functional anatomy as it relates to the dancer, teaches the analysis of posture and movement as it relates to the classical dancer, the typical injuries sustained by dancers and their management and rehabilitation.

This text, combined with Sally Fitt's, Dance Kinesiology, should be in every therapist's library. If the book has one fault, it is that is focuses almost exclusively on classical dancers.

This book written by Justin Howse, Consultant Orthepaedic Surgeon to the Royal Ballet Schools, The Royal Academy of Dancing and the Remedial Dance Clinic, London , and also by Shirley Hancock, Principal Physiotherapist to the Royal Ballet Schools, the Royal Academy of Dancing and the Remedial Dance Clinic ,London.

This book is a study reading requirement for the Royal Academy of Dancing Anatomy paper.

The foreward by Dame Ninette de Valois, says it all really. "This book gives us the opportunity to indulge in some serious reflection. It is full of highly technical observations on movement as related to the world of ballet and is accompanied by helpful instructions. A great deal of it should be rewarding to students, dancers, teachers, repetiteurs and ballet staff in general. I dare to add that in my opionion, it is also food for thought for choreographers. Today it is not customary for choreographers to give either scientific or practical thought to their choreographic demands. Let us recall that a composer has to remember to keep within the range of a singer's voice. It therefore seems right for a choreographer to study more carefully not only the limitation of dancer's limbs but also the limitation of their general stamina ."

You will never regret spending the money on this book.I refer to this book often. It has excellent photographs also.

I am fortunate in that one of my friends is a physiotherapist who works at the local medical centre.This book provides excellent back up.

The book was fine. It was for Wayne State University's DNC 1000 course. I found the book to be easy reading and informative. It gives you insight on different dance forms from around the world and gives you a fuller appreciation of dance as an art. :-)
Thanks Amazon!

Product was purchased known to be used, and was in excellent shape except for one tiny minute crease on the cover's bottom corner, which I accepted ahead of time by knowing the product was not new. You would never have known it was used otherwise. Had I expected perfection, I would have purchased a new copy. The product was well worth the price.

Stanislawa Przbyzewska (1901-1935) was the daughter of a well-known polish writer. Her father left her and her mother soon after she was born and for much of her life he had no contact with her. As he grew older, they became more close and she also started to write. She went to university in Cracow and stayed on there in some junior teaching position.
In her late twenties she saw a few of her works (plays and essays) published, not to much acclaim however, and by then she had begun to lose her grip on her life and on her sanity. Whether it was mental illness of instability, one or more unhappy love affairs or her progressively worsening morphine addiction (and probably all of the aforementioned together) she got weirder and weirder. The last years of her life she lived as a recluse in a small wooden shack on a courtyard within the maze of 18th-century universtiy buildings. She read and she wrote. Feverishly so. Mostly about the French Revolution, and why it had gone so spectacularly wrong: it began in 1789 with the hope for a better world, and it ended in 1799 in Napoleon's authoritarean government, passing throug the bloody terror and an appalling civil war.

As a pole Przbysewska had seen a revolution gone bad in her own country: Pilsudski made a new and free Poland after the first world war, but soon made himself the head of state and of the governement.
In Russia, next to Poland, it had gone even worse: the Bolshevik experiment had degenerated in Lenin's terror and Stalin's terror was getting up steam by the 1930s.

Przbysewska, living like an ascetic, strange, hallucinating hermit wrote and rewrote her plays. Her views on the French Revolution and particularly on the chief protagonists (Robespierre, St-Just, Danton, Desmoulins, Fabre) of its most exciting period (1793-1794) are still valid, fresh and refreshingly different. So what if she is way too far into Robespierre. Robespierre was as ascetic and uninterersted in material things as she was herself and that must have appealed to her: like him she only lived for her work. She is never dogmatic and never makes the characters into caricatures, as so many writers do: Danton the lust-for-life and larger-than-life big old brute with the golden heart and Robespierre the sneaky, utterly humourless, friendless fanatic.

Przbysewska's Robespierre is a complex charachter, who loses sight of humanity, even if he is a very humane and caring human being: he likes animals, children and "the People".
Robespierre loses sight of the fact, or deliberately shuts out the fact that the enemies of the people are people too, even if they are royalists, criminals, cooked stockbrokers, defeatists or dantonists. And so Robespierre, who by most accounts was an odd but fundamentally decent, shy and kind person becomes the personification of the Terror and of it's excesses.
Przbysewska puts them all on stage and lets them speak. She does so skillfully, believably and, in my view honestly. One may not always agree with her opinions or with her slant on the events or the charachters but it is clear her views were passionately held and very very sincere.

Not yet 35 she died, in 1935, alone in her shed. After her death it was found she had died of illness and hunger, in short, form neglect. Lots of people had offered to help her and to take her in, but she had stubbornly refused. The neglect of which she died was self-imposed.
She had starved herself to death, again, like some exalted medieval mystic. She deserved better, of course, and made life unnecessarily hard for herself. But maybe because of her weirdness, she had an uncanny feeling for her subjects and wrote about them magnificently. Highly recommended, especially for Fr. Rev. buffs and for those who enjoy reading good plays.

Brilliant, obsessive and painfully overlooked as a playwright, Stanislawa Przybyszewska was able to turn her life time fascination with the Revolution into a compelling if highly idiosyncratic recounting of 1794. Very difficult to understand for people with little background, absolutely mind-blowing for those who have studied the era. She writes as if she were talking to Committee of Public Safety. Although both plays leave a bit to be desired in the way of historical accuracy and her Robespierrism gets on your nerves, few authors are able to so successfully live in the lives and times of their characters and so keenly convey the historical ambiance and psychological nuances. Nervy, haunting and brilliant, Stanislawa's highly personal telling sheds light on our own troubled century as much as Robespierre's. A must read for anyone interested in the failure of radical social change.

In this exhaustive and thorough 714page biography, Bruce King sets out the development of Derek Walcott as a poet and dramatist whose ambition and talent led him from the colonial backwaters of the Caribbean of the forties to the Nobel stage in Stockholm in 1992. The reader will not find a gossipy, tell-all chronicle.King follows Walcott from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Saint Lucia through university in Jamaica,life in Trinidad where he formed his Trinidad Theatre Workshop and on to his jet setting years as an international writer whose personal friends were Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Paul Simon et al.Through his close detailing of Walcott's relative poverty, his incessant travelling to read his work, his disappointments, his successes,his sheer prolific output of writing and art, King fulfills his goal to demonstrate the effects on a major literary talent of cultural decolonialisation, the recognition of national literatures, the place of the U.S.in encouraging artists like Walcott.Walcott's is a very modern life,an example of the changing face of the once imperial-international literary and artistic scene.Walcott's work, as seen in his most recentTieopolo's Hound (an integration of poetry and art), continues to defy literature boundaries.King's biography will further understanding of the writer, his work, the culture from which he comes, and the larger movements in 20th century arts and letters.A must for general libraries, literary collections, and for readers and students of modern literature. A recommended companion volume is also King's earlier "Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama"(Oxford,1995).

In this exhaustive and thorough 714page biography, Bruce King sets out the development of Derek Walcott as a poet and dramatist whose ambition and talent led him from the colonial backwaters of the Caribbean of the forties to the Nobel stage in Stockholm in 1992. The reader will not find a gossipy, tell-all chronicle.King follows Walcott from his earliest years as a child prodigy in Saint Lucia through university in Jamaica,life in Trinidad where he formed his Trinidad Theatre Workshop and on to his jet setting years as an international writer whose personal friends were Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, Paul Simon et al.Through his close detailing of Walcott's relative poverty, his incessant travelling to read his work, his disappointments, his successes,his sheer prolific output of writing and art, King fulfills his goal to demonstrate the effects on a major literary talent of cultural decolonialisation, the recognition of national literatures, the place of the U.S.in encouraging artists like Walcott.Walcott's is a very modern life,an example of the changing face of the once imperial-international literary and artistic scene.Walcott's work, as seen in his most recentTieopolo's Hound (an integration of poetry and art), continues to defy literature boundaries.King's biography will further understanding of the writer, his work, the culture from which he comes, and the larger movements in 20th century arts and letters.A must for general libraries, literary collections, and for readers and students of modern literature. A recommended companion volume is also King's earlier "Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama"(Oxford,1995).

I have devised many shows with young people and in professional contexts. There is no other book which does the job this one does. It allows professionals from the whole spectrum (from directors to composers to stage managers) to write about their experiences of devising in a way ANYONE would find useful. It is a MUST for any student or young professional wishing to begin work from a non text base.

I've read many books on this subject in the vain hope that they will give me advice on how to actually CREATE theatre on a PRACTICAL level: not to be patronised in the process or made to feel that because I don't have enough experience I shouldn't even bother. Well, PRAISE BE TO THE THEATRE GODS, I've found a book that not only shows me how to practically create and produce non-text based theatre but to actually enjoy it too!
The writers' enthusiasm leaps off of the page and soon injects that same enthusiasm into the reader...whether they are a student, keen theatregoer, professional or amateur.
The presentation is wonderful: the photographs, illustrations, checklists, 'prompt points' and the excellent clearly and expertly written text etc. all add to the overall feeling of being 'shown' how to make theatre through the benefit of the contributors' collective and extensive experience, not being 'taught' or being bombarded with unhelpful theories by teachers whom have never produced a theatre event.
It is obvious to all those who read this book that the author is an excellent teacher. The book is written in such a way as to give immensely helpful advice to the reader but essentially demonstrates that theatre is a process of discovery and the reader needs to discover their own working methodologies, so they can create theatre that is socially applicable to their world - think of the information in this book as the foundations for your own theatre creating process...
In all, an excellent book and source of advice. Go on! Make use their expertise, experience and talent to create and have fun with your own productions! Worth every penny!

Hilarious yet often sad true tale of the author's incredibly frustrating run of his stage play Legends, starring two honest-to-goodness stage divas Carol Channing and Mary Martin, who in real life gave their stage characters more than a run for their money. Greedy producers, bickering stars, hostile reviewers, backstage manipulations, it's all here, presented in good humor by Kirkwood, a vastly unsung writer, unfortunately long since deceased. This was his final book. A good read in itself, and sure to provoke laughter and empathy from anyone who has been involved in theatre.

Suppose you are a playwright who co-authored a little something called "A Chorus Line"? And just suppose you managed to sign theatrical legends Mary Martin and Carol Channing for your latest play, appropriately called "Legends!"? What could possibly go wrong? Grab this book, and boy, will you find out! For example, Mary Martin could no longer remember lines, so she was fitted with a small radio headset so she could be "fed" her lines. But seemingly every taxi driver in the city was on the same frequency... Hilarious, tragic-a true classic, right up there with "Act One" by Moss Hart.

I've had this book for only a short period of time and have found it to be helpful thus far in a ways that suggest to me that I am going to find it to be increasingly helpful over time. For those who have been interested in classical ballet or who are just becoming interested, as well as those who are possessed of at least some, if not considerable, knowledge of it, including actual training and experience as ballet dancers, it may be very helpful, at least, because it appears to be quite comprehnsive (as the dictionary that it is, with 92 pages of definitions and/or descriptions, including cross-references, but no photographs or illustrations). I am not one of those in the latter category. I am an an adult who is am simply and only interested in classical ballet, and I would like to know more about it at the present time. I would like to say, however, that because I have already benefitted thus far from having had it in ways I did not foresee, I expect to continue to benefit from having bought the Royal Academey of Dancing's Dictionary of Classical Ballet Terminology , since I have already done so. I recommend it, therefore, to anyone who is interested in it.

This book is excellent for RAD ballet teachers. I describes in detail the technique required for specific steps in the RAD majors syllabi. It is a great companion book to the major syllabus books and is helpful in refreshing your memory of what certain steps and specific positions are. It has pronouciations as well as the translated meaning of the steps (which should be included in any ballet class!).
It has helped me out greatly in re-aquainting myself with the exercises I learned in my student training.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who doesn't know much about ballet. It doesn't have pictures and is too detailed for a non dancer to get a lot out of.