Theatre Books

This book does fair justice to the original, in being a play, a tragedy, spartan (pun intended) in presentation, and without the Disneyesque happy ending expected in our culture. The plot conciously parallels the original, in a college setting, a Classics course on "Antigone," which only adds to the irony of the effect. Among other points of interest, the Antigone of this play is a young woman surname of Miller, who is Jewish, and her antagonist is an old professor who likes to contrast the ethical norms of Jerusalem and Athens. She never really gets the idea of Greek tragedy, until perhaps the very end, but she listens to Bruce Springsteen, whose canon of work comes about as close to expressing the tragic as does anything embedded in the popular culture.
Without giving the plot away, there is not much more to say, except that this work meets Edgar Allen Poe's standard for literature - like a good piece of music, a good story should be one that can be enjoyed in a single sitting.
-Lloyd A. Conway

As an intro book, this has all the right ingredients to capture the imagination of those who are new to the mechanics of theater. With illustrations, photographs, and easy-to-understand text, this book has it all. It explains everything from 'flying fish and dying villains' to Aristotle's three unities to where to get your broadway tickets... For the greenhorns to theater, this book will definitely kick-start your imagination. A great book.
There are some sections (such as that of the Guthrie Theater) which need to be updated, but they will definitely cover that in the next edition.
Who doesn't love illustration and photographs!? This book has a lot!

Stacy Keach is magnificent. The rocky relationships in this production are so life-like! You can feel what's going on and you can relate to it.

This is one of the most hilarious, yet intelligent and moving shows one can ever read. Even without hearing Mr. Sondheim's delightfully flowing melodies one can still find enjoyment in Mr. Laurent's book and Sondheim's lyrics.

_"It looked as though the London premiere of Franz Lehar's operetta, The Merry Widow, was going to flop. Its producer, George Edwardes, was running out of money and his critics damned him for choosing Lily Elsie as the star.A fragile actress seized with stage fright, Elsie herself believed her voice was not strong enough for the role. In the event, The Merry Widow was a roaring success, which transformed Elsie's career. It ran for 778 performances, admirers showered her with jewellery and she was asked to promote everything from face cream to toothpaste. So, why is her first biography called Anything But Merry?

Firstly, the show made her ill, both physically and mentally. Secondly, men scared her. Her marriage, which was deeply unhappy, ended in divorce. Thirdly, as time went by, her mental health broke down completely, resulting in a dubious operation on her brain. She became a recluse and, in 1962, she died alone.

David Slattery-Christy has researched his work diligently. He tells Lily's story clearly and dispassionately. He has added mini-biographies about the most significant people in her life, notes about the theatres she played and a list of the shows she appeared in, but unfortunately no index.

His book is an important contribution to our understanding of Edwardes and the Gaiety Girls, one of the most glittering periods of London's theatre history."_

Richard Anthony Baker - The Stage

Joseph Urban was primarily responsible for bringing the influence of the Vienese Secessionist Movement and Modernism to the theatre of America near the turn of the 20th century. Sure, he wasn't the only one and this book doesn't try to over-state Urban's influence. The text lets the designs do the work.
The book is nothing more than a catalogue but what an extraordinary catalogue it is! The photos of the renderings and models are top quality and really good choices by the author and editors. One can really see the watercolor techniques in the renderings along with the development of the design ideas Uban went through in his varied and prolific life as a designer. I really enjoyed the ddesigns and written text associated with the New School of Social Research. His work seems to be a precurser to Mondrian without the sterility of some of the Bauhaus concepts. His theatrical work really enlivened his architectural work.
His designs for the theatre were outrageous and vital.
I rate this book so very high because Urban's work is so important to stage design in America. As I said earlier, this book is a catalogue - but what a body of inspired and fantastical work to catalogue!

"Architecture, actor & audience" is one of those books that gives you a new understanding of a problem. In this case, the relations between the play on the stage and the audience. Mackintosh, a well respected theatre consultant, analizes what makes a playhouse a good one, why actors and audience prefer one theater to another, what are the keys to intimacy and the magic of feeling a part of the theatrical event. A must for everybody dealing with theatre: actors, directors, designers, and specially architects.

The 3 boys who received this DVD (ages 1 1/2 to 5) LOVED it. As usual, a Disney hit for all ages! And as a cat lover, I found it particularly delightful! Definitely would recommend it.

Aristophanes was a ribald playwright whose raucous plays were brilliantly brought to life by Alfred Corn, RHW Dillard, XJ Kennedy, and Campbell McGrath. In the first play of the series of four plays, Wasps, satirizes the jury-for-pay system, prevalent in Athens during the war with Sparta. Athens was populated with older men, veterans of the wars with Persia, and were particularly noted for the severity of their judgments. In the play, Philocleon is being kept prisoner in his own home by his son, Bdelycleon, in an attempt to prevent the father from going to the courthouse to pronounce sentence on a criminal before even hearing the evidence. Bdelycleon uses a clever argument to convince his father to stay home and serve as judge and jury over household matters. His first case was trying the pet dog for stealing food and not sharing it with the cat.

Lysistrata is a hilarious play about Athenian women who team up with the women of Sparta and Thebes to force the men to make peace. Written during the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes, like his play, Peace, takes a strong anti-war stance (...) .

In Frogs, Aristophanes hits upon the theme of a lack of good playwrights in Athens. Written after the death of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, the hero of the comedy, Dionysus (god of arts, among other things) wants to bring back Euripides from Hades. He pretends to be Hercules (who had gone to Hades to capture Cerberus, the guard dog of Hades) and runs into all kinds of trouble. He eventually referees a crazy debate between Euripides and Aescylus, to determine who the best playwright is.

Finally, in The Sexual Congress, we have an uproarious comedy about the women of Athens disguising themselves as men and stocking the General Assembly. Praxagora, as the leader of the women, proposes that the affairs of the city be turned over to the women. The women won the day and instituted a utopian society not to different from Plato's Republic, but this one went way overboard. Written after the war with Sparta, Athens was beset with corruption and low morale at the time.

The four plays in Aristophanes, 2 span the gamut from Old Comedy to New Comedy. The former was characterized by vulgar and slapstick humor with a Chorus used to interact with the audience. As comedy evolved the Chorus played less a role and there was a softening of the ribald humor so characteristic of Old Comedy.

To make the plays more readable and understandable without losing any of the humor of the plays the translators often made references to Twentieth Century phrases instead of the original Greek phrases. This might be annoying to the scholar but makes these plays eminently enjoyable to the general reader.

review of: William Saroyan, An Armenian Trilogy, edited by Dickran Kouymjian William Saroyan (1908-1981) was a major voice in American literature during the 1930's and 40's. He had a brief influence on theatre, with his Pulitzer-prize winning play, "The Time of Your Life," in 1940, and other lesser plays. He wrote and produced several others, then fell into obscurity as a playwright. The "Armenian Trilogy," edited by Dickran Kouymjian, marks a departure in play writing for Saroyan, from theatrics to introspection. The three plays contained in this volume are the most "Armenian" of his writings. "Armenians," the first play, is about countrymen in diaspora, in Fresno, CA in 1921, six years after the last round of atrocities by the Turks against Armenians. Saroyan deals with regional stereotypes and larger issues of diaspora. "Bitlis," is a one-act play that features Bill Saroyan, the Armenian-American writer and his pilgrimage to his ancestral home in what was once Armenia. "Haratch," the most political of the three, Saroyan takes the stage in a visit to the Armenian daily newspaper in Paris. As strong as the plays, is Kouymjian's brilliant introduction that provides the perceptive explanation of Saroyan, the writer and the Armenian. The book is a necessity for fans of his dramatic works and those that enjoy the writings of William Saroyan, the "Buffalo Bill, " of American letters. -Y. Stephan Bulbulian, Fowler, CA