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Showboats: The History of an American Institution
by Philip GrahamThis book is a delightful and authoritative record of America''s showboats from the first one, launched in 1831, to the last, ultimately tied up at a St. Louis dock. It is also a record of the men and women who built and loved these floating theaters, of those who performed on their stages, and of the thousands who sat in their auditoriums. And, lastly, it is a record of a genuine folk institution, as American as catfish, which for more than a century did much to relieve the social and cultural starvation of our vast river frontier. For these showboats brought their rich cargoes of entertainment--genuine laughter, a glimpse of other worlds, a respite from the grinding hardship of the present, emotional relaxation--to valley farmers, isolated factory workers and miners, and backwoodsmen who otherwise would have lacked all such opportunities. To the more privileged, the showboats brought pleasant reminder of a half-forgotten culture. They penetrated regions where churches and school had not gone, and where land theaters were for generations to be impossible. Like circuit preachers, they carried their message to the outer fringes of American civilization. In spite of many faults, it was a good message. The frontier had created this institution to fill a genuine need, and it lasted only until other and better means of civilizing these regions could reach them--good roads, automobiles, motion pictures, schools, churches, newspapers, and theaters. But although the showboats have passed into history, they have left a rich legacy. As long as the Mississippi flows into the Gulf, their story will fire the imagination of Americans. Showboating has become so legendary that few Americans know what this unique institution was really like. In Showboats, at long last, the true story emerges. It differs in many important respects from the motion picture and fictional versions to which Americans are accustomed, but it is not a whit the less glamorous. Philip Graham has told his story with imagination, genuine insight, and complete devotion to facts. No one who is interested in America''s past should fail to read it. This book is a delightful and authoritative record of America''s showboats from the first one, launched in 1831, to the last, ultimately tied up at a St. Louis dock. It is also a record of the men and women who built and loved these floating theaters, of those who performed on their stages, and of the thousands who sat in their auditoriums. And, lastly, it is a record of a genuine folk institution, as American as catfish, which for more than a century did much to relieve the social and cultural starvation of our vast river frontier. For these showboats brought their rich cargoes of entertainment - genuine laughter, a glimpse of other worlds, a respite from the grinding hardship of the present, emotional relaxation - to valley farmers, isolated factory workers and miners, and backwoodsmen who otherwise would have lacked all such opportunities. To the more privileged, the showboats brought pleasant reminder of a half-forgotten culture. They penetrated regions where churches and school had not gone, and where land theaters were for generations to be impossible. Like circuit preachers, they carried their message to the outer fringes of American civilization. In spite of many faults, it was a good message. The frontier had created this institution to fill a genuine need, and it lasted only until other and better means of civilizing these regions could reach them - good roads, automobiles, motion pictures, schools, churches, newspapers, and theaters. But although the showboats have passed into history, they have left a rich legacy. As long as the Mississippi flows into the Gulf, their story will fire the imagination of Americans. Showboating has become so legendary that few Americans know what this unique institution was really like. In Showboats, at long last, the true story emerges. It differs in many important respects from the motion picture and fictional versions to which Americans are accustome...
Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
by Katherine EggertFor most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority. In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.
Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power
by Catherine A. Schuler Kimberley Bell Marra Laurie FrederikThe interdisciplinary essays in Showing Off, Showing Up examine acts of showing, a particular species of performance that relies on competition and judgment, active spectatorship, embodied excess, and exposure of core values and hidden truths. Acts of showing highlight those dimensions of performance that can most manipulate spectators and consumers, often through over-the-top heightening and skewing of presentation. Many forms of showing and of heightened performance, however, operate more enigmatically and covertly while still profoundly affecting the social world, even if our reactions to them are initially flippant or unconcerned because “it’s just a show.” Examining a wide range of examples—from dog shows to competitive dancing to carnivals to striptease, the essays illuminate how such events variously foster competition, exaggerate a characteristic, and reveal hidden truths. There is as much to be learned about the power of showing through subtlety and underlying intentionality as through overt display. The book’s theoretical introduction and 12 essays by leading scholars reveal how diverse, particularly efficacious genres of showing are theoretically connected and why they merit more concerted attention, especially in the 21st century.
Showstoppers!: The Surprising Backstage Stories of Broadway's Most Remarkable Songs
by Gerald NachmanWhen Robert Preston shouted "Ya got trouble!" in River City, when Carol Channing glided down a gilded staircase while waiters serenaded her with "Hello, Dolly!," when Barbra Streisand defied us to rain on her parade in Funny Girl, audiences were instantly enchanted. Showstoppers! is all about Broadway musicals' most memorable numbers--why they were so effective, how they were created, and why they still resonate. Much of it is told through the eyes of the performers, songwriters, directors, and choreographers who first built these explosive numbers and lit the fuse. Gerald Nachman interviewed dozens of iconic musical theater figures, including Patti LuPone, John Raitt, Jerry Herman, Edie Adams, Dick Van Dyke, Joel Grey, Marvin Hamlisch, John Kander, Tommy Tune, Sheldon Harnick, and Harold Prince, uncovering priceless untold anecdotes and details.
Showtime at First Baptist
by Ron OsborneDramatic Comedy / 6f Showtime at First Baptist is the sequel to the hugely popular and widely produced First Baptist of Ivy Gap. First Baptist of Ivy Gap's 100th anniversary picnic was a smashing success, except for one little thing: the bolt of lightning that struck the church's steeple, igniting a fire that destroyed the sanctuary and so much more. In the wake of the disaster, key women of the church - led by Edith, the pastor's take-charge wife - gather in what's left (the fellowship hall) to commiserate and try to put things back together. To raise spirits and funds for rebuilding, the women plan an evening of entertainment designed to showcase the congregation's talent. Could it be that some of Edith's gang plan a song and dance number that may shock the congregation? If so, how will they circumvent the authority of the all-male conservative board of deacons, not to mention, one of their own? Change is in the air as these six diverse women challenge institutions as well as each other. Along the way, there are laughs to be shared, battles to be fought, love to be won, relationships to be mended, and losses to be grieved. "Good natured religious jokes aplenty and drama ... But the real meat is a gentle, warm story about six good women and how they came together despite times that are, 'a changing' ... A serious play and a delightful comedy ... I sure enjoyed it." - Bristol Herald-Courier "Sure to be an instant classic ... This touching comedy is full of laughs, realistic characters and thought-provoking issues ... The Southern women who inhabit the world of Ivy Gap are amazing! Osborne can definitely write great women characters ... It's small-town politics at its most entertaining ... Bring the whole family." - Washington County News
Shrunken Heads
by Meir Z. RibalowComedy / 3m, 4f / Interior / Dr. Bob Hyde, a successful psychiatrist, just wants to have a quiet, peaceful weekend at his country estate, where he can commune with nature and relax in his Jacuzzi, far away from his patients. No such luck. In burst an assortment of crazed or just plain eccentric characters, from his neurotic to end all neurotics patient Dorothy Putney, to his daughter Caroline who is dropping out of her seventh college to go and live in a tent in Colorado and who has stopped by for moral support and money, to Caroline's mother and Hyde's ex wife Jennifer, a master of facetious wise cracks and particularly adept at draining Dr. Bob of alimony money. When Dorothy's husband Norman, who thinks his wife is having an affair with Hyde, shows up with a gun, this wildly paced farce really hits its stride, and things build and build to an hilarious climax.
Shtick
by Henry MeyersonComedy / 1m, 2f / Unit Set / Helen's life became complicated after her husband Murray's stroke and her sister Gladys's revelation, wanting to set the record straight in case Murray should die, that she and Murray had been having an affair. Helen suspected Murray was no angel when she married him. After all, as a stand-up comic he was always on the road and she knew comics could be loose cannons. Helen knew she was trading the risk Murray would bring to any relationship, let alone marriage, for the excitement of the gamble. While Helen might have been willing to adjust to Murray and his new stroke induced limits, the stakes were raised and the game was changed by Gladys's admission of the affair. So now Helen is left on the horns of dilemma: How can she be a nurturing caretaker for a man who has deceived her (with her own sister, yet) while knowing he is a snake with no visible conscience? / "Mainstream success…spicy situation…moving effect…abundance of jokes…wittily cynical lines…Whoever like to be moved and entertained in one evening will enjoy this show." –Lidove Noviny, Prague
Shuffle Along: The 1921 Broadway Musical Complete Libretto
by Flournoy Miller Aubrey Lyles Noble SissleComplete libretto to the 1921 ground breaking musical. One of the most significant musicals of the 20th Century, “Shuffle Along” was a rarity, written, produced, and acted wholly by African Americans. For the first time racially diverse audiences celebrated the uniqueness of this musical together. While the New York Times praised Eubie Blake "swinging and infectious score," it panned the rest of the production “as extremely crude—in writing, playing and direction." That didn’t matter. New Yorkers, including George Gershwin and Fanny Brice, flocked to it and it soon became the most popular production of the season with record breaking sales. Its influences were felt throughout the 1920s when "Shuffle Along" type musicals became all the vogue.
Shut Up, Martha!
by Cleve HauboldComedy / 3m, 2f / Interior / On a stormy night, a mysterious cloaked figure appears in Benjamin Franklin's print shop to insist Ben print a letter "to save the country." The fun and confusion build until the visitor produces a basket of chocolates and casts off her disguise to reveal herself as Martha Washington. Wild eyed Martha plies the wary Ben with promises and peanut brittle to persuade him to publish her note in which she sees a Tory behind every tree. Ben tries to calm Martha, but she becomes a whirlwind of confusion, when George Washington himself angrily arrives to drag Martha back to Mount Vernon. A mad historical romp which shows how history can repeat itself.
Shylock on the Stage (Routledge Library Editions: Shakespeare in Performance)
by Toby LelyveldOriginally published in 1961, this book is a study of the ways actors since the time of Shakespeare have portrayed the character of Shylock. A pioneering work in the study of performance history as well as in the portrayal of Jews in English literature. Specifically it studies Charles Macklin, Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving and more recent performers.
Shylock on Trial: The Appellate Briefs
by Richard Posner Charles FriedWilliam Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law, his plays rich in its terms, settings, and thought processes. In Shylock on Trial: The Appellate Briefs, the Hon. Richard A. Posner and Charles Fried rule on Shakespeare's classic drama The Merchant of Venice. Framed as a decision argued by two appellate judges of the period in a trial following Shylock's sentencing by the Duke of Venice, these essays playfully walk the line between law and culture, dissecting the alleged legal inconsistencies of Shylock's trial while engaging in an artful reading of the play itself. The resultant opinions shed fresh light on the relationship between literary and legal scholarship, demonstrating how Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects.
Shylock's Daughter and Other Small Chips from Great Gems of Shak
by Jules TascaA fresh twist on characters from Shakespeare’s classics. Contensts (Click for descriptions.) Shylock’s Daughter Prince Lear The MacDuff Tragedy Friar Falstaff
El sí de las niñas
by Leandro Fernández de MoratínLa obra maestra de Leandro Fernández de Moratín y una de las piezas de teatro más importantes de la Ilustración española. El sí de las niñas, la más conocida de las comedias neoclásicas, narra, con estricta sujeción a los principios de unidad de acción, espacio y tiempo, la disolución del compromiso de matrimonio entre don Diego y Francisca, que está enamorada de un tercero. Crítica con la educación que se daba a las jóvenes en los conventos y con la costumbre de los matrimonios arreglados, esta comedia es, en su ligereza, un verdadero compendio del pensamiento ilustrado.
El sí de las niñas
by Leandro Fernández de MoratínDoña Irene piensa casar a su hija con don Diego, un rico solterón, pero el pretendiente tiene un sobrino -Carlos-, del que Paquita se enamora desbaratando los planes de su madre. La obra -que fue el mayor éxito teatral de su tiempo- reivindica el derecho a casarse por amor en lugar de por conveniencia, como todavía era frecuente a comienzos del siglo XIX. Ataca las costumbres e hipocresías de la época y critica la educación recibida por las mujeres.
Sicilian Epic and the Marionette Theater
by Michael BuonannoThis study analyzes the folkloric genres that comprise the repertoire of the marionette theater in Sicily. Here, epic, farce, saints' lives, bandits' lives, fairytales, Christian myth, and city legend offer the vehicles by which puppeteers comment upon, critique--perhaps even negotiate--the relationships among the major classes of Sicilian society: the aristocracy, the people, the clergy and the Mafia. The lynchpin of the repertoire is the Carolingian Cycle and, in particular, a contemporary version of The Song of Roland known in Sicily as The Death of the Paladins, a text which illustrates the means by which the Carolingian heroes--Charlemagne, Roland, Renaud, Ganelon, and Angelica--augment saints, bandits, Biblical figures and Sicilian folk heroes to provide the marionette theater its rhetorical function: the articulation and dissemination of the tools of Sicilian identity.
Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England
by Jonathan Gil HarrisFrom French Physiocrat theories of the blood-like circulation of wealth to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market, the body has played a crucial role in Western perceptions of the economic. In Renaissance culture, however, the dominant bodily metaphors for national wealth and economy were derived from the relatively new language of infectious disease. Whereas traditional Galenic medicine had understood illness as a state of imbalance within the body, early modern writers increasingly reimagined disease as an invasive foreign agent. The rapid rise of global trade in the sixteenth century, and the resulting migrations of people, money, and commodities across national borders, contributed to this growing pathologization of the foreign; conversely, the new trade-inflected vocabularies of disease helped writers to represent the contours of national and global economies.Grounded in scrupulous analyses of cultural and economic history, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England teases out the double helix of the pathological and the economic in two seemingly disparate spheres of early modern textual production: drama and mercantilist writing. Of particular interest to this study are the ways English playwrights, such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Massinger, and Middleton, and mercantilists, such as Malynes, Milles, Misselden, and Mun, rooted their conceptions of national economy in the language of disease. Some of these diseases—syphilis, taint, canker, plague, hepatitis—have subsequently lost their economic connotations; others—most notably consumption—remain integral to the modern economic lexicon but have by and large shed their pathological senses.Breaking new ground by analyzing English mercantilism primarily as a discursive rather than an ideological or economic system, Sick Economies provides a compelling history of how, even in our own time, defenses of transnational economy have paradoxically pathologized the foreign. In the process, Jonathan Gil Harris argues that what we now regard as the discrete sphere of the economic cannot be disentangled from seemingly unrelated domains of Renaissance culture, especially medicine and the theater.
Sight Unseen and Other Plays
by Donald MarguliesIncludes: Found a Peanut, The Loman Family Picnic, The Model Apartment, What's Wrong with This Picture?, and Sight Unseen.. With a palpable affection for the traditions of the stage and a taste for surreal comedy, Margulies "manages to transform what might have been kitchen-sink drama into theatre that is unsettling, imaginative and quite hilarious"--Howard Kissel, New York Daily News
Sightlines
by Rage Theatre ProductionsEvery three years, over the last decade, the Mumbai-based theatre group RAGE - in collaboration with the Royal Court Theatre in London - organizes the Writers' Bloc Workshop. Offering a much-needed artistic retreat to playwrights, this workshop allows aspiring and professional playwrights a chance to perfect their scripts with established actors and professionals from within the industry. Apart from encouraging them to break free from the rigid boundaries of English theatre in India to fashion their own idiom, the workshop also ensures its playwrights access to the final pilgrimage of any script - the stage. As it stands today, the infamous debate on whether an Indian play written in English mirrors a bona fide Indian reality is no longer relevant. Using a vocabulary that is entirely their own - 'unaffected, homegrown and lyrical' - the three plays in this collection convincingly capture the peculiar accents and the particular chaos of our times. Rahul Da Cunha's 'Pune Highway' is set in a seedy hotel room where three friends, having just witnessed the gruesome murder of a fourth, are holed up, desperate to escape its consequences; Ram Ganesh Kamatham's 'Crab' takes a hard-talking look at the existential angst of a new generation, looking at once for purpose and an emotional safe place from an increasingly concrete world; Farhad Sorabjee's 'Hard Places' explores the unspoken borders that divide us from our loved ones and the violently disputed borders between countries. Bridging the invisible lines between the personal and the political and taking us to places and situations a little less familiar and safer than our own, these brilliantly written plays can be performed, and empathized with, across territories.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window
by Lorraine HansberryBy the time of her death thirty years ago, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice. These two plays remain milestones in the American theater, remarkable not only for their historical value but for their continued ability to engage the imagination and the heart. With an Introduction by Robert Nemiroff
Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace
by Joan M. SchenkarJoan Schenkar, widely regarded as America's most original female contemporary playwright, is the author of numerous experimental plays which she refers to as "comedies of menace." Bristling with wit and intelligence, the collection features Signs of Life, Cabin Fever, The Universal Wolf, Burning Desires, The Last of Hitler, and Fulfilling Koch's Postulate. These plays explore issues of feminism and gender politics, history and memory, sexuality and violence, bringing to life such figures as Gertrude Stein and Marlene Dietrich, Hitler and Eva Braun, P. T. Barnum and Henry and Alice James, Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. Schenkar's charged language and evocative stage directions invite the reader to become both performer and audience, and the experience is enhanced both by richly evocative stage directions and illustrations from productions of the plays. Initially written to be read like novels as well as staged, the plays provide a unique theatrical experience, an experience that can only be accessed by laughter.
Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre
by Colin CounsellSigns of Performance provides the beginning student with working examples of theatrical analysis. Its range covers the whole of twentieth century theatre, from Stanislavski to Brecht and Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes an historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between: * Key practitioners' ideas about performance * The theatrical practices prompted by those ideas * The resulting signs which emerge in performance * The meanings and political consequences of those signs It provides an understandable theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a an signifying practice, and offers vivid explanations in clear, direct language. It opens up this fascinating field to a broad audience.
Sila: The Arctic Cycle
by Chantal BilodeauIn Inuit mythology, "sila" means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau's play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. <P><P>Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken-word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut). There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters - including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her daughter, and two polar bears - find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges - especially raising children and maintaining family ties - is always more powerful than reciting facts and figures. Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle - eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic - poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.
Silence: Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell
by Trina DaviesIt only takes one spark of love to change the world forever. Mabel Hubbard Bell was a strong, self-assured woman—bright, passionate, and a complete original. Despite a near-fatal case of childhood scarlet fever that cost her the ability to hear, she learned to talk and lip-read in multiple languages. At nineteen, she married a young inventor named Alexander Graham Bell and became the most significant influence in his life. This is Mabel's story, offering the unique perspective of a woman whose remarkable life was forever connected to her famous, distracted husband. From inspiring invention to promoting public service, Mabel and Alec challenged each other to become strong forces for good. Silence is a beautiful and true love story about how we communicate.
The Silenced Theatre: Czech Playwrights without a Stage
by Marketa Goetz-StankiewiczSince the Soviet occupation of 1968 censorship has closed the curtain on free expression in Czechoslovakia. But plays continue to be circulated in typescript within the country, are regularly smuggled out for publication abroad, and continue to be produced without restriction in the West. This book is the first full-length study of Czechoslovak drama of the sixties and seventies. The author discusses the works of major playwrights, including Václav Havel, Pavel Kohout, and Josef Topol; and the influence of the great Czech writers Kafka and Hašek as well as Western writers such as Beckett, Sartre, and Albee. Czech and Slovak playwrights have responded in a distinctive, courageous, and often very funny manner to a political situation perhaps best labelled 'absurd.' The author depicts movingly their portrait of the horror–and the unintended humour–of life in a rigidly bureaucratic society, a theme of universal interest. The Silenced Theatre is the only detailed study of this dynamic and modern national theatre. This book will help to preserve Czech drama and create an awareness of its important role in Western literaturea role it continues to play even in exile from its homeland.
Silent Laughter
by Jane Milmore Billy Van ZandtComedy / 8m, 2f / New York audiences went wild for this gag-filled water sloshing, bed crashing, pie throwing craziness. Performed in black and white with title cards projected over the actors' heads, and a live theatre organ accompanying every doubletake, this comic tour de force stars a dashing hero who overcomes jail, poverty, World War I and a dastardly villain, Lionel Drippinwithit, to win the girl of his dreams. She is the heiress to the Thickwad Screw Factory, a firm that has been "Screwing the American Public since 1861." The biggest pie fight the theatre world has ever seen caps the silent action. More than a tribute to the slapstick antics of Chaplin, Keaton and Arbuckle - this is a reverential recreation of a bygone era.