Download or read book The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes written by Gyles Brandreth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the ultimate anthology of theatrical anecdotes, edited by lifelong theatre-lover Gyles Brandreth in the Oxford tradition, and covering every kind of theatrical story and experience from the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe to the age of Stoppard and Mamet, from Richard Burbage to Richard Briers, from Nell Gwynn to Daniel Day-Lewis, from Sarah Bernhardt to Judi Dench. Players, playwrights, prompters, producers—they all feature. The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes provides a comprehensive, revealing, and hugely entertaining portrait of the world of theatre across four hundred years. Many of the anecdotes are humorous: all have something pertinent and illuminating to say about an aspect of theatrical life—whether it is the art of playwriting, the craft of covering up missed cues, the drama of the First Night, the nightmare of touring, or the secret ingredients of star quality. Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren—the great 'names' are all here, of course, but there are tales of the unexpected, too—and the unknown. This is a book—presented in five acts, with a suitably anecdotal and personal prologue from Gyles Brandreth—where, once in a while, the understudy takes centre-stage and Gyles Brandreth treats triumph and disaster just the same, including stories from the tattiest touring companies as well as from Broadway, the West End and theatres, large and small, in Australia, India, and across Europe.
Download or read book The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes written by John Gross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.
Download or read book The Book of Theatrical Anecdotes written by Percy Fitzgerald and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book English Theatrical Anecdotes 1660 1800 written by Heather Ladd and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explores the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. Chapters in this book discuss anecdotes about actors, actresses, musicians, and other theatre people.
Download or read book Stop the Show written by Brad Schreiber and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to compile all of theater's glorious bloopers--an uproarious homage to the stage Stop the Show! is the first book to assemble humorous, frightening and bizarre anecdotes about the history of all that went wrong during live theatrical productions in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. It is the publishing equivalent of TV bloopers for the legitimate stage. This book includes stories from top directors, actors, playwrights and technicians from New York, Los Angeles, and points in between, to the United Kingdom, from the 19th century to today. There are stories about missed entrances and exits, onstage unscripted fights between performers, improvised lines, accidental pratfalls, falling scenery, and costume, lighting and makeup screwups. The backstage provides sordid tales of practical jokes, treachery, misplaced props, wild arguments, and generally the kinds of things Michael Frayn created for his farce about a theatrical disaster, Noises Off. This book doesn't leave out the theatergoers either, who snore, fight with each other, talk back to the performers, search for their seats, become suddenly ill, eat, drink, make merry, and are yelled at by the performers--all of which sometimes prompts the show to stop, even though we've always been told it must go on.
Download or read book Broadway Anecdotes written by Peter Hay and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hay's marvelously entertaining collection of stories leads readers down that sparkling thoroughfare known as the Great White Way. Broadway embodies the entire history of live entertainment in America, and Broadway Anecdotes captures it in all its diversity.
Download or read book Mainly on Directing written by Arthur Laurents and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From playwright, screenwriter, and director Laurents comes a mesmerizing book about theater, art and the artist, the insider and the outsider--and the making of two of the greatest musicals of the American stage: "Gypsy" and "West Side Story."
Download or read book Finding Roger written by Rick Elice and published by Disney Electronic Content. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rick Elice, author of Jersey Boys, Addams Family, and Peter and the Starcatcher for Broadway, has penned a heartbreaking memoir of his 34 years with the inimitable Roger Rees. Some may recognize Roger as Nicholas Nickleby and others will know him as Kirstie Alley's boyfriend on Cheers. When he died of brain cancer in 2015, Broadway dimmed all the lights in his honor -- a true stage legend. Pulled straight from Rick's enormous and broken heart, Finding Roger will touch everyone who reads it. It's a story of profound loss -- but also a love story for the ages.
Download or read book Star Theatre written by William Firebrace and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-12-30 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us can recall a childhood visit to a planetarium: the sense of anticipation as the room darkens. The stars begin to appear as the voice of an astronomer is heard. In the planetarium, where the audience is transported to distant galaxies, the wondrous complexity of the cosmos combines with entertainment to become a theater of the night. Star Theatre explores the history of the planetarium’s mix of science and spectacle. William Firebrace reveals how in the planetarium, the solar system and universe is demonstrated on an ever-expanding scale. He traces the origins of the building through history, from its antecedents to its invention in Germany in the 1920s, developments in the USSR and the United States, to its expansion across the globe at the time of the space race, and finally to the evolution of the contemporary planetarium in a time of startling astronomical and cosmological discoveries. This concise and well-illustrated history will appeal to astronomy lovers and those interested in architecture, theater, and cinema.
Download or read book A Theater of Our Own written by Richard Christiansen and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who produced the first stage adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz" in 1902-nearly forty years before the movie classic?
Download or read book A Theatre Project written by Richard Pilbrow and published by Plasa Media. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New York Theater Walks written by Howard Kissel and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2007 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Applause Books). In New York Theatre Walks , Howard Kissel provides a series of seven self-guided walking tours not just of the theatre district but of the East and West Village, the Lower East Side, and the Upper West Side neighborhoods uptown and downtown that illuminate the theatre's intimate relationship with the city. On one tour, we follow the career of Irving Berlin from the sites of his theatrical triumphs to the ultra-posh corner where this Lower East Side boy eventually made his home. There's also "Adolph Green's Daily 'Commute,'" a route on which he went to meet and work with his musical theatre writing partner Betty Comden, and on a culinary tour we see the way Times Square eateries contributed to theatre history. The book abounds in Broadway anecdotes, but it also gives the walker a sense of the city's own complex, rich history. East Side, West Side, All Around the Town, New York Theatre Walks provides enjoyment and instruction not just for visitors eager to get off the beaten path but for the native who wants to find the theatrical past lying behind the sights one passes on a regular basis.
Download or read book From Cradle to Stage written by Virginia Hanlon Grohl and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by Virginia Grohl, the mother of Dave Grohl—former Nirvana drummer and current frontman for the Foo Fighters—From Cradle to Stage shares stories and exclusive photos featuring mothers of rock icons, the icons themselves, and their Behind the Music-style relationships While the Grohl family had always been musical-the family sang together on long car trips, harmonizing to Motown and David Bowie-Virginia never expected her son to become a musician, let alone a rock star. But when she saw him perform in front of thousands of screaming fans for the first time, she knew that rock stardom was meant to be for her son. And as Virginia watched her son's star rise, she often wondered about the other mothers who raised sons and daughters who became rock stars. Were they as surprised as she was about their children's fame? Did they worry about their children's livelihood and wellbeing in an industry fraught with drugs and other dangers? Did they encourage their children's passions despite the odds against success, or attempt to dissuade them from their grandiose dreams? Do they remind their kids to pack a warm coat when they go on tour? Virginia decided to seek out other rock star mothers to ask these questions, and so began a two-year odyssey in which she interviewed such women as Verna Griffin, Dr. Dre's mother; Marianne Stipe, Michael Stipe of REM's mother; Janis Winehouse, Amy Winehouse's mother; Patsy Noah, Adam Levine's mother; Donna Haim, mother of the Haim sisters; Hester Diamond, Mike D of The Beastie Boys' mother. With exclusive family photographs and a foreword by Dave Grohl, From Cradle to Stage will appeal to mothers and rock fans everywhere.
Download or read book The New Book of Opera Anecdotes written by Ethan Mordden and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the continued success of Ethan Mordden's Opera Anecdotes, The New Book of Opera Anecdotes continues where the original left off, bringing into conversation the new corps of major stars that has arisen since the original book's 1985 publication, presenting completely new, fresh stories that cover the aesthetic and stylistic shifts this latest period has ushered in.
Download or read book Whenever You re Ready written by Shawn DeSouza-Coelho and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Backstage with one of Canada’s greatest stage managers Whenever You’re Ready is an intimate account of the career of Nora Polley, who — in her 52 years at the Stratford Festival — has learned from, worked with, and cared for some of the greatest directors, actors, stage managers, and productions in Canadian theatrical history. In so doing, Nora became one of the greatest stage managers this country has ever seen. Here is an account of the Stratford Festival’s history like no other. From her childhood forays into a theater her father, Victor, worked tirelessly to help maintain, to her unexpected apprenticeship and the equally unexpected 40 years of stage management it ushered in, this is the Stratford Festival seen exclusively through Nora’s eyes. Here is an immersive account of a life spent in service of the theater, told from the ground floor: where actors struggle with lines and anxieties, where directors lose themselves in the work, where the next season is always uncertain, and where Nora — a stage manager, a custodian, a confidante, a pillar, a rock — finds her rhythm, her patience, her perseverance, her love, her consistency, and her invisibility. These are the qualities that make a stage manager great and, whenever you’re ready, this book will show you why.
Download or read book A Player s Place written by David Garfield and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1980 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the founding and development of The Actors Studio, the personalities associated with it, and its contribution to the world of American acting on stage and screen.
Download or read book Fish and Wildlife News written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
