Download or read book The Fabulous Lunts written by Jared Brown and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Passing Performances written by Robert A. Schanke and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passing Performances gathers a range of critical and biographical essays on notable personalities whose major contributions to the stage occurred before 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots that kicked off the gay rights movement in the United States. How these theater practitioners variously "passed"-- i.e., managed unconventional sexual inclinations both on- and offstage--significantly determined the course of their personal and professional lives and thus the course of U.S. theater history. The actors, directors, producers, and agents examined here include Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Adah Isaacs Menken, whose personal lives and careers traded on the same-sex erotics of "true love" in the antebellum period; Elisabeth Marbury, Elsie de Wolfe, Elsie Janis, Nance O'Neil, and Alla Nazimova, whose intimate female liaisons were variously interpreted around the turn of the century; the "lavender marriages" of Alfred Lunt to Lynne Fontanne and Guthrie McClintic to Katharine Cornell; the lesbian collaborations of Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford; the comic antics of Monty Woolley, which negotiated codified constructions of homosexual perversion in the post-Freudian interwar years; and the on- and offstage performances of Mary Martin and Joe Cino, which resisted the paranoid enforcements of heterosexual normality in the McCarthy era. Central to these investigations are the complex connections of performances of sexuality and gender and their different implications for men and women practitioners working under pervasive sexism and homophobia. The volume also includes striking archival photographs of the performers and their performances, and an index to facilitate the cross-referencing of subjects' intersecting careers. Passing Performances will engage both general and academic readers interested in theater, gay and lesbian history, American studies, and biography. Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of Fine Arts, Central College, Iowa. Kim Marra is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Iowa.
Download or read book The Gay Lesbian Theatrical Legacy written by Billy J. Harbin and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recovers the hidden history of theater professionals who transgressed the gendered expectations of their time
Download or read book Design for Living written by Margot Peters and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the much-admired biographer of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the Barrymores (“Margot Peters is surely now . . . our foremost historian of stage make-believe”—Leon Edel), a new biography of the most famous English-speaking acting team of the twentieth century. Individually, they were recognized as extraordinary actors, each one a star celebrated, imitated, sought after. Together, they were legend. The Lunts. A name to conjure with. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne worked together so imaginatively, so seamlessly onstage that they seemed to fuse into one person. Offstage, they brawled so famously and raucously over every detail of every performance that they inspired the musical Kiss Me, Kate. At home on Broadway, in London’s West End, touring the United States and Great Britain, and even playing “the foxhole circuit” of World War II, the Lunts stunned, moved, and mystified audiences for more than four decades. They were considered to be a rarefied taste, but when they toured Texas in the 1930s, the audience threw cowboy hats onto the stage. Their private life was equally fascinating, as unusual as the one they led in public. Friends like the critic Alexander Woollcott (whom Edna Ferber once described as “the little New Jersey Nero who thinks his pinafore is a toga”), Noël Coward, Laurette Taylor, and Sidney Greenstreet received lifelong loyalty and hospitality. Ten Chimneys, their country home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, “is to performers what the Vatican is to Catholics,” Carol Channing once said. “The Lunts are where we all spring from.” In this new biography, Margot Peters catches the magic of Lunt and Fontanne—their period, their work, their intimacy and its contradictions—with candor, delicacy, intelligence, and wit. She writes about their personal and creative choices as deftly as she captures their world, from their meeting (backstage, naturally)—when Fontanne was a young actress in the first flush of stardom and Lunt a lanky midwesterner who came in the stage door, bowed to her elaborately, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs—and the early days when an unknown and very hungry Noël Coward lived in a swank hotel in a room the size of a closet and cadged meals at their table to the telegram the famous couple once sent to a movie mogul, turning down a studio contract worth a fortune (“We can be bought, my dear Mr. Laemmle, but we can’t be bored”). We follow the Lunts through triumphs in plays such as The Guardsman, The Taming of the Shrew, and Design for Living; through friendships and feuds; through the intricate way they worked with such playwrights and directors as S. N. Behrman, Robert Sherwood, Giraudoux, Dürrenmatt, Peter Brook, and with each other. Margot Peters captures the gallantry of two remarkably gifted people who lived for their art and for each other. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were once described as an “amazing duet of intelligence and gaiety.” Margot Peters re-creates the fun and the fireworks.
Download or read book Margaret Webster written by Milly S. Barranger and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-24 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it." -Marian Seldes "Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading." -Oscar Brockett Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72). This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women. Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater. Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.
Download or read book Broadway 2 volumes written by Thomas A. Greenfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive and insightful reference available on Broadway theater as an American cultural phenomenon and an illuminator of American life. Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture is the first major reference work to explore just how much the "Great White Way" illuminates our national character. In two volumes spanning the era from the mid-19th century to the present, it offers nearly 200 entries on a variety of topics, including spotlights on 30 landmark productions—from Shuffle Along to Oklahoma! to Oh Calcutta! to The Producers—that not only changed American theater but American culture as well. In addition, Broadway offers thirty extended thematic essays gauging the powerful impact of theater on American life, with entries on race relations, women in society, sexuality, film, media, technology, tourism, and off-Broadway and noncommercial theater. There are also 110 profile entries on key persons and institutions—from the famous to the infamous to the all but forgotten—whose unique careers and contributions impacted Broadway and its place in the American landscape.
Download or read book American Women s History written by Glenna Matthews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alphabetical articles on major events, documents, persons, social movements, and political and social concepts connected with the history of women in America.
Download or read book No l Coward written by Russell Jackson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length work to draw extensively on unpublished archive material to document the composition and reception of some of Noël Coward's most significant plays. It examines his working practices as a playwright, from manuscript to performance. This study argues that, while he did not embrace any of the more radical theatrical 'isms' of his time, Coward experimented with both form and content. He adapted the familiar 'well-made' formulas, while also emphasizing theatrical self-consciousness and an exploration of radical social and sexual relationships. After an overview of Coward's career and the reception of his plays, the work discusses selected texts from successive phases of Coward's career, including some unproduced or uncompleted work and perennially popular plays such as The Vortex, Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter. This study also explores how, in the aftermaths of two world wars, as major changes in social and political circumstances suggested new approaches to dramaturgy, Coward's post-1945 work failed to achieve the same success he had enjoyed in earlier periods. The final chapter examines Coward's approach to his craft in response to the new theatrical and cultural environment, and the new freedom in the treatment of homosexuality represented by Suite in Three Keys and his final, uncompleted play, Age Cannot Wither.
Download or read book Bernard Shaw on the American Stage written by L. W. Conolly and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-24 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations—production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors’ studio portraits— inform the study throughout.
Download or read book Mrs Ziegfeld written by Grant Hayter-Menzies and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-04-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broadway actress Billie Burke was one of the most sought after young stage beauties of her time, stealing the hearts of Enrico Caruso, Mark Twain, and, most importantly, famed Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who became her husband. Following Ziegfeld's death, the threats of financial ruin and encroaching age forced Burke to recreate herself as a Hollywood character actress. This biography benefits from the cooperation of the daughter and grandchildren of Burke and Ziegfeld, as well as from anecdotes provided by actors who performed with Burke on the stage and screen. In addition to studying the character and significance of Burke's greatest screen role as Glinda the Good Witch of the North, this richly illustrated book also provides a complete history of Burke's stage, screen, and radio work.
Download or read book Enchantment written by Donald Spoto and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While her name is synonymous with elegance, style and grace, this poignant, funny and deeply moving biography, reveals the private Audrey Hepburn and invites readers to fall in love with her all over again. Over the course of her extraordinary life and career, Audrey captured hearts around the world and created a public image that stands as one of the most recognizable and beloved in recent memory. But despite her international fame and her tireless efforts on behalf of UNICEF, Audrey was also known for her intense privacy. With unprecedented access to studio archives, friends and colleagues who knew and loved Audrey, bestselling author Donald Spoto provides an intimate and moving account of this beautiful, elusive and talented woman. Tracing her astonishing rise to stardom, from her harrowing childhood in Nazi-controlled Holland during World War II to her years as a struggling ballet dancer in London and her Tony Award–winning Broadway debut in Gigi, Spoto illuminates the origins of Audrey’s tenacious spirit and fiercely passionate nature. She would go on to star in some of the most popular movies of the twentieth century, including Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, The Nun’s Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady. A friend and inspiration to renowned designer Hubert de Givenchy, Audrey also emerged as a fashion icon and her influence on women’s fashion virtually unparalleled to this day. Behind the glamorous public persona, Audrey was a different and deeper person and a woman who craved love and affection. Donald Spoto offers remarkable insights into her professional and personal relationships with her two husbands, and with celebrities such as Gregory Peck, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Robert Anderson, Cary Grant, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney and Ben Gazzara. The turbulent romances of her youth, her profound sympathy for the plight of hungry children, and the thrills and terrors of motherhood prepared Audrey for the final chapter in her life, as she devoted herself entirely to the charity efforts of an organization that had once come to her rescue at the end of the war: UNICEF.
Download or read book Audrey Wood and the Playwrights written by M. Barranger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre of her day. Her quiet determination and burning enthusiasm brought America's finest mid-century playwrights to prominence and altered stage history.
Download or read book Audrey Hepburn written by Barry Paris and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-09-01 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most ambitious and personal account ever written about Hollywood's most gracious star-Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris is a "moving portrayal" (The New York Times Book Review) that truly captures the woman who captured our hearts... With the insights of family and friends who never before spoke to a Hepburn biographer-and never-before-published photographs-Paris has created an in-depth portrait of the actress, from her childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, through her legendary career, and into her UN ambassadorship.
Download or read book Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety written by L. Woods and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows eminent actors performing under stringent conditions in vaudeville. It was a strange notion in 1900 that leading lights of the legitimate stage would ever join a bill of 'turns', with everything from song-and-dance to criminals regaling crowds with their exploits. It chronicles renowned actors showing rough fare in rough times.
Download or read book Moss Hart written by Jared Brown and published by Backstage Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "He's a legend of The Great White Way whose very name is synonymous with the Golden Age of Broadway: Moss Hart. In Moss Hart: A Prince of the Theater, biographer Jared Brown offers a meticulously researched, sensitive look at the life and work of a major American artist." "More than just an assessment of Hart's career, this is a personal portrait as well. Despite his enormous success in both theatre and film, Hart spent all of his adult life in psychoanalysis, attempting to come to grips with a crushing depression. He was rumored to be bisexual, and this book examines the evidence for that claim. When he married, in his forties, he and his wife, the actress-singer Kitty Carlisle, were said by Hart's friend and collaborator Alan Jay Lerner to be "not only an ideal couple, [but] the ideal couple."" "This is the first biography to be written with the full cooperation of Hart's family and friends. Author Jared Brown had access to documents (such as Hart's diary) previously unavailable to biographers, and conducted lengthy interviews with Hart's wife and children, as well as with some of the most prominent performers he worked with, such as Julie Andrews, Gregory Peck, Eddie Albert, and Roubert Goulet. This long-awaited biography, featuring dozens of never-before-published photographs, is truly the definitive picture of an extraordinary man and a theatrical giant."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Theatre written by Don B. Wilmeth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of the authoritative, multi-volume Cambridge History of American Theatre, first published in 1999, begins in the post-Civil War period and traces the development of American theatre up to 1945. It covers all aspects of theatre from plays and playwrights, through actors and acting, to theatre groups and directors. Topics examined include vaudeville and popular entertainment, European influences, theatre in and beyond New York, the rise of the Little Theatre movement, changing audiences, modernism, the Federal Theatre movement, scenography, stagecraft, and architecture. Contextualising chapters explore the role of theatre within the context of American social and cultural history, and the role of American theatre in relation to theatre in Europe and beyond. This definitive history of American theatre includes contributions from the following distinguished academics - Thomas Postlewait, John Frick, Tice L. Miller, Ronald Wainscott, Brenda Murphy, Mark Fearnow, Brooks McNamara, Thomas Riis, Daniel J. Watermeier, Mary C. Henderson, and Warren Kliewer.
Download or read book All You Need to Know About the Movie and TV Business written by Gail Resnik and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996-02-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether one is pursuing the dream of acting, directing, or writing, or is interested in a career as a studio executive, agent, cinematographer, makeup artist, stuntman, or camera operator, Resnik and Trost present realistic assessments of career opportunities, offer savvy insights into how to play the Hollywood game, and explore in detail the legal ins and outs of the business.
