Download or read book A History of the American Musical Theatre written by Nathan Hurwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the diverse proto-theatres of the mid-1800s, though the revues of the ‘20s, the ‘true musicals’ of the ‘40s, the politicisation of the ‘60s and the ‘mega-musicals’ of the ‘80s, every era in American musical theatre reflected a unique set of socio-cultural factors. Nathan Hurwitz uses these factors to explain the output of each decade in turn, showing how the most popular productions spoke directly to the audiences of the time. He explores the function of musical theatre as commerce, tying each big success to the social and economic realities in which it flourished. This study spans from the earliest spectacles and minstrel shows to contemporary musicals such as Avenue Q and Spiderman. It traces the trends of this most commercial of art forms from the perspective of its audiences, explaining how staying in touch with writers and producers strove to stay in touch with these changing moods. Each chapter deals with a specific decade, introducing the main players, the key productions and the major developments in musical theatre during that period.
Download or read book Theatre in the United States Volume 1 1750 1915 Theatre in the Colonies and the United States written by Barry Witham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the growth and development of theatre in the United States. Documents and commentary are arranged into chapters on business practice, acting, theatre buildings, drama, design, and audience behavior.
Download or read book Inkface written by Miles P. Grier and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era of booming print production, popular urban theater, and increasing rates of literacy, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink became essential to a fraternity of literate white men who, by treating an elastic category of marked people as reading material, were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. Inkface examines that fraternity’s reading of the world as well as the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.
Download or read book Theatre Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Representative American Plays written by Arthur Hobson Quinn and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book George Henry Boker written by Sculley Bradley and published by 清华大学出版社有限公司. This book was released on 1927 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book When Romeo was a Woman written by Lisa Merrill and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the life of the androgynous nineteenth-century American actress and her work on the Anglo-American stage
Download or read book Restricting Freedoms written by Eric Beasley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, freedom is so closely associated with the United States that most people still view America as the ultimate symbol of freedom. This is one reason why the desire to immigrate to the United States from almost anywhere in the world has not waned for more than a century. Because of this image, the idea that Americans are constrained by restrictive ordinances and rules seems contrary and therefore difficult for most citizens to accept.Vladimir Shlapentokh and Eric Beasley argue that the idea of basing American society upon unadulterated freedom in all spheres of life is both unrealistic and simplistic. The authors define freedom as the ability to choose one of many available alternatives. They note that this concept of freedom sometimes leads to a paradox: occasionally, freedoms are expanded through the creation of additional restrictions because the restrictions provide people with more alternatives. Thus, being free or restricted is not an all or nothing proposition, but rather a question of degrees.Many works discuss restrictions in relation to a particular area of life, but none of them explore the magnitude of how limitations shape people's everyday lives. Restricting Freedoms is unique in that the authors provide case studies that illustrate a wide variety of social contexts in relation to religious activity, noise-making, and sexual activities, among others. This overview of the role of restrictions in American life will be of interest to all American readers.
Download or read book Abandoned written by Julie Miller and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two interesting items: The author's article in New York Archives A letter regarding foundlings in The Riverdale Press In the nineteenth century, foundlings—children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth—were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the city's leaders begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children. In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social problem that wracked America's biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention. Assistance came from public officials and religious reformers who constructed four institutions: the Nursery and Child's Hospital's foundling asylum, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital, located on Randall's Island in the East River. Ultimately, the foundling asylums were unable to significantly improve children’s lives, and by the early twentieth century, three out of the four foundling asylums had closed, as adoption took the place of abandonment and foster care took the place of institutions. Today the word foundling has been largely forgotten. Fortunately, Abandoned rescues its history from obscurity.
Download or read book Twas Only an Irishman s Dream written by W. H. A. Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the Irish in the United States changed drastically over time, from that of hard-drinking, rioting Paddies to genial, patriotic working-class citizens. In 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, William H. A. Williams traces the change in this image through more than 700 pieces of sheet music--popular songs from the stage and for the parlor--to show how Americans' opinions of Ireland and the Irish went practically from one extreme to the other. Because sheet music was a commercial item it had to be acceptable to the broadest possible song-buying public. "Negotiations" about their image involved Irish songwriters, performers, and pressured groups, on the one hand, and non-Irish writers, publishers, and audiences on the other. Williams ties the contents of song lyrics to the history of the Irish diaspora, suggesting how ethnic stereotypes are created and how they evolve within commercial popular culture.
Download or read book The Life and Times of Elizabeth Upham Yates written by Shannon M. Risk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Upham Yates (1857–1942) was a nationally known reformer in the United States in the fields of temperance, women’s suffrage, simple living, and missionary work. The Life and Times of Elizabeth Upham Yates: A Crusader for Women’s Suffrage, Temperance, and Missionary Work documents Yates’s life from her coastal Maine origins through her missionary activities in China in the 1880s to her political career in the 1920s. Upon her return from China to the United States, Yates’s reputation grew as a master orator who stirred the suffrage spirit on campaign trails across the country. In 1920, the first year that women could campaign for office in Rhode Island, she ran for the Democratic ticket for lieutenant governor, earning 50,000 votes. She railed against jingoists like Theodore Roosevelt in the New York Times and chastised male political leadership for ignoring the lynching crisis. During her long career, her suffrage sisters memorialized her as a “prophet and a dreamer.” Shannon M. Risk draws on sources ranging from regional histories and shipping passenger manifests to archival papers at the Library of Congress and Yates’s own writing to shed new light on this suffragist’s life and work.
Download or read book London in a Box written by Odai Johnson and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 Theatre Library Association Freedley Award Finalist If one went looking for the tipping point in the prelude to the American Revolution, it would not be the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, or the blockade of Boston by British warships, or even the gathering of the first Continental Congress; rather, it was the Congress’s decision in late October of 1774 to close the theatres. In this remarkable feat of historical research, Odai Johnson pieces together the surviving fragments of the story of the first professional theatre troupe based in the British North American colonies. In doing so, he tells the story of how colonial elites came to decide they would no longer style themselves British gentlemen, but instead American citizens. London in a Box chronicles the enterprise of David Douglass, founder and manager of the American Theatre, from the 1750s to the climactic 1770s. The ambitious Scotsman’s business was teaching provincial colonials to dress and behave as genteel British subjects. Through the plays he staged, the scenery and costumes, and the bearing of his actors, he displayed London fashion and London manners. He counted among his patrons the most influential men in America, from British generals and governors to local leaders, including the avid theatre-goers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. By 1774, Douglass operated a monopoly of theatres in six colonies and the Anglophone Caribbean, from Jamaica to Charleston and northward to New York City. (Boston remained an impregnable redoubt against theatre.) How he built this network of patrons and theatres and how it all went up in flames as the revolution began is the subject of this witty history. A treat for anyone interested in the world of the American Revolution and an important study for historians of the period.
Download or read book Catalogue written by Bernard Quaritch (Firm) and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book James Nelson Barker 1784 1858 written by Paul Howard Musser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life of the first champion of American independence in literature and art and a Philadelphia political figure, with a reprint of what is considered the best American play written before 1825.
Download or read book Church and Stage written by Claudia Durst Johnson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout nineteenth century America, religious officials often condemned the theatre as an inversion of the house of God, similar to the church in architectural structure and organization but wholly different in purpose and values. This book explores the many ways in which religious institutions supported by capitalism profoundly affected the early development of American theatre. The author analyzes the church's critical view toward common theatre practices, including the use of female and child performers, and the lower class alliance with the stage. Three appendices provide period correspondence, including an excerpt from Mark Twain's February 1871 "Memoranda," in which Twain criticizes an Episcopalian reverend for denying church burial to a popular stage comedian.
Download or read book Civil War America 1850 To 1875 written by Richard F. Selcer and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features essays, statistical data, period photographs, maps, and documents.
Download or read book Coal and Culture written by William Faricy Condee and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical appreciation of the opera house in the coal-mining region of Appalachia from the mid 1860s to the early 1930s, Coal and Culture demonstrates that these were multipurpose facilities that were used for traveling theater, concerts, religious events, lectures, commencements, boxing matches, benefits, union meetings, and - if the auditorium had a flat floor - skating and basketball.
