Download or read book Nineteenth Century American Women Theatre Managers written by Jane K. Curry and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1994-07-21 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many women held positions of great responsibility and power in the United States during the 19th century as theatre managers: managing stock companies, owning or leasing theatres, hiring actors and other personnel, selecting plays for production, directing rehearsals, supervising all production details, and promoting their dramatic offerings. Competing in risky business ventures, these women were remarkable for defying societal norms that restricted career opportunities for women. The activities of more than 50 such women are discussed in Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers, beginning with an account of 15 pioneering women managers who were all managing theatres before 24 December 1853, when Catherine Sinclair, often incorrectly identified as the first woman theatre manager in the United States, opened her theatre in San Francisco.
Download or read book Women s Contribution to Nineteenth century American Theatre written by Miriam López Rodríguez and published by Universitat de València. This book was released on 2011-11-28 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aquesta col·lecció d'assajos mostra els múltiples aspectes de la contribució que va fer la dona, al teatre americà del segle XIX. En aquest estudi s'ensenyen diversos tipus de dones i els rols que ocupen, així com reflecteix la manera que Susan Glaspell i Sophie Treadwell van ajudar a donar forma al teatre, entre moltes altres que escriurien dècades més tard.
Download or read book Playing to the Gods written by Peter Rader and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting story of the rivalry between the two most renowned actresses of the nineteenth century: legendary Sarah Bernhardt, whose eccentricity on and off the stage made her the original diva, and mystical Eleonora Duse, who broke all the rules to popularize the natural style of acting we celebrate today. Audiences across Europe and the Americas clamored to see the divine Sarah Bernhardt swoon—and she gave them their money’s worth. The world’s first superstar, she traveled with a chimpanzee named Darwin and a pet alligator that drank champagne, shamelessly supplementing her income by endorsing everything from aperitifs to beef bouillon, and spreading rumors that she slept in a coffin to better understand the macabre heroines she played. Eleonora Duse shied away from the spotlight. Born to a penniless family of itinerant troubadours, she disappeared into the characters she portrayed—channeling their spirits, she claimed. Her new, empathetic style of acting revolutionized the theater—and earned her the ire of Sarah Bernhardt in what would become the most tumultuous theatrical showdown of the nineteenth century. Bernhardt and Duse seduced each other’s lovers, stole one another’s favorite playwrights, and took to the world’s stages to outperform their rival in her most iconic roles. A scandalous, enormously entertaining history full of high drama and low blows, Playing to the Gods is the perfect “book for all of us who binge-watched Feud” (Daniel de Visé, author of Andy & Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show).
Download or read book Theatres of Value written by Danielle Rosvally and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-07-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatres of Value explores the idea that buying and selling are performative acts and offers a paradigm for deeper study of these acts—"the dramaturgy of value." Modeling this multifaceted approach, the book explores six case studies to show how and why Shakespeare had value for nineteenth-century New Yorkers. In considering William Brown's African Theater, P. T. Barnum's American Museum and Lecture Hall, Fanny Kemble's American reading career, the Booth family brand, the memorial statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, and an 1888 benefit performance of Hamlet to theatrical impresario Lester Wallack, Theatres of Value traces a history of audience engagement with Shakespearean cultural capital and the myriad ways this engagement was leveraged by theatrical businesspeople.
Download or read book The American Stage written by Ron Engle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-06 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the economic and social forces which shaped American theatre throughout its history. Alone or as a collection, these essays, written by leading theatre historians and critics of the American theatre, will stimulate discussions concerning the traditionally held views of America's theatrical heritage.
Download or read book Women on Southern Stages 1800 1865 written by Robin O. Warren and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women played an integral role in the theater of the Antebellum and Civil War South. Yet their contributions have largely been overlooked by history. Southern actresses were important public figures who helped mold gender identity through their theatrical performances. Although cast in parts written by men, they subverted the norms of femininity in their public personas and in their personal lives. Educated and often wealthy but never accepted by the landed elite, women distinguished themselves by carving out an in-between class status, and many proved to be sophisticated entrepreneurs. Southern actresses also helped shape racial perceptions and regional politics as the South entered the Civil War.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Drama written by Jeffrey H. Richards and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the history of American drama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It describes origins of early republican drama and its evolution during the pre-war and post-war periods. It traces the emergence of different types of American drama including protest plays, reform drama, political drama, experimental drama, urban plays, feminist drama and realist plays. This volume also analyzes the works of some of the most notable American playwrights including Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and those written by women dramatists.
Download or read book Opera for the People written by Katherine K. Preston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-11 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activities of several important players in American postbellum opera, including manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and "the people's prima donna" Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources, including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead to the emergence of American musical comedy.
Download or read book Staging Family written by Nan Mullenneaux and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking every prescription of ideal femininity, American actresses of the mid-nineteenth century appeared in public alongside men, financially supported nuclear and extended families, challenged domestic common law, and traveled the globe in the transnational theater market. While these women expanded professional, artistic, and geographic frontiers, they expanded domestic frontiers as well: publicly, actresses used the traditional rhetoric of domesticity to mask their very nontraditional personal lives, instigating historically significant domestic innovations to circumvent the gender constraints of the mid-nineteenth century, reinventing themselves and their families in the process. Nan Mullenneaux focuses on the personal and professional lives of more than sixty women who, despite their diverse backgrounds, each made complex conscious and unconscious compromises to create profit and power. Mullenneaux identifies patterns of macro and micro negotiation and reinvention and maps them onto the waves of legal, economic, and social change to identify broader historical links that complicate notions of the influence of gendered power and the definition of feminism; the role of the body/embodiment in race, class, and gender issues; the relevance of family history to the achievements of influential Americans; and national versus inter- and transnational cultural trends. While Staging Family expands our understanding of how nineteenth-century actresses both negotiated power and then hid that power, it also informs contemporary questions of how women juggle professional and personal responsibilities—achieving success in spite of gender constraints and societal expectations.
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 1998-02-28 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of American Theatre is an authoritative and wide-ranging history of American theatre in all its dimensions, from theatre building to play writing, directors, performers, and designers. Engaging the theatre as a performance art, a cultural institution, and a fact of American social and political life, the History recognizes changing styles of presentation and performance and addresses the economic context that conditions the drama presented. The History approaches its subject with a full awareness of relevant developments in literary criticism, cultural analysis, and performance theory. At the same time, it is designed to be an accessible, challenging narrative. Volume One deals with the colonial inceptions of American theatre through the post-Civil War period: the European antecedents, the New World influences of the French and Spanish colonists, and the development of uniquely American traditions in tandem with the emergence of national identity.
Download or read book Women in the American Theatre written by Faye E. Dudden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a series of biographical sketches of female performers and managers, Dudden provides a discussion of the conflicted messages conveyed by the early theatre about what it meant to be a woman. It both showed women as sex objects and provided opportunities for careers.
Download or read book Starring Women written by Sara E. Lampert and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women performers played a vital role in the development of American and transatlantic entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Sara E. Lampert examines the lives, careers, and fame of overlooked figures from Europe and the United States whose work in melodrama, ballet, and other stage shows shocked and excited early U.S. audiences. These women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of nineteenth-century gender roles, sparking debates about women's place in public life. Yet even their unprecedented wealth and prominence failed to break the patriarchal family structures that governed their lives and conditioned their careers. Inevitable contradictions arose. The burgeoning celebrity culture of the time forced women stage stars to don the costumes of domestic femininity even as the unsettled nature of life in the theater defied these ideals. A revealing foray into a lost time, Starring Women returns a generation of performers to their central place in the early history of American theater.
Download or read book Victorian touring actresses written by Janice Norwood and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-09 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian touring actresses brings new attention to women’s experience of working in nineteenth-century theatre by focusing on a diverse group of largely forgotten ‘mid-tier’ performers, rather than the usual celebrity figures. It examines how actresses responded to changing political, economic and social circumstances and how the women were themselves agents of change. Their histories reveal dynamic patterns of activity within the theatrical industry and expose its relationship to wider Victorian culture. With an innovative organisation mimicking the stages of an actress’s life and career, the volume draws on new archival research and plentiful illustrations to examine the challenges and opportunities facing the women as they toured both within the UK and further afield in North America and Australasia. It will appeal to students and researchers in theatre and performance history, Victorian studies, gender studies and transatlantic studies.
Download or read book Thomas Hamblin and the Bowery Theatre written by Thomas A. Bogar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recounts the personal and professional life of Thomas Souness Hamblin (1800-1853), Shakespearean actor and Bowery Theatre manager. Primarily responsible for the popularity of “blood and thunder” melodramas with working class audiences in New York City, Hamblin discovered, trained and promoted many young actors and, especially, actresses who later became famous in their own right. He also epitomized the “sporting man” of mid-nineteenth century life, conducting a scandalous series of affairs and visits to Manhattan brothels, which cost him his marriage to Elizabeth Blanchard Hamblin (1799-1849) and made him the brunt of moralist, religious and journalistic crusades, notably that of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. His machinations and perseverance through trying challenges, including several destructions of the Bowery Theatre by fire, extensive financial and legal complications, and the untimely deaths of several young protégées, earned him equal measures of admiration and opprobrium.
Download or read book Childhood and Nineteenth Century American Theatre written by Shauna Vey and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study of the daily work lives of five members of the Marsh Troupe, a nineteenth-century professional acting company composed primarily of children, sheds light on the construction of idealized childhood inside and outside the American theatre"--
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women written by Cheris Kramarae and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-04-16 with total page 2050 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a full list of entries and contributors, sample entries, and more, visit the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women website. Featuring comprehensive global coverage of women's issues and concerns, from violence and sexuality to feminist theory, the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women brings the field into the new millennium. In over 900 signed A-Z entries from US and Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and the Middle East, the women who pioneered the field from its inception collaborate with the new scholars who are shaping the future of women's studies to create the new standard work for anyone who needs information on women-related subjects.
