Product Description: Musicals of the 1990s felt the impact of key developments that forever changed the landscape of Broadway. While the onslaught of British imports slowed down, the so-called Disneyfication of Broadway began, a trend that continues today...read more

Product Description: Winner, 2017 American Theater and Drama Society John W. Frick Book Award Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York offers a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of how the city’s financial crisis shaped theater and performance practices in this turbulent decade and beyond...read more

Product Description: How do the funding, setting architecture, and exhibition of a presidential library shape our understanding of the president’s character? And how do diverse performances of the presidency create radically different opportunities for the practice of American citizenship? In Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W...read more

The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors-- Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein--used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater--subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator--become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner examines the artistic poetics of Meyerhold's grotesque, Tairov's mime-drama, and Eisenstein's theatrical attraction through production analyses, based on extensive archival research, that challenge the notion of theater as a mirror to life, instead viewing the director as a prism through whom life is refracted. A resource for scholars and practitioners alike, this groundbreaking study provides a fresh, provocative perspective on experimental theater, intercultural borrowings, and the nature of the creative process. Illustrating cutting-edge developments in the evolution of the book, Northwestern University Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Director's Prism on Fulcrum. Combining a traditional print monograph with an innovative web-based archive of digitally-enriched source materials, Fulcrum is a publishing platform that helps publishers present the full richness of their authors' research outputs in a durable, discoverable, and flexible form.To view the source materials from The Director's Prism, go to the Fulcrum website at fulcrum.org/northwestern

Inspired by new approaches in performance studies, theatre history, research in material culture and dress history, a rich discussion of the many aspects of costume in Shakespearean performance has begun. Shakespeare and Costume furthers this research, bringing together varied and stimulating essays by leading scholars that consider costume from literary, dramatic, design, performative and theatrical perspectives, as well as interviews with renowned theatre practitioners Jane Greenwood and Robert Morgan. The volume amply demonstrates how an analysis of the meaning of costume enriches our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. Beginning with an overview of the stage history of Shakespeare and costume, the volume looks at the historical context of clothing in the plays, considering topics such as royal self-fashioning, festive livery practices, and conceptions of race and gender exhibited in clothing choice, as well as costume in performance. Drawing on documentary evidence in designers' renderings, illustrations in periodicals, paintings, photographs, newspaper reviews and actors' memoirs, the volume also explores costume designs in specific Shakespeare productions from the re-opening of the London theatres in 1660 to the present day.

Product Description: This revelatory study explores how Scottish history plays, especially since the 1930s, raise issues of ideology, national identity, historiography, mythology, gender and especially Scottish language. Covering topics up to the end of World War Two, the book addresses the work of many key figures from the last century of Scottish theatre, including Robert McLellan and his contemporaries, and also Hector MacMillan, Stewart Conn, John McGrath, Donald Campbell, Bill Bryden, Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Jo Clifford, Peter Arnott, David Greig, Rona Munro and others often neglected or misunderstood...read more

Product Description: This research follows the history ofthe Acco Festival for Other Israeli Theatre from 1980-2012, chronicling it as a site of celebration as well as confrontation. The Acco Festival is presented as a borderland that brings together established mainstream directors and actors, alternative artists from the fringes, and Acco’s Jewish and Arab residents...read more

Product Description: Exploring the experiences of early to mid-twentieth century British theatre-makers in Russia, this book imagines how these travellers interpreted  Russian realism, symbolism, constructivism, agitprop, pageantry, dance or cinema.With some searching for an alternative to the corporate West End, some for experimental techniques  and others still for methods that might politically inspire their audiences, did these journeys make any differences to their practice? And how did distinctly Russian techniques affect British theatre history?Migrating Modernist Performance seeks to answer these questions, reimagining the experiences and creative output of a range of, often under-researched, practitioners...read more

Product Description: This book reveals for the first time the import of a huge network of connections between Tennessee Williams and the country closest to his heart, Italy. America's most thought-provoking playwright loved Italy more than any other country outside the US and was deeply influenced by its culture for most of his life...read more