Download Free The London Stage 1930 1939 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The London Stage 1930 1939 and write the review.

Theatre in London has celebrated a rich and influential history, and in 1976 the first volume of J. P. Wearing’s reference series provided researchers with an indispensable resource of these productions. In the decades since the original calendars were produced, several research aids have become available, notably various reference works and the digitization of important newspapers and relevant periodicals. The second edition of The London Stage 1930–1939: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel provides a chronological calendar of London shows from January 1930 through December 1939. The volume chronicles more than 4,250 productions at 61 major central London theatres during this period. For each production the following information is provided: Title Author Theatre Performers Personnel Opening and Closing Dates Number of Performances Other details include genre of the production, number of acts, and a list of reviews. A comment section includes other interesting information, such as plot description, first-night reception by the audience, noteworthy performances, staging elements, and details of performances in New York either prior to or after the London production. Among the plays staged in London during this decade were The Barretts of Wimpole Street, French without Tears, George and Margaret, The Greeks Had a Word for It, Laburnum Grove, Lady Precious Stream, The Late Christopher Bean, Love on the Dole, Me and My Girl, Private Lives, and 1066 and All That, as well as numerous musical comedies (British and American), foreign works, operas, ballets, and revivals of English classics. A definitive resource, this edition revises, corrects, and expands the original calendar. In addition, approximately 20 percent of the material—in particular, information of adaptations and translations, plot sources, and comment information—is new. Arranged chronologically, the shows are fully indexed by title, genre, and theatre. A general index includes numerous subject entries on such topics as acting, audiences, censorship, costumes, managers, performers, prompters, staging, and ticket prices. The London Stage 1930-1939 will be of value to scholars, theatrical personnel, librarians, writers, journalists, and historians.
This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries. Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries – autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm. Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.
Brian Donlevy (1901-1972) was an underrated film actor with surprising range and a little-heralded gift for comedy. Often typecast as a villain, he played the definitive bad guy in such films as Destry Rides Again, Union Pacific and Beau Geste (all in 1939). He showed his versatility in the title role of Preston Sturges' political satire The Great McGinty (1940) and impressed both New York critics and the Soviet government as the cooly authoritative Major Caton in Wake Island (1942). Donlevy was fondly remembered as globe-trotting U.S. Special Agent Steve Mitchell in the television series Dangerous Assignment (1952) and as Professor Quatermass in two acclaimed science fiction films. This first ever biography of Donlevy covers his colorful early life as a boy soldier, his years playing comedy roles on Broadway and his long career in Hollywood.
This study overturns twentieth-century thinking about pasticcio opera. This radical way of creating opera formed a counterweight, even a relief, to the trenchant masculinity of literate culture in the seventeenth century. It undermined the narrowing of nationalism in the eighteenth century, and was an act of gross sacrilege against the cult of Romantic genius in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it found itself on the wrong side of copyright law. However, in the twenty-first century it is enjoying a tentative revival. This book redefines pasticcio as a method rather than a genre of opera and aligns it with other art forms which also created their works from pre-existing parts, including sculpture. A pasticcio opera is created from pre-existing music and text, thus flying in face of insistence on originality and creation by a solo genius.
A key figure in British literary circles following the French Revolution, novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft promoted ideas of reform and equality informed by the philosophy of his close friend William Godwin. Arrested for treason in 1794 and released without trial, Holcroft was notorious in his own time, but today appears mainly as a supporting character in studies of 1790s literary activism. Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama authoritatively reintroduces and reestablishes this central figure of the revolutionary decade by examining his life, plays, memoirs, and personal correspondence. In engaging with theatrical censorship, apostacy, and the response of audiences and critics to radical drama, this thoughtful study also demonstrates how theater functions in times of political repression. Despite his struggles, Holcroft also had major successes: this book examines his surprisingly robust afterlife, as his plays, especially The Road to Ruin, were repeatedly revived worldwide in the nineteenth century.
This book explores the hitherto neglected history of the campaign for state funding of the arts. By focusing on the important but forgotten movements for music and drama subsidy before and during WWII, Howard Webber makes an important contribution to the history of arts subsidy. Before the Arts Council rediscovers three forgotten but influential campaigns for state support of the arts in Britain in the 1930s and wartime. Webber's impressive historical excavation challenges existing scholarship, which argues that arts subsidy was the result of the war, and instead re-situates the campaign's origins in the pre-war years. Webber does so by drawing on correspondence from influential figures including Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Maynard Keynes and J.B Priestley, along with extensive use of government papers. Before the Arts Council is a lively, compelling and scrupulously researched account of a subject consistently misunderstood and misrepresented. It changes our understanding of an aspect of British cultural history we thought we knew well. It will appeal to students of twentieth century social and political history and to anyone with a general interest in the arts and in this period.
Theatre in London has celebrated a rich and influential history, and in 1976 the first volume of J. P. Wearing’s reference series provided researchers with an indispensable resource of these productions. In the decades since the original calendars were produced, several research aids have become available, notably various reference works and the digitization of important newspapers and relevant periodicals. The second edition of The London Stage 1920–1929: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel provides a chronological calendar of London shows from January 1920 through December 1929. The volume chronicles more than 4,000 productions at 51 major central London theatres during this period. For each entry the following information is provided: Title Author Theatre Performers Personnel Opening and Closing Dates Number of Performances Other details include genre of the production, number of acts, and a list of reviews. A comment section includes other interesting information, such as plot description, first-night reception by the audience, noteworthy performances, staging elements, and details of performances in New York either prior to or after the London production. Among the plays staged in London during this decade were Bulldog Drummond, The Emperor Jones, The Enchanted Cottage, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hay Fever, Saint Joan, and Six Characters in Search of an Author, as well as numerous musical comedies (British and American), foreign works, operas, and ballets, revivals of English classics. A definitive resource, this edition revises, corrects, and expands the original calendar. In addition, approximately 20 percent of the material—in particular, information of adaptations and translations, plot sources, and comment information—is new. Arranged chronologically, the shows are fully indexed by title, genre, and theatre. A general index includes numerous subject entries on such topics as acting, audiences, censorship, costumes, managers, performers, prompters, staging, and ticket prices. The London Stage 1920-1929 will be of value to scholars, theatrical personnel, librarians, writers, journalists, and historians.
This book offers perhaps the most comprehensive history of pantomime ever written. No other book so thoroughly examines the varieties of pantomimic performance from the early Roman Empire, when the term “pantomime” came into use, until the present. After thoroughly examining the complexities and startlingly imaginative performance strategies of Roman pantomime, the author identifies the peculiar political circumstances that revived and shaped pantomime in France and Austria in the eighteenth century, leading to the Pierrot obsession in the nineteenth century. Modernist aesthetics awakened a huge, highly diverse fascination with pantomime. The book explores an extraordinary variety of modernist and postmodern approaches to pantomime in Germany, Austria, France, numerous countries of Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Chile, England, and The United States. Making use of many performance and historical documents never before included in pantomime histories, the book also discusses pantomime’s messy relation to dance, its peculiar uses of music, its “modernization” through silent film aesthetics, and the extent to which writers, performers, or directors are “authors” of pantomimes. Just as importantly, the book explains why, more than any other performance medium, pantomime allows the spectator to see the body as the agent of narrative action.