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For more than 30 years, the Wing has produced the Working in the Theatre seminars, a series that features the greatest names in theatre. In book form for the first time, compact, and at an affordable-paperback price.
This comprehensive work is truly the first textbook in the field of dramaturgy. Most of the material-much of it by leaders in all areas of the theater-was commissioned for this collection, rather than being reprinted. Its currency and importance cannot be overestimated. A review of the history of dramaturgy as a profession, together with its European antecedents, gives students a sense of historical context. Selections from respected and recognized names in theater provoke student interest and communicate the benefits of those experts' experiences.
For decades roughly 80 percent of commercial Broadway productions have failed to recoup their original investments. In light of this shocking and harsh reality, how does the show go on? Tim Donahue and Jim Patterson answer this question and many others in this updated edition of their popular, straightforward guide to understanding professional theater finances and the economic realities of theater production. This revised edition of Stage Money not only includes the latest financial information and illuminating examples of key concepts; it has been enhanced with a discussion of the stagehands' union plus a new chapter on marketing for the theater. These new elements combined with the essentials of the first edition create an expansive overview of the contemporary theater business. Stage Money is designed for theater enthusiasts and professionals interested in understanding the inner workings of this industry today and its challenges for the future. Ken Davenport, two-time Tony Award winner, Broadway and Off Broadway theater producer, blogger, writer, and owner of Davenport Theatrical Enterprises writer, offers a foreword.
The Business of American Theatre is a research guide to the history of producing theatre in the United States. Covering a wide range of subjects, the book explores how traditions of investment, marketing, labor union contracts, advertising, leasing arrangements, ticket scalping, zoning ordinances, royalties, and numerous other financial transactions have influenced the art of theatre for the past three centuries. Yet the book is not a dry reiteration of hits and flops, bankruptcies and bamboozles. Nor does it cover "everything about it that's appealing, everything the traffic will allow" (as Irving Berlin did in the song "There's No Business Like Show Business"). It is instead a highly readable resource for anyone interested in how money, and how much money, is critical to the art and artists of theatre. Many of those artists make appearances in the book: Richard Rodgers and his keen eye for investment, Jacob Shubert and his construction of "the bridge of thighs" for his showgirls at the Winter Garden, the significance of the Disney Souvenir Shop near the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, and the difference between a Broadway show losing millions of dollars or making billions in one night. Consider this book a go-to resource for readers, students, and scholars of the theatre business.
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.
Drawing on fascinating archival discoveries from the past two centuries, Brent Salter shows how copyright has been negotiated in the American theatre. Who controls the space between authors and audiences? Does copyright law actually protect playwrights and help them make a living? At the center of these negotiations are mediating businesses with extraordinary power that rapidly evolved from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: agents, publishers, producers, labor associations, administrators, accountants, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and film studio executives. As these mediators asserted authority over creativity, creators organized to respond, through collective minimum contracts, informal guild expectations, and professional norms, to protect their presumed rights as authors. This institutional, relational, legal, and business history of the entertainment history in America illuminates both the historical context and the present law. An innovative new kind of intellectual property history, the book maps the relations between the different players from the ground up.
Composed of sixteen essays and fifteen illustrations, Angels in the American Theater explores not only how donors became angels but also their backgrounds, motivations, policies, limitations, support, and successes and failures.
Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theatre has become a landmark book since its publication in 1978. It chronicles American musicals, show by show and season by season, and offers a running commentary and assessment as well as providing the basic facts about each production. This updated edition includes the new shows that have opened on Broadway since the original publication. Also included are over a hundred musicals that were turn-of-the-century, cheap-priced touring shows which never played Broadway, but were the training ground for many theatre greats.
Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism. Situating expressionism within the context of early twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of American dramatic modernism.
(Applause Books). In 1943, a wounded soldier aided by a cane limped into the Stage Door Canteen, the American Theatre Wing's fabled New York club created to entertain the Allied forces. Two hours later, he was said to have left with a spring in his step and without the cane. This "miracle" is recounted in the lavish new book, The American Theatre Wing, an Oral History: 100 Years, 100 Voices, 100 Million Miracles . The other 999,999 miracles are more commonplace, if no less remarkable, told by the impassioned artists and theater advocates who created and sustained this preeminent theatrical organization founded in 1917. While the American Theatre Wing is best known as the founder of the Tony Awards, its mission is also dedicated to preserving the past, celebrating the present, and fostering the future of American theater by developing educational programs and distributing national grants and awards each year to performers and theater companies. The organization also recently took under its wing the irreverent OBIE awards, the top honors for off-Broadway that has become a dynamic pipeline for Broadway. This coffee-table book, celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the American Theatre Wing, is a fascinating cornucopia of untold lore and never-before-seen photos as prismatic and unexpected as the theater itself. The oral history traces the American Theatre Wing as a defender of the country's most romantic ideals through two world wars, presciently establishing an interracial policy at the Stage Door Canteen despite being denounced from the well of the United States Senate. In succeeding decades the ATW has burnished those ideals through its unflagging support of artists from Broadway, Off Broadway, and regional theater many of whom vividly tell their own stories in the book, including Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Harold Prince, Neil Patrick Harris, James Corden, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.