"We see Bob Fosse's legacy everywhere--from Broadway to "Billy Jean" to Beyonce;'s moves in the "Single Ladies" video. Yet in spite of Fosse's deep cultural significance, no biography has ever brought him fully to life, unveiling the man behind the bowler hat and the swaggering sex appeal. Now, acclaimed cultural historian Sam Wasson traces Fosse's numberless reinventions of himself over a career that would spawn The Pajama Game, Cabaret, Pippin,...

Japanese Theatre presents a full historical account for Westerners of the theater arts that have flourished for centuries in Japan. Kabuki, arising in the late seventeenth century, is the theater of the commoner. The successive syllables of Kabuki mean "song dance skill." The precursors of Kabuki were the puppet theater and the comic interludes in the stately, aristocratic Noh drama all fully described by the author. In the modem era the Japanese...

"Shakespeare's Ear presents dark and sometimes funny pieces of fact and folklore that bedevil the mostly unknown history of theater. All manner of skullduggery, from revenge to murder, from affairs to persecution, proves that the drama off-stage was just as intense as any portrayed on it. The stories include those of: An ancient Greek writer of tragedies who dies when an eagle drops a tortoise on his head. A sixteenth-century English playwright who...

First published in 1933, "Acting: The First Six Lessons" is the classic work on what would later become known as Method acting by Richard Boleslavsky. Born in Russia in 1889, Boleslavsky began his acting career by studying under Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre where he learned about the "system". After World War I, Boleslavsky both directed and acted in films in Poland and Germany before settling in New York, where he founded the...

The Clouds is a comedy written by the celebrated playwright Aristophanes lampooning intellectual fashions in classical Athens. It was originally produced at the City Dionysia in 423 BC and it was not well received, coming last of the three plays competing at the festival that year. It was revised between 420-417 BC and thereafter it was circulated in manuscript form. No copy of the original production survives, and scholarly analysis indicates that...

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1992" Ruth Padel, recently Visiting Professor in the Modern Greek Program at Princeton University, has taught classics at the University of Oxford and the University of London. She is the author of two books of poems and of Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Ruth Padel explores Greek conceptions of human innerness and the way in which Greek tragedy shaped European notions of...

Until now, Eugene O'Neill's psychological dramas have been analyzed mainly by critics who relied on obvious parallels between O'Neill's life, his family, and his plays. In this theoretically expansive and interdisciplinary book, Joel Pfister reassesses what was at stake ideologically in O'Neill's staging and modernizing of 'psychological' individualism for his social class. Pfister examines the history of the middle-class family and of Freudian pop...

For over forty-years, Tadashi Suzuki has been a unique and vital force in both Japanese and Western theater, creating and directing many internationally acclaimed productions including his famous production of The Trojan Women, which subsequently toured around the world. An intergral part of his work has been the development and teaching of his rigorous and controversial training system, the Suzuki method, whose principals have also been highly influential...

Sharkey is the natural artist, performing his magic for nothing but love.-Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker Sharkey tells the compelling story of an unusually gifted, trained sea lion who shared the stage with practically every important performer of the first half of the twentieth century-from Bob Hope to Ella Fitzgerald, from Broadway to Hollywood and beyond. Readers follow Sharkey and his flippered colleagues as they travel the world with stops at...

Nightwood Theatre is the longest-running and most influential feminist theatre company in Canada. Since 1979, the company has produced works by Canadian women, providing new opportunities for women theatre artists. It has also been the 'home company' for some of the biggest names in Canadian theatre, such as Ann-Marie MacDonald. In Nightwood Theatre, Scott describes the company's journey toward defining itself as a feminist theatre establishment,...