検索キーワード： 歴史・批評

Shakespeare's most powerful female character, her historical inspiration, and her reinventions in performance through the centuries. She is more violent than Lady Macbeth, more complex than Ophelia, more strategic than King Lear’s daughters. She is the only Shakespearean character, male or...

In Hamlet, Shakespeare's play, a ghost tells a prince a terrible tale. ‘Is it true?’ the prince asks himself. This book asks, and answers, that same question. A ghost is something one may see and believe or look through and doubt. Doubt runs through the entire play. But it is in how...

A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries. Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively...

The Bawdy Bard: Shakespeare, sex, and the liberation of love In Shakespeare on Sex, listeners will discover William Shakespeare as they’ve never seen him before: a daring playwright determined to challenge Elizabethan sexual mores and champion the freedom of love.

Bloomsbury presents Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd by Rick Pender, read by John Chancer. An award-winning Sondheim expert dives into all facets of this unique, murder-filled masterpiece—its slimy roots, original production, characters from killers to lovers to bakers, soaring score, gripping...

Who decides what a character is on the American stage? The playwright who created the character, or the institution that controls the production?

Stop performing your life. Start living it. In a world driven by distraction, overstimulation, and artificial intelligence, one truth remains: your presence is your power. The Soul System: Acting From the Inside Out is not just a book about acting—t’s a transformative guide to becoming more human in an increasingly artificial world. Written and narrated by actor, coach, and creator Jay Jones, this audiobook introduces the Soul System, a powerful six-pillar framework designed to reconnect you to your emotional truth, your body, your voice, and your story.

Bloomsbury presents Attack of the Monster Musical by Adam Abraham, read by Christopher Ragland. How many hit musicals are based on films that were shot in two days at a budget of $30,000? The answer is one: Little Shop of Horrors. Roger Corman's monster movie opened in 1960, played the midnight...

Bloomsbury presents Rise Up by Chris Jones, read by Christopher Ragland. Penned by one of America’s best-known daily theatre critics and organized chronologically, this lively and readable book tells the story of Broadway’s renaissance from the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, via the...

Bloomsbury presents The Cambridge Footlights by Robert Sellers, read by Mike Read. In the league table of the funniest universities in the world, Cambridge wears the crown. Home of Britain’s oldest student sketch comedy troupe, the Cambridge Footlights, it has been a veritable conveyor belt of...

Bloomsbury presents Notes from a Working-Class Playwright, written and read by Leo Butler Award-winning British playwright, Leo Butler looks back over 25 of writing for the stage and his extensive experience teaching and mentoring emerging playwrights through the Royal Court Young Writers'...

Go behind the scenes of the Great White Way with this illustrated guide to the Theater District’s hidden history--an essential book for your explorations of the district from a seasoned Broadway guide. Broadway is one of New York’s greatest treasures, and where there is treasure, there is a...

The definitive oral history of the 1967 novel for teens, turned blockbuster film turned Tony-winning musical, and commemorated with a newly opened museum. This groundbreaking story has managed to stay gold for nearly sixty years. *Includes interviews with Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas...

Theatre Work: Reimagining the Labor of Theatrical Production investigates both the history and current realities of life and work in professional theatrical production in the United States and explores labor practices that are equitable, accessible, and sustainable. In this book, Brídín Clements Cotton and Natalie Robin investigate the question of artmaking, specifically theatrical production, as work.

Il nostro corpo racconta molte cose se può manifestarsi con libertà. I pantaloni con cui Marlene Dietrich arrivò a Parigi nel 1930 fecero gridare allo scandalo perché non solo parlavano di una sessualità dominatrice, ma di una donna che attingeva agli stereotipi del potere maschile diventando una vampira di energie invece che una donatrice devota. Il seno turgido che sbocciava dall'abito di Marilyn Monroe mentre cantava al suo amante "Happy Birthday, Mr. President", alludeva a una seduzione di nuovo conio, ribelle alle convenzioni del matrimonio, della ragion di Stato e della donna per bene.

Mention The Phantom of the Opera at a dinner party, and each guest will have his or her own vivid, almost visceral, recollection of the tale of a disfigured musical genius and his unrequited love for a beautiful, young singer. Someone will undoubtedly pantomime the famous scene from the silent era film in which Mary Philbin (as Christine Daae) sneaks up behind the Phantom, while he is playing the organ in his subterranean lair, and unmasks the great Lon Chaney, revealing his horribly disfigured face to the audience and her.

In recent decades its history has been fabricated from modern myth, romantic fiction, and pure fantasy. Now, for the first time, historical researcher and author Michael Paul Mihaljevich has pieced together the real story of the Bird Cage.

Slaves to Fashion is a cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art world. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

Afterlives of Endor offers an analysis of the way early modern English literature addressed the period's anxieties about witchcraft and theatricality. What determined whether or not a demonologist imagined a trial as a spectacle? What underlying epistemological constraints governed such choices and what conceptions of witchcraft did these choices reveal? Pairing readings of demonological texts with canonical plays and poetry, Laura Levine examines such questions.

Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is a witty and thought-provoking play that explores themes of social class, transformation, and the power of language. First performed in 1913, the play remains one of Shaw's most celebrated works, blending comedy with sharp social critique. The story follows Professor Henry Higgins, a phonetics expert, who makes a bet with his friend, Colonel Pickering, that he can transform a poor flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a refined lady simply by teaching her proper speech and manners. Eliza, eager to improve her station in life, agrees to the experiment.