Theatre History Studies articles from June 1 2003

Theatre History Studies archives from June 1 2003

The selling of La Cage aux Folles: how audiences were helped to read Broadway's first gay musical.
June 1, 2003... After Hello Dolly! (1964) and Mame (1966) both closed in 1970, Jerry Herman suffered a string of critical and commercial failures that had begun with Dear World (1969) and lasted more than a decade, due in large part to the so-called concept...

Julia Marlowe's Ophelia: a portrait of resistance and failure.
June 1, 2003... In 1904 Julia Marlowe, already an established American star of Shakespearean drama and romantic melodrama, teamed with E. H. Sothern and played Ophelia for the first time, using a text cut by Sothern to highlight his role as Hamlet (See Figure...

Outcast London on the Victorian and Edwardian stage.(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2003... In the nineteenth-century English theater, dramas that promised audiences authentic scenes of London life enjoyed an enormous and enduring popularity. From W.T. Moncrieff's adaptation of Pierce Egan's Tom and Jerry (Adelphi 1821) to such late...

Historical invisibility: the vexatious A. P. Wilson and the Abbey Theatre.
June 1, 2003... From 1914-15 Andrew Patrick Wilson, a journalist/columnist for the Irish Worker, the Socialist organ of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, was also the manager of the Abbey Theatre, as well as a director, actor and the company's...

Community, civility, and citizenship: theatre and indoctrination in the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s.
June 1, 2003... In July 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed the first group of young men into the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a relief organization established as part of the New Deal. In a greeting published in the CCC camp newspaper, Happy...

The gestus of scene design: Mordecai Gorelik and the Theatre Union's production of Brecht's The Mother.
June 1, 2003... Known for his work with the Group Theatre, his metaphorical approach to scene design, and his seminal history of the theatre, New Theatres for Old, Mordecai ("Max") Gorelik was also the first American theatre practitioner to unconditionally...

Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Edited by Kim Matra and Robert A. Schanke. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. pp. x + 404. $60 cloth, $22.95 paper. During my early years in graduate school, I immersed myself in pre-twentieth century dramas written by...

On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Edited by Patricia McDonnell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 2002; pp. xii + 220. $45.00 cloth. A wealth of images--color reproductions of paintings,...

The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual & Other Theories of Origin.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By Eli Rozik. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002; pp. xix + 362. $49.95 cloth. A professor of theatre studies at Tel Aviv University, Eli Rozik has set himself the task of disproving most of the accepted ways of talking about the...

The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2002; pp. 240. $32.95 paperback. The post-Night of the Iguana plays of Tennessee Williams have more often than not been judged harshly by critics and audiences, the majority...

Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By Freddie Rokem. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2000; pp. ix +241. $42.95 cloth. The nature of the relationship between History and Theatre has been an issue of concern in dramatic theory and criticism since (at least) the time...

The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By Dunbar Ogden. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2002; pp. 251. $39.50 cloth. Dunbar Ogden's The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church is, first and foremost, an exploration of medieval dramaturgy. Ogden's evocative...

Bernard Shaw and the French.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By Michel W. Pharand. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2000; pp. xviii + 413. $55.00 cloth. In 1884, while studying French, George Bernard Shaw wrote his first complete work for the stage, a playlet entitled Un Petit...

The New York Concert Saloon: the Devil's Own Nights.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By Brooks McNamara. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. xxi+148. $55 cloth. The concert saloon and related forms of popular entertainment, features of nineteenth-century American culture, are frequently noted in...

The Theatre of Sabina Berman. The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By Sabina Berman. Translation and introduction by Adam Versenyi. Essay by Jacqueline E. Bixler. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. xxvi + 169 pp. $21.00 paper. Actor, director, novelist, poet and journalist...

A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By David Krasner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; pp. xii+370. $35 cloth. In A Beautiful Pageant, David Krasner examines the ways in which dramatists and performers of the early Harlem Renaissance negotiated the pressures of appealing...

Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... By S.E. Wilmer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. 202. $60.00 cloth. Theatre, Society and the Nation surveys seven sites of performance activity over three centuries, which the author, S.E. Wilmer, thinks have defined or...

Teaching Performance Studies.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002; pp. xiii + 290. $25 paper. "None of us follows a single vision; instead, our very visions are products of growth and...

Books received.
June 1, 2003... The listing of a book in this section does not preclude subsequent review. Beckman, Karen. Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. pp. xiii + 239. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Blackmore,...