Your one-stop classical workshop At last, over 175 of Shakespeare's finest and most performable monologues taken from all thirty-seven plays are here in two easy-to-use volumes (Men and Women). Selections travel the entire spectrum of the great dramatist's vision, from comedies, wit and romances, to tragedies, pathos and histories. Soliloquy is an excellent and comprehensive collection of Shakespeare's speeches. Not only are the monologues wide-ranging and varied, but they are superbly annotated. Each volume is prefaced by an informative and reassuring introduction, which explains the signal... View More...
England experienced something of a social revolution in the years from the early 16th century to the Civil War. This work seeks to add a new dimension to the discussion of this phenomena by focusing on the emerging role and function of social behaviour as a means of signalling social identity and rank. Noting the even greater emphasis placed on manners, customs and ordinary behaviour during that time period, Darryll Grantley demonstrates the interrelation of two key elements - education and drama - in the reconstruction of social identity. View More...
Anyone who cares about opera will find The Ultimate Art a thoroughly engaging book. David Littlejohn's essays are exciting, provocative, sometimes even outrageous. They reflect his deep love of opera--that exotic, extravagant, and perpetually popular hybrid performing art form--and his fascination with the many worlds from which it sprang. From its seventeenth-century beginnings, opera has been decried by its detractors for its elitism, its artifice, its absurd costliness, and its social irrelevance. But Littlejohn makes us see that opera embraces an extraordinary amount of intense human emoti... View More...
An introduction to modern stage directing. Focuses on fundamentals, with an emphasis on the director's interaction with actors. The material is organized in a step-by-step teaching format, from explanations to demonstrations and exercises. View More...
Few actresses command such unqualified affection as Angela Lansbury. For more than fifty years she has appeared in classic films (The Manchurian Candidate), in musicals (Gypsy, Sweeney Todd), and, of course, on television for twelve seasons in Murder, She Wrote. She has won five Tonys and has been nominated for three Oscars and twelve Emmys.Balancing Act is Lansbury's triumphant story, in which she has cooperated with noted theater writer and critic Martin Gottfried. Lansbury became established by her late teens in films like The Picture of Dorian Gray. While her career flourished, she was fru... View More...
Written for the adult beginner, Ballet Basics is a well-illustrated introduction to the fundamentals of ballet technique. The text also provides an overview of the history of ballet and introduces students to the world of ballet. View More...
An invaluable guide for both casual opera fans and aficionados, 100 Great Operas is perhaps the most comprehensive and enjoyable volume of opera stories ever written. From La Traviata to A da, from Carmen to Don Giovanni, here are the plots of the world's best-loved operas, told in an engaging, picturesque, and readable manner. Written by noted opera authority Henry W. Simon, this distinctive reference book contains act-by-act descriptions of 100 operatic works ranging from the historic early seventeenth century masterpieces of Monteverdi to the modern classics of Gian-Carlo Menotti. In addi... View More...
Speak. Laugh. Cry. Shout. Scream. Sing. Whether you're an actor or a singer, your voice is called upon to do many things. But how do you keep your voice healthy while satisfying these demands? Theatre voice specialist Joan Melton is uniquely qualified to show how. She maintains that the training of singers and actors should be similar. Her groundbreaking book outlines a course of study that integrates basic elements of singing technique into the whole range of theatre voice training. The physicality of Melton's approach addresses all the issues of concern for professional voice users in any fi... View More...
This collection of thirty years of interviews with America's only Nobel Prize dramatist records his encounters with the press and gives a striking portrait of the man and the process of his public mythologizing. A profoundly private individual, O'Neill struggled throughout his life to overcome his intense discomfort with oral discourse as he responded to the probing of interviewers wishing him to discuss a wide range of social, political, literary, and theatrical issues. Collected in their entirety for the first time, these interviews begin in 1920, when O'Neill was thirty-two. Serious America... View More...