Broadway, once upon a time. A place where people buy tickets at the box office, with cash; where patrons dress for theatre, with no sneakers, no water bottles, and no backpacks; and the only text messages are the ones put there by the playwright. A place where iconic legends of stage and screen can be found in plain view, smiling politely or egotistically preening. Where three dollars will get you a balcony seat at the biggest hit—or the lowliest flop—in town. And a place where an innocent teenager from the suburbs can buy a ticket, slip through the stage door, and wander o'er the threshold into the magical world backstage. Steven Suskin introduces Broadway, once upon a time, in Offstage Observations: Tales of the Not-So-Legitimate Theatre. The drama critic and noted chronicler of Broadway takes the reader through a decade's worth of adventures, working his way from a menial pencil sharpener for producer David Merrick toward a career as a full-fledged manager, producer, and drama critic. The book follows the author's progress from the wintry night after his sixteenth birthday, when he unexpectedly finds himself alone on the empty stage of a Broadway theatre, peering out at the silent, empty auditorium lit only by a solitary ghost light to the matinee eight summers later when he finds himself accidentally and uncomfortably acting in a Broadway musical, bombarded by roars of laughter from a houseful of playgoers. A keen observer of the impertinent with an ear for amusing anecdotes, whimsical curiosities, and exaggerated tales of life upon the wicked stage, Suskin draws a portrait of a not-so-long-ago theatre world that has all but vanished.

Interactional Justice explores how defence lawyers accomplish their role in interaction with others and highlights the ways in which they do loyalty work – constructing and conveying loyalty in emotionally and interactionally constraining situations. By drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with lawyers, this sociological study brings their loyalty work to life and reveals to the reader the unwritten rules of emotional interactions. It presents how defence lawyers socially construct their duty of loyalty by negotiating informal and implicit professional and social expectations. This accomplishment demands emotion work and face work in order to perform a role which includes defending clients accused of heinous crimes and “losing” the majority of cases. As the defence team is central to this, the ways of doing teamwork are illustrated. Teamwork is also found to be essential between legal professionals to ensure that a criminal trial runs smoothly. All of this takes place within an overarching framework – the emotional regime of law – which aims to uphold the illusionary dichotomy between rationality and emotionality thus quietening the role of emotions. Loyalty and teamwork are features of many professions, workplaces, and aspects of social life making this book an essential tool for understanding strategies for their accomplishment. Focusing on courtroom emotions and interactions, the book suggests how trials can be made more user-friendly and provides guidance for newly qualified legal professionals. The use of ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews provides scholars and students in the social sciences, teaching, law, and medicine with a colourful monograph which reveals and explains emotion and interaction rules. It also makes this book a useful tool for teaching and understanding qualitative research methods.

Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.

This volume brings together experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the China field, from cultural studies to history to musicology, to make a timely intervention—from the historical demise of enuchism to male cross-dressing shows in contemporary Taiwan—to inaugurate a subfield in Chinese transgender studies.

In an age of ubiquitous music and countless new songs releasing every minute, the Great American Songbook endures. After all, the Songbook—that sprawling canon of popular songs, standards, and show tunes from roughly the 1920s through the 1950s—is a foundational text of American pop music. Rare indeed is the song that doesn’t in some way draw on this magnificent corpus, and rare is the person who hasn’t heard at least a few of its most enduring melodies. Nonetheless, the Songbook is broader and deeper than most listeners can imagine, and on the margins, the question of whether this or that song should be included is the source of regular arguments among scholars and buffs alike. Attempting to plumb its depths can be a daunting prospect. Enter Steven Suskin, who has been writing about music since the days that Rodgers, Arlen, and Berlin still roamed the streets of Manhattan. In this carefully curated and cheerfully opinionated guidebook, Suskin surveys 201 of the most significant selections from the Songbook, ranging from celebrated masterpieces to forgotten gems. Year by year, he puts songwriters and their contributions in their context, and explains what makes each song such a distinctive treat—whether felicitous melody, colorful harmony, compositional originality, or merely the sheer, irreducible joy of listening to it. Old and new favorites await all readers of this painstakingly compiled, enthusiastically written catalog.

The Tony Award–winning director gathers memories of people, productions, and problems surmounted from his fifty-year career in this one-of-a-kind how-to handbook. What do directors do? Jack O’Brien, the winner of Tony and Drama Desk Awards and the former artistic director of San Diego’s historic Old Globe theatre, describes it like this: “You stand before a situation in which something is presented to you. You’re afforded a challenge. Like catching an enormous ball. And you respond. You come up with a vision of some kind. That is, if you respond to the material at all, and one must, or it’s doomed. You sort of feel that since you relate to the material at hand, you might as well try to be helpful.” In Jack in the Box, O’Brien’s follow-up to his memoir Jack Be Nimble, the director collects stories from the many productions he has worked on, the great talents he encountered and collaborated with (including Tom Stoppard, Mike Nichols, Jerry Lewis, Marsha Mason, and many others), and the choices he made, on the stage and off, that have come to define his career. With humor, warmth, and contagious excitement, O’Brien takes the reader by the shoulder, pulls them in, and tells them how to become a director—or, at the very least, relates an unfailingly honest story of how he did.