This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.

Creating Musical Theatre features interviews with the directors and choreographers that make up today's Broadway elite. From Susan Stroman and Kathleen Marshall to newcomers Andy Blankenbuehler and Christopher Gattelli, this book features twelve creative artists, mostly director/choreographers, many of whom have also crossed over into film and television, opera and ballet. To the researcher, this book will deliver specific information on how these artists work; for the performer, it will serve as insight into exactly what these artists are looking for in the audition process and the rehearsal environment; and for the director/choreographer, this book will serve as an inspiration detailing each artist's pursuit of his or her dream and the path to success, offering new insight and a deeper understanding of Broadway today. Creating Musical Theatre includes a foreword by four-time Tony nominee Kelli O'Hara, one of the most elegant and talented leading ladies gracing the Broadway and concert stage today, as well as interviews with award-winning directors and choreographers, including: Rob Ashford (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying); Andy Blankenbuehler (In the Heights); Jeff Calhoun (Newsies); Warren Carlyle (Follies); Christopher Gattelli (Newsies); Kathleen Marshall (Anything Goes); Jerry Mitchell (Legally Blonde); Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon); Randy Skinner (White Christmas); Susan Stroman (The Scottsboro Boys); Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys); and Anthony Van Laast (Sister Act).

This comprehensive work is truly the first textbook in the field of dramaturgy. Most of the material-much of it by leaders in all areas of the theater-was commissioned for this collection, rather than being reprinted. Its currency and importance cannot be overestimated. A review of the history of dramaturgy as a profession, together with its European antecedents, gives students a sense of historical context. Selections from respected and recognized names in theater provoke student interest and communicate the benefits of those experts' experiences.

The Dark Theatre is an indispensable text for activist communities wondering what theatre might have to do with their futures, students and scholars across Theatre and Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Social Ecology. The Dark Theatre returns to the bankrupted warehouse in Hope (Sufferance) Wharf in London’s Docklands where Alan Read worked through the 1980s to identify a four-decade interregnum of ‘cultural cruelty’ wreaked by financialisation, austerity and communicative capitalism. Between the OPEC Oil Embargo and the first screening of The Family in 1974, to the United Nations report on UK poverty and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, this volume becomes a book about loss. In the harsh light of such loss is there an alternative to the market that profits from peddling ‘well-being’ and pushes prescriptions for ‘self-help’, any role for the arts that is not an apologia for injustice? What if culture were not the solution but the problem when it comes to the mitigation of grief? Creativity not the remedy but the symptom of a structural malaise called inequality? Read suggests performance is no longer a political panacea for the precarious subject but a loss adjustor measuring damages suffered, compensations due, wrongs that demand to be put right. These field notes from a fire sale are a call for angry arts of advocacy representing those abandoned as the detritus of cultural authority, second-order victims whose crime is to have appealed for help from those looking on, audiences of sorts.

First published in 1985, this is a reissue of the seminal text on the work of Jerzy Grotowski and Laboratory Theatre recognised as being one of the most influential and important studies of the Polish theatre practitioner. In 1984 Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre closed down after twenty-five years of ceaseless experimentation pushing at the boundaries of the nature of theatre. From tiny beginnings in provincial Poland, Grotowski's influence spread to Eurpoe and the United States, fuelled first by the international tours of his remarkable company and then by 'paratheatrical' participatory projects which attracted adherents all over the world. This study of his work remains one of the most important and thorough examinations of the history, theory, and post-theatre work of this most influential of theatre practitioners.

Meyerhold on Theatre brings together in one volume Vsevolod Meyerhold's most significant writings and utterances, and covers his entire career as a director from 1902 to 1939. It contains a comprehensive selection from all published material, unabridged and translated from the original Russian, updated and supplemented with a critical commentary relating Meyerhold to his period and eye-witness accounts describing all his productions. The book is illustrated with photographs of Meyerhold's designs and productions. Within this diverse collection of sometimes dense, sometimes lyrical, and always fascinating writings, Meyerhold emerges from this book as a forerunner of such directors as Brecht, Piscator, Planchon and Brook, a relentless enemy of naturalism and a supreme exponent of total theatre whose influence continues to be felt throughout the theatre of today. This fourth edition features a new introduction by Prof. Jonathan Pitches, which helps to demystify some of the terminology Meyerhold and his associates used, and indicates the fundamental connection between culture and politics represented in his life and art.

W. B. Yeats is recognised globally as one of the most significant poets of the past century. And yet, in his Nobel address, he singled out his work in the theatre as his main accomplishment. Yeats on Theatre restores Yeats not only a playwright, but as a writer and thinker who, over forty years, produced a body of theory covering all aspects of theatre, including the possibilities of performance space, the role of the audience and the nature of tragedy. When read as whole, in conjunction with his plays, letters, and extensive manuscript materials, Yeats's theatre writings emerge as a radical, cohesive, theatrical aesthetic, at odds with – and in advance of – the theatre of his time. Ultimately, the Yeats who takes shape in Yeats on Theatre is an artist who thinks through theatre, providing us with an urgently needed reassertion of the value of theatre as embodied thought.