This book presents the history and records of New York's theater stage from 1750 to 1860. It is a valuable resource for historians, theater enthusiasts, and cultural scholars interested in understanding the development of American theater and performing arts in New York. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Describes the growth and development of theatre in the United States. Documents and commentary are arranged into chapters on business practice, acting, theatre buildings, drama, design, and audience behavior.

This collection uncovers connections and coincidences that challenge the old stories of pioneering performers who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It investigates songlines, drama, opera, music theatre, dance, and circus—removing traditional boundaries that separate studies of performance, and celebrating difference and transformation in style, intention, and delivery. Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks—the material remains—demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often beenconceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns—ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students in theatre, music, drama studies, and cultural history.

As America passed from a mere venue for English plays into a country with its own nationally regarded playwrights, William Dunlap lived the life of a pioneer on the frontier of the fledgling American theatre, full of adventures, mishaps, and close calls. He adapted and translated plays for the American audience and wrote plays of his own as well, learning how theatres and theatre companies operated from the inside out. Dunlap's masterpiece, A History of American Theatre was the first of its kind, drawing on the author's own experiences. In it, he describes the development of theatre in New York, Philadelphia, and South Carolina as well as Congress's first attempts at theatrical censorship. Never before previously indexed, this edition also includes a new introduction by Tice L. Miller.

The geographic range of this study is the British American colonies, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Savannah, in the Georgia colony on the continent, and the British West Indies."--BOOK JACKET.