In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for.The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.

This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the Jewish religious repertoire known as the Maftirim, which developed in parallel with "secular" Ottoman court music. Through memoirs, personal interviews, and new archival sources, the book explores areas often left out of those histories of the region that focus primarily on Jewish communities in isolation, political events and actors, or nationalizing narratives. Maureen Jackson foregrounds artistic interactivity, detailing the life-stories of musicians and their musical activities. Her book amply demonstrates the integration of Jewish musicians into a larger art world and traces continuities and ruptures in a nation-building era. Among its richly researched themes, the book explores the synagogue as a multifunctional venue within broader urban space; girls, women, and gender issues in an all-male performance practice; new technologies and oral transmission; and Ottoman musical reconstructions within Jewish life and cultural politics in Turkey today.

Staging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order known as tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a historically multiethnic and cosmopolitan nation. Author Lanlan Kuang unites multimedia ethnographic research and theoretical insights from ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, and cognitive science, with a focus on Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a modern interpretation inserted into the Chinese classical dance and theatrical arts tradition. Staging Tianxia thus aims to redefine Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology, a transdisciplinary field dedicated to studying the texts and art of Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that connected China via the Silk Road with Central Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Staging Tianxia is a careful ethnographic study that looks at the importance of performance tradition and poetics in the arts and aesthetic theory of China.

First published in 2004. English stage comedy has weathered centuries of social and theatrical change. How did it survive? English Stage Comedy 1490–1990 is a unique and beautifully written study of the comedy of the English stage from the Tudor period to the late twentieth century. Organized thematically, it shows how this remarkably enduring genre has dealt with the tensions of social life, using its conventions as tools for social inquiry. Through an examination of comedy Alexander Leggatt demonstrates that an approach through genre, neglected in recent criticism, can have much to say about our current concerns with the relations between literature and society. English Stage Comedy 1490–1990 surveys five centuries of classic comic drama, focusing on major playwrights such as: Shakespeare, Jonson, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Coward, Orton, Ayckbourn and many lesser-known figures.

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the actress begin with the Restoration, this book demonstrates that the girl is actually a well-documented category of performer and a key participant in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It explores evidence of the girl actor in archival records of payment, eyewitness accounts, stage directions, paintings, and in the plays and masques that were explicitly composed for girls, and, in some cases, by them. Contradicting previous scholarly assumptions about the early modern stage as male-dominated, this evidence reveals girls' participation in medieval religious drama, Tudor civic pageants and royal entries, Elizabethan country house entertainments, and Stuart court and household masques. This book situates its historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including girls as singers, translators and authors. By examining the impact of the girl actor on constructions of girlhood in the work of Shakespeare – whose girl characters register and evoke the power of the performing girl – Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' dramatic, musical and literary performances actively shaped medieval and early modern culture. It shows how the active presence and participation of girls shaped medieval and Renaissance culture, and it reveals how some of its best-known literary and dramatic texts address, represent, and reflect upon girl children, not as an imagined ideal, but as a lived reality.

A step-by-step guide to the whole process of putting on a musical, placing a firm emphasis upon good organisation and careful planning. This book describes all the elements involved including: how to choose the right show, budgets and schedules, auditions, rehearsals and performances. There are also sections on set designs, costumes, sound, lighting and publicity.

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller’s 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans). The author elucidates Schiller’s appropriation of themes from Euripides’s Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of “sublime sanctity,” which transforms Joan’s image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will. Finding the best-known works of his time about her – Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orléans and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part I – utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi’s opera Giovanna d’Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans). In turn, the book’s final chapter examines Shaw’s Saint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright’s vociferous complaints about Schiller’s “romantic flapdoodle” belie a surprising affinity for Schiller’s approach.