"When I see a thing it is not a play for me, but when I write something that somebody else can see then it is a play for me." —Gertrude Stein In the more than seventy-five plats Gertrude Stein wrote between 1913 and 1946, she envisioned a new dramaturgy, beginning with her pictorial conception of a play as a landscape. She drew into her plays the daily flow of life around her—including the natural world—and turned cities, villages, parts of the dramatic structure, and even her own friends into characters. She made punctuation and typography part of her compositional style and chose words for their joyful impact as sound andwordplay. For Strin, the writing process itself was always important in delevoping the "continuous present" at the heart of her work. Long out of print, Last Opera and Plays again makes available many of Stein's most important and most-produced works. As a special feature, it also included her thought-provoking essay "Plays," in which she reflects on the experience in the theater of seeing and hearing, and on emotion and time. "Now nearly a half century after her deathe," writes Bonnie Marranca in her introduction, "it is indisputable that Gertrude Stein is the great American modernist mind. No American author has been more influential for more generations of artists in the worlds of theater, dance, music, poetry, painting, and fiction."

Shakespearean Music in the Plays and Early Operas is a scholarly treatise written by the British musician and academic Frederick Bridge. His in-depth examination of the use of music in Shakespeare's works and its influence on early operas provides a fresh perspective on the Bard's plays. This book appeals to both Shakespeare enthusiasts and music lovers, giving them unique insights into how these two art forms intertwine.

THE STORIES: PART I: SEYMOUR IN THE VERY HEART OF WINTER. It's Christmas Eve; Viv, a fading actress, is reminiscing about her ex-husband and her life before, to Bob, the man who currently loves her. With a fancy restaurant as her stage, Viv rants a

Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources this philosophical tradition can bring to musicology but those which musicology can bring to philosophy, challenging and refining accounts of narrative, point of view, and the work-performance relationship within both disciplines. She also considers practical problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner's Jewish caricatures and the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, Penner reflects on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of 21st-century audiences.

Michael Ewans explores how classical Greek tragedy and epic poetry have been appropriated in opera, through eight selected case studies. He examines the issues through a comparative analysis of significant divergences of plot, character and dramatic strategy between source text, libretto and opera.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.