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Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford (1902–1986) declared in her 1977 autobiography, “The theatre has been my life.” Crawford was notoriously circumspect about her private life, and only now, with Milly S. Barranger’s insightful biography, is her full story revealed.

A major Broadway producer in an era when women producers were exceedingly rare, Crawford found unprecedented success with the plays of Tennessee Williams, including The Rose Tattoo and Sweet Bird of Youth, but her enduring legend is as a musical producer, having brought Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus, Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon to the stage. Her commercial success, though, was balanced with the founding of studios that would enable actors to explore their art outside the strictures of commercial theater. She cofounded the Group Theatre with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, the American Repertory Theatre with Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne, and the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis, but her idealism was constantly frustrated by unfulfilled artistic promises from her male counterparts and by the chronic shortage of funding for the nonprofit enterprises.

As Barranger traces Crawford’s career as an independent producer, she tells the parallel story of American theater in the mid-twentieth century, making A Gambler’s Instinct both an enjoyable and informative biography of a remarkable woman and an important addition to the literature of the modern theater.

Once labeled the “lot that laugher built,” the Hal Roach Studios launched the comedic careers of such screen icons as Harold Lloyd, Our Gang, and Laurel and Hardy. With this stable of stars, the Roach enterprise operated for forty-six years on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system during a golden age of cinema and gained notoriety as a producer of short comedies, independent features, and weekly television series. Many of its productions are better remembered today than those by its larger contemporaries. In A History of the Hal Roach Studios, Richard Lewis Ward meticulously follows the timeline of the company’s existence from its humble inception in 1914 to its close in 1960 and, through both its obscure and famous productions, traces its resilience to larger trends in the entertainment business.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the motion picture industry was controlled by an elite handful of powerful firms that allowed very little room for new competition outside of their established cartel. The few independents that garnered some measure of success despite their outsider status usually did so by specializing in underserved or ignored niche markets. Here, Ward chronicles how the Roach Studios, at the mercy of exclusive distribution practices, managed to repeatedly redefine itself in order to survive for nearly a half-century in a cutthroat environment.

Hal Roach’s tactic was to nurture talent rather than exhaust it, and his star players spent the prime of their careers shooting productions on his lot. Even during periods of decline or misdirection, the Roach Studios turned out genuinely original material, such as the screwball classic Topper (1937), the brutally frank Of Mice and Men (1940), and the silent experiment One Million B.C. (1940). Ward’s exploration yields insight into the production and marketing strategies of an organization on the periphery of the theatrical film industry and calls attention to the interconnected nature of the studio system during the classic era. The volume also looks to the early days of television when the prolific Roach Studios embraced the new medium to become, for a time, the premier telefilm producer.

Aided by a comprehensive filmography and twenty-seven illustrations, A History of the Hal Roach Studios recounts an overlooked chapter in American cinema, not only detailing the business operations of Roach’s productions but also exposing the intricate workings of Hollywood’s rivalrous moviemaking establishment.

Dramaturg Jane Barnette has put together an essential guide for theatre scholars and practitioners seeking to understand and participate in the process of adaptation for the stage. Employing the term “adapturgy”—her neologism for the art of adaptation dramaturgy—Barnette redefines the dramaturg’s role and thoroughly refutes the commonplace point of view that adapted works are somehow less creative than “original” plays.
 
The dual nature of dramaturgy and adaptation as both process and product is reflected in the structure and organization of the book. Part 1 explores the ways that linking adaptation to dramaturgy advances our understanding of both practices. Part 2 demonstrates three different methods—each grounded in a detailed case study—for analyzing theatrical adaptations. Part 3 offers concrete strategies for the dramaturg: dramaturgy for the adapted script; the production dramaturgy of stage adaptations; and the role of the dramaturg in the postmortem for a production. Rounding out the book are two appendixes containing interviews with adapters and theatre-makers and representative program notes from different play adaptations.
 
Plays adapted from literature and other media represent a rapidly growing part of the theatre. This book offers both practical and theoretical tools for understanding and creating these new works.