Results by title
967 books match the query 'Theater' and 17 start with h
HK Phil 50+
Jimmy Shiu
Hong Kong University Press, 2025
A symphony of history: celebrating fifty years of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.
In the 1970s, as Hong Kong’s economy began to soar, the public started to place greater emphasis on cultural and artistic pursuits. The Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (HK Phil) became a professional ensemble in 1974, providing high-quality musical entertainment for the public while also promoting classical music and nurturing the next generation of young musicians.
Upon obtaining his master’s degree in the late 1980s, author Jimmy Shiu joined the orchestra as audience development manager from 1988 to 1994, working alongside the ensemble to cultivate Hong Kong’s musical landscape. On the orchestra’s golden jubilee, Shiu offers a warm narrative that reflects on fifty significant moments both on and off stage.
The HK Phil is celebrated as one of Asia’s premier classical orchestras. During its forty-four-week season, the orchestra performs over 150 concerts in the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and other international cities, reaching more than 200,000 audience members. In 2019, the HK Phil became the first Asian winner of the “Orchestra of the Year” award by the renowned British magazine Gramophone. While its history dates to the establishment of the Sino-British Orchestra in 1947, the HK Phil was officially registered in 1957 and became a professional orchestra in 1974. The 2023/24 season marked its fiftieth professional season.
Harlem's Theaters
A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939Adrienne Macki Braconi
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Honorable Mention, 2016 Errol Hill Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theater, Drama and/or Performance
Based on a vast amount of archival research, Adrienne Macki Braconi’s illuminating study of three important community-based theaters in Harlem shows how their work was essential to the formation of a public identity for African Americans and the articulation of their goals, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Macki Braconi uses textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and audience reception to examine the complex dynamics of productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Even as these theaters demonstrated the extraordinary power of activist art, they also revealed its limits. The stage was a site in which ideological and class differences played out, theater being both a force for change and a collision of contradictory agendas. Macki Braconi’s book alters our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, the roots of the Civil Rights movement, and the history of community theater in America.
Harold Pinter
The Theatre of PowerRobert Gordon
University of Michigan Press, 2013
The latest volume in the Michigan Modern Dramatists series offers an authoritative but accessible look at Harold Pinter, one of the greatest and most influential postwar British playwrights and author of classic works such as The Birthday Party and The Homecoming. Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 for his remarkable body of work and plays that "uncover the precipice under everyday prattle and force entry into oppression's closed rooms."
Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power focuses on the playwright's continuously innovative experiments in theatrical form while tracing the recurrence of a consistent set of ethical and epistemological concerns. Exploring important plays from across this prolific writer’s career, author Robert Gordon argues that the motivating force in almost all of Pinter's drama is the ceaseless desire for power, represented in his work as a compulsive drive to achieve or maintain dominance—whether it be the struggle to defend one's own territory from intruders, the father's battle with his sons to assert his patriarchal position in the family, the manipulation of erotic feelings in the gender warfare that motivates sexual relationships, the abuse of brute force by dictatorships and democracies, or simply the masculine obsession to dominate. Gordon demonstrates the adventurousness of Pinter's experimentation with form while at the same time exposing the ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic preoccupations that have persisted with remarkable consistency throughout his career.
Harriet Bosse
Strindberg's Muse and InterpreterCarla Waal
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990
Haunted City
Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in PhiladelphiaChristian DuComb
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Mummers have long worn blackface makeup during winter holiday celebrations in Europe and North America; in Philadelphia, mummers’ blackface persisted from the colonial period well into the twentieth century. The first annual Mummers Parade, a publicly sanctioned procession from the working-class neighborhoods of South Philadelphia to the city center, occurred in 1901. Despite a ban on blackface in the Mummers Parade after civil rights protests in 1963–64, other forms of racial and ethnic impersonation in the parade have continued to flourish unchecked. Haunted City combines detailed historical research with the author’s own experiences performing in the Mummers Parade to create a lively and richly illustrated narrative. Through its interdisciplinary approach, Haunted City addresses not only theater history and performance studies but also folklore, American studies, critical race theory, and art history. It also offers a fresh take on the historiography of the antebellum minstrel show.
Hearing Difference
The Third Ear in Experimental, Deaf, and Multicultural TheaterKanta Kochhar-Lindgren
Gallaudet University Press, 2006
Kochhar-Lindgren then charts a genealogy of the theater of the third ear from the mid-1800s to the 1960s in examples ranging from Denis Diderot, the Symbolists, the Dadaists, Antonin Artaud, and others. She also analyzes the work of playwright Robert Wilson, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and Asian American director Ping Chong. She shows how the model of the third ear can address not only deaf performance but also multicultural performance, by analyzing the Seattle dance troupe Ragamala’s 2001 production of Transposed Heads, which melded classical South Indian use of mudras, or hand gestures, and ASL signing.
The shift in attention limned in Hearing Difference leads to a different understanding of the body, intersubjectivity, communication, and cross-cultural relations, confirming it as a critically important contribution to contemporary Deaf studies.
Hemispheric Blackface
Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the AmericasDanielle Roper
Duke University Press, 2025
Hemispheric Waves
Havana's Avant-Garde Theatre, 1965-2000Eric Mayer-García
University of Iowa Press, 2027
Here for the Hearing
Analyzing the Music in Musical TheaterMichael Buchler and Gregory J. Decker, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Winner of the Society for Music Theory's Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award
This book offers a series of essays that show the integrated role that musical structure (including harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, form, and musical association) plays in making sense of what transpires onstage in musicals. Written by a group of music analysts who care deeply about musical theater, this collection provides new understanding of how musicals are put together, how composers and lyricists structure words and music to complement one another, and how music helps us understand the human relationships and historical and social contexts. Using a wide range of musical examples, representing the history of musical theater from the 1920s to the present day, the book explores how music interacts with dramatic elements within individual shows and other pieces within and outside of the genre. These essays invite readers to consider issues that are fundamental both to our understanding of musical theater and to the multiple ways we engage with music.
Hey Presto!
Swift and the QuacksHugh Ormsby-Lennon
University of Delaware Press, 2011
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans
Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American StageHeather S. Nathans
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Using an eclectic range of sources including theatrical reviews, diaries, letters, cartoons, portraiture, tax records, rumors flying around the tavern, and more, Heather S. Nathans has listened for the echoes of vanished audiences who witnessed and responded to these stereotypes onstage, from the earliest appearance of Shylock on an American stage in 1752 to Jewish theater artists on the eve of the Civil War. The book integrates social, political, and cultural histories, with an examination of those texts (both dramatic and literary) that shaped the stage Jew.
Highbrow/Lowdown
Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle ClassDavid Savran
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Historians on Hamilton
How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America's PastRomano, Renee C
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Historians on Hamilton brings together a collection of top scholars to explain the Hamilton phenomenon and explore what it might mean for our understanding of America’s history. The contributors examine what the musical got right, what it got wrong, and why it matters. Does Hamilton’s hip-hop take on the Founding Fathers misrepresent our nation’s past, or does it offer a bold positive vision for our nation’s future? Can a musical so unabashedly contemporary and deliberately anachronistic still communicate historical truths about American culture and politics? And is Hamilton as revolutionary as its creators and many commentators claim?
Perfect for students, teachers, theatre fans, hip-hop heads, and history buffs alike, these short and lively essays examine why Hamilton became an Obama-era sensation and consider its continued relevance in the age of Trump. Whether you are a fan or a skeptic, you will come away from this collection with a new appreciation for the meaning and importance of the Hamilton phenomenon.
Hollywood on Location
An Industry HistoryGleich, Joshua
Rutgers University Press, 2019
How Sondheim Found His Sound
Steve Swayne
University of Michigan Press, 2010
---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: A History
"Sondheim's career and music have never been so skillfully dissected, examined, and put in context. With its focus on his work as composer, this book is surprising and welcome."
---Theodore S. Chapin, President and Executive Director, The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization
"What a fascinating book, full of insights large and small. An impressive analysis and summary of Sondheim's many sources of inspiration. All fans of the composer and lovers of Broadway in general will treasure and frequently refer to Swayne's work."
---Tom Riis, Joseph Negler Professor of Musicology and Director of the American Music Research Center, University of Colorado
Stephen Sondheim has made it clear that he considers himself a "playwright in song." How he arrived at this unique appellation is the subject of How Sondheim Found His Sound---an absorbing study of the multitudinous influences on Sondheim's work.
Taking Sondheim's own comments and music as a starting point, author Steve Swayne offers a biography of the artist's style, pulling aside the curtain on Sondheim's creative universe to reveal the many influences---from classical music to theater to film---that have established Sondheim as one of the greatest dramatic composers of the twentieth century.
Sondheim has spoken often and freely about the music, theater, and films he likes, and on occasion has made explicit references to how past works crop up in his own work. He has also freely acknowledged his eclecticism, seeing in it neither a curse nor a blessing but a fact of his creative life.
Among the many forces influencing his work, Sondheim has readily pointed to a wide field: classical music from 1850 to 1950; the songs of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood; the theatrical innovations of Oscar Hammerstein II and his collaborators; the cinematic elements found in certain film schools; and the melodramatic style of particular plays and films. Ultimately, Sondheim found his sound by amalgamating these seemingly disparate components into his unique patois.
How Sondheim Found His Sound is the first book to provide an overview of his style and one of only a few to account for these various components, how they appear in Sondheim's work, and how they affect his musical and dramatic choices.
How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today
Simon Goldhill
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe.
One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.
Humanitarian Performance
From Disaster Tragedies to Spectacles of WarJames Thompson
Seagull Books, 2026
A groundbreaking lens on humanitarianism, which reframes global humanitarian responses to war and disaster through performance studies, revealing how aid, media, and public attention transform crisis into spectacle on a world stage.
As the world is challenged by a state of constant conflict and by disasters, both natural and manmade, support communities endeavour through humanitarianism to overcome human suffering and help to build more peaceful and safe futures. Humanitarian Performance argues that the humanitarian project—from its history and rationale to its contemporary practice—can be productively explored through the critical lens of performance studies. Using the outpouring of international support for projects to benefit survivors of the Asian tsunami, the War in Kosovo, and the crisis in Darfur as case studies, this timely volume explores humanitarian attention to these narratives and the stories of tragedy and survival that emerge. With the peculiar focus and international audiences that the media brings to local tragedies, these contemporary disasters—and the humanitarianism that they elicit—become a performance on the world stage.