theater

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt , 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 386 pages,b&w illustrations. They stand at the apex of the great age of songwriting, the creators of the classic Broadway musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, whose songs have never lost their popularity or emotional power. Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play. Their songs and dance numbers served to advance the drama and reveal character, a sharp break from the past and the template on which all future musicals would be built. Todd S. Purdum's portrait of these two men, their creative process, and their groundbreaking innovations will captivate lovers of musical theater, lovers of the classic American songbook, and young lovers wherever they are. Clean copy.

NY, Metro Books , 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket,178 pages illustrated in color and b&w. A pictorial history of the Broadway musical. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Metro Books , 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 178 pages illustrated in color and b&w. A pictorial history of the Broadway musical. Light edgewear to dust jacket. Clean copy.

Softcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. At a time when few Americans had visited Australia, journalist John Lardner sailed down under with the U.S. armed forces as one of the first American war correspondents in the Pacific theater. With his excellent sense of humor and gift for narrative, Lardner penned vignettes of MacArthur's arrival and his reception in Melbourne and a flight with the daring Dutch flier Capt. Hans Smits. More frequently, Lardner wrote about the ordinary day and the average person. Traveling throughout the country, in Southwest Passage Lardner offers a glimpse of Australia in the 1940s and generates warmth and admiration for World War II fighters in the Pacific, whether Australian, New Zealander, aboriginal, or American. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Bard Graduate Center, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 208 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Although Jane Hading (1859-1940), Lily Elsie (1886-1962), and Billie Burke (1884-1970) gained fame as stage actresses, their popular appeal also rested on their ability to cultivate a glamorous appearance. Their careers illustrate the early transformation of actresses into marketable commodities whose celebrity status depended on the consumption of their images. This celebrity, in turn, was used to market an array of beauty and fashion goods to women striving to emulate them. The three women featured in Staging Fashion exemplify the factors that ensured success for 20th-century actresses. Each of these women was dressed by a leading couturier (or several couturiers), both onstage and offstage. In major cities such as New York, Paris, and London, actresses depended on exquisite, custom-made gowns both to secure principal roles and to maintain popularity. Their physical beauty, which was consistent with elite notions of class and race, was depicted on postcards and in popular fashion and theatre magazines and newspapers. Finally, these actresses developed distinct "personalities," which were conveyed by their stage roles and in numerous photos and articles.

Hardcover. London, Cassell, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 157 pages Hardcover with dust jacket. clean, tight copy. Black and white pictures in center. Dust jacket has light rubbing on fore edge.

Hardcover. New Milford CT, Roaring Brook Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Non-paginated. Hardcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR/ILLUSTRATOR AMY SCHWARTZ ON TITLE PAGE. Full color illustrators. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. New Milford CT, Roaring Brook Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Illustrated in color by Schwartz. This amusing picture book features Darlene, a relatively svelte hippo, and a cast of other dressed animals in three connected stories. With stars in her eyes, Darlene signs up for theater class and lands a role as "the Flood" in Noah's ark. On opening night she enters, entangles her feet in her long gown, and missing her target, flings a basin of water onto the critic in the first row. His review? "?a drenching, yet refreshing experience. Miss Darlene's performance was especially exciting." Two more plays follow, a science fiction drama in which Darlene flubs her lines, and Sleeping Beauty, which finds the hippo falling asleep onstage. The critic raves "A STAR IS BORN," and the story ends with Darlene's contented smile. Brightened with delicate washes, the fine, clean ink drawings create a series of charming, often droll scenes.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, paper-covered boards quarter-bound in cream cloth with gilt lettering to spine, top edge tinted blue, halftone photos of the production, Directed by and starring Anthony Perkins, this play was produced way off-Broadway and revealed that God is a Puerto Rican steambath attendant. Name, date on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 337 pages, b&w illustrations. Still Here is the first full telling of Elaine Stritch's life. Rollicking but intimate, it tracks one of Broadway's great personalities from her upbringing in Detroit during the Great Depression to her fateful move to New York City, where she studied alongside Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, and Harry Belafonte. We accompany Elaine through her jagged rise to fame, to Hollywood and London, and across her later years, when she enjoyed a stunning renaissance, punctuated by a turn on the popular television show 30 Rock. We explore the influential-and often fraught-collaborations she developed with Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and above all Stephen Sondheim, as well as her courageous yet flawed attempts to control a serious drinking problem. And we see the entertainer triumphing over personal turmoil with the development of her Tony Award-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, which established her as an emblem of spiky independence and Manhattan life for an entirely new generation of admirers. Remainder dot on top edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Winnipeg Canada, Blizzard Publishing, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 92 pages. SIGNED BY FINDLEY on title page. Slight wear to dust jacket with old price-sticker to back cover, else a very nice, tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Viking Press, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 79 pages. Illustrated by Arvis Stewart. Music by John Sebastian Brown. Small bookplate on front fly leaf. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, oblong format, 188 pages illustrated in color. Long before television and the internet, entertainment was often a performance at the local grange or Town Hall. Since there wasn't much money for costumes or props, the plays relied on all-purpose scenic backdrops - painted canvases of local scenes and interest. And they were often glorious. Many of these minor masterpieces of vernacular art still survive and are presented in all their glory in this richly illustrated book celebrating the colorful and memorable painted curtains that graced the stages of countless New England towns. A remarkable team of conservators from "Curtains Without Borders" has overcome a century of dirt, damage, and neglect to restore hundreds of these historic theater curtains. This book presents exquisite photographs of these enormous pieces of art that have been hidden away and neglected for too long. Bump to top corner, causing mild crease to pages. Otherwise bright and clean.

Hardcover. NY, Arbor House, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 352 pages with photographs. Biography co-written by the author's brother. The definitive biography of one of America's most celebrated playwrights. Drawing on previously unseen diaries, letters, and interviews, the authors explore the life and work of Williams, from his early years in Mississippi to his landmark plays of the 1950s and 1960s. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 765 pages, b&w illustrations. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life-his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin-Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2014-09-22, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 765 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. College Station TX, Texas A & M University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 174 pages, b&w photos. The show traveled in West Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Eastern Colorado from 1920 to 1945. Clean copy in a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY/London, Theatre Arts/W. Heinemann, reprint, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with faded gilt lettering on spine, 90 pages. Written when Michael Redgrave was at the height of his power and acclaim, The Actor's Ways and Means is a spirited and knowledgeable account of the most influential ideas about the art and craft of acting. Drawing on his own direct experience, Redgrave evaluates the influence of famous actors and directors, from Copeau to Stanislavski, from Meyerhold to Edward Gordon Craig. Illustrated with b&w photos of Redgrave in performance. Checkmark on front flyleaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, red cloth in a worn and chipped dust jacket with closed tears, 191 pages with index. Dr. Worcester presents a theory of satire, surveying the whole field since Dryden's Discourse of the Origin of Satire and drawing illustrations not only from English but from classical, French, German, and American literature. At the same time he makes a penetrating study of irony and its uses. Name on inside front cover otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Pittsburgh PA, GoodKnight Books, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The Art of Selling Movies presents the first-ever look at 60 years of newspaper advertising for motion pictures great and small. These ads created by Hollywood and adapted by local and regional exhibitors motivated patrons to leave their homes, part with precious income, and spend time in the dark. Because of the high stakes involved, theater operators used wildly creative means to make that happen. They made movie advertising equal parts art and psychology, appealing to every human instinct (especially sex) in an effort to push product and keep their theatres in business. From the pen-and-ink masterpieces of the 1920s and 30s to location-specific folk art to ad space jam-packed with enticements for every member of the family, The Art of Selling Movies dissects the psyche of the American movie-going public ... and the advertisers seeking to push just the right buttons.

Hardcover. Pittsburgh PA, GoodKnight Books, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The Art of Selling Movies presents the first-ever look at 60 years of newspaper advertising for motion pictures great and small. These ads created by Hollywood and adapted by local and regional exhibitors motivated patrons to leave their homes, part with precious income, and spend time in the dark. Because of the high stakes involved, theater operators used wildly creative means to make that happen. They made movie advertising equal parts art and psychology, appealing to every human instinct (especially sex) in an effort to push product and keep their theatres in business. From the pen-and-ink masterpieces of the 1920s and 30s to location-specific folk art to ad space jam-packed with enticements for every member of the family, The Art of Selling Movies dissects the psyche of the American movie-going public ... and the advertisers seeking to push just the right buttons.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st US, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, off-white cloth with red and gilt stamping. Tanning to edges of cloth, no markings. A two-act play.

Hardcover. NY, H. Bittner and Company, 1st, 1945, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue buckram stamped with gilt code of arms and lettering on spine. Limited to 1000 copies. A study of an artistic family who created theatrical designs dating from the 1680s to the 1780s under eight names. Illustrated with 53 plates. Small review slip tipped on front fly leaf. Some darkening to covers and spine, internally clean and bright. No dust jacket.