What is theatre? - Structure of a play - Greek theatre - Roman theatre - Theatre in the Middle Ages - Shakespearean theatre - Theatre of Asia - Royal theatre - Modern theatre - Antirealism - Musical theatre - Actor, playwright and director - Designers and technicians - Critic.

Robert Cohen's Theatre Brief, 10th Edition continues to provide an insiders guide to the world of theatre, where students are given a front-row seat. This lively introduction to theatre offers equal measures of appreciation of theatrical arts and descriptions of the collaborative theatrical crafts. Coverage of design, acting, and directing, as well as photo essays, provide a behind-the-scenes look at professional theatre artists performing their craft. The author illustrates live theatre through more than 250 photographs from five continents, most of them showing recent stage productions, bringing to life many exciting theatre companies and productions.

This lively introduction to theatre offers equal measures of appreciation of theatrical arts, history of performance, and descriptions of the collaborative theatrical crafts. The author's enthusiasm for and knowledge of the current theatre, highlighted by contemporary production shots from around the world, put the students in the front row. The text includes extensive excerpts from seven plays: Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Tyrannos, The York Cycle, Romeo and Juliet, The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Three Sisters, and Happy Days.

Theatre immerses its readers in the world of theatre, giving them in-depth descriptions of many job functions and various aspects of a play's production from beginning to end. Through the coverage of design, acting, and directing, students are given a behind-the-scenes look at professional theatre artists performing their craft. The Photo Essay features that appear in multiple chapters include interviews with well-known figures both onstage and offstage. Conducted personally by the authors, they provide readers with firsthand accounts of what it's like to work in the field. Every culture has developed theatre of some kind, and this edition makes a greater effort to include plays from non-Western countries in its examples. There is also greater attention to individual diversity withing the U.S. theatre community. The authors incorporate more examples of women and ethnic minorities in both onstage and backstage roles, including a new profile on Young Jean Lee, the first Asian American woman to have her work staged on Broadway.

Acting in Musical Theatre is the only complete course in approaching a role in a musical. It is the first to combine acting, singing and dancing into a comprehensive guide, combining what have previously been treated as three separate disciplines. This book contains fundamental skills for novice actors, practical insights for professionals, and even tips to help veteran musical performers refine their craft. Drawing on decades of experience in both acting and teaching, the authors provide crucial advice on all elements of the profession, including: fundamentals of acting applied to musical theatre script, score and character analysis personalizing your performance turning rehearsal into performance acting styles in the musical theatre practical steps to a career. Acting in Musical Theatre’s chapters divide into easy-to-reference units, each containing related group and solo exercises, making it the definitive textbook for students and practitioners alike.

Robert Cohen's Theatre, 10th Edition continues to provide an insider's guide to the world of theatre, where students are given a front-row seat. This lively introduction to theatre offers equal measures of appreciation of theatrical arts, history of performance, and descriptions of the collaborative theatrical crafts. Coverage of design, acting, and directing, as well as photo essays, provide a behind-the-scenes look at professional theatre artists performing their craft. The author illustrates live theatre through more than 300 photographs from five continents, most of them showing recent stage productions, bringing to life many exciting theatre companies and productions. Play excerpts and outlines represent a wide range of theatrical achievement. Highlighted plays in the 10th Edition include: Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Tyrannos, The York Cycle of Medieval Plays, Romeo and Juliet, The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Rover, A Doll’s House, The Three Sisters, and Happy Days.

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in email, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • “Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio—even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories—but first she’d have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She’d have to find her language. Weaving together Hudes’s love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging—narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.

This is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. For years, theater director Bryan Doerries has led an innovative public health project that produces ancient tragedies for current and returned soldiers, addicts, tornado and hurricane survivors, and a wide range of other at-risk people in society. The originality and generosity of Doerries's work is startling, and The Theater of War--wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging--is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked.