Showing titles in Theater

Lydia (Aja Naomi King) and Henry (Jason Butler Harner)’s dinner guests (Madeline Brewer and William Jackson Harper) are about to arrive when Henry’s spontaneous marriage proposal threatens to burn the evening to a crisp. Wine bottles and years of unspoken tensions are uncorked, and before the evening is through, Lydia must confront her long-held fears and feelings if she’s going to commit to a future with Henry.

This comprehensive course is designed for actors aiming to master the diverse range of accents found across the United Kingdom and Ireland, offering an extensive foundation in both technical and cultural aspects of accent work, while maintaining accessibility for the novice learner. With an emphasis on authentic performance, the program provides step-by-step guidance on dialect production, using a wide variety of oral posture guidance, pronunciation exercises, and practical lexicon that actors can apply directly to their work.

Praised as “a breakneck, hair-raising comic tour of the contemporary American male psyche” by The New York Times, Drinking in America, is a gritty, muscular restaging with star Andre Royo (The Wire) bringing to vivid life more than a dozen colorful characters, each in the throes of intoxication. Written and originated by three-time Obie Award winner Eric Bogosian, this critically acclaimed work takes on a new persona in our present day, with terms like toxic masculinity and male fragility at the forefront of the zeitgeist.

From his acclaimed stage triumphs to his legendary onscreen work in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, Sir Patrick Stewart has captivated audiences around the world and across multiple generations with his indelible command of stage and screen. Now, he presents his long-awaited memoir, MAKING IT SO, a revealing portrait of an artist whose astonishing life—from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire, England to the heights of Hollywood and worldwide acclaim—proves a story as exuberant, definitive, and enduring as the author himself.

Sir Laurence Olivier. Orson Welles. Vivien Leigh. Joan Plowright. Kenneth Tynan. When these champions of the theatre get together to rehearse Ionesco's Rhinoceros, mere mortals best step aside. With lightning wit and scathing insight into the true nature of genius, Austin Pendleton's new play opens the private worlds of these very public people, exposing their warmth, their egos, and their glittering madness.

Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth-century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What Makes It Great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the Great American Songbook, bringing many of our favorite classics to life.

In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children

From award-winning actress, audiobook narrator, and performance coach Marni Penning comes a powerful new tool for calming anxiety and nerves for actors and presenters! The Penning Method for the Panicked Actor™ introduces performers of all disciplines—whether stage, television, film, public speaking, or musical—to 10 simple markings that can help you analyze your script in record time so you can relax and play in your auditions.

In this audio-original production, author Richard Fawkes traces the development of the musical, highlighting composers and lyricists including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim. Presented by the vivacious singer Kim Criswell, star of Cats, and including nearly 100 famous musical extracts.

Here is Neil Simon’s acclaimed semi-autobiographical Eugene Trilogy, including Brighton Beach Memoirs. In the first installment of the trilogy, 14-year-old Eugene is preoccupied by his passion for the Yankees and his lust for his beautiful cousin. Biloxi Blues, The second hilarious installment of the Eugene Trilogy follows our naïve hero and his sadistic drill sergeant through boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Kenichi Zenimura–known as “Zeni”–loved baseball. As a young man in the 1920s he developed a Nisei baseball league in Fresno, California, and later organized barnstorming tours that brought the likes of Babe Ruth to the West Coast and Japan. And despite being sent to a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona during World War II, he knew that somehow, baseball would be the key to improving the lives of his fellow detainees.

While there are plenty of books about the mechanics of writing, this is the first time an insider has detailed the invaluable TV executive perspective. As key pieces of the entertainment puzzle, executives hold institutional wisdom that seldom gets disseminated outside network walls. The Executive Chair breaks down the business from the gatekeeper’s point of view, illuminating the creative process used by those who ultimately make the decisions.

Fasten your seatbelts for a rapid-fire, sophisticated thrill ride that propels you through one of the most infamous financial scandals in history! With a spicy blend of humor, pathos, and music, the big biz machinations of Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andy Fastow are laid bare as razzle-dazzle entertainment. Lucy Prebble’s Enron casts a shocking new light on today’s economy and how we got here.

Lillian Hellman was a giant of 20th-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.

Amber Iman’s powerful concert melds her onstage work in shows such as Shuffle Along and Soul Doctor with her work offstage as a founding member of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition and Black Women on Broadway. Using personal stories and songs, she takes the audience on a journey through love, rejection, race, artistry, and heartbreak in a performance that challenges, encourages, and uplifts, reminding us that we have the capacity to move forward from any setback.

Unique insights into Shakespeare, from one of the world’s most revered theatre directors. Who was the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Why does Shakespeare never go out of date? How should actors approach Shakespeare’s verse? In this short but immensely wise book, visionary theatre director Peter Brook debates the questions that are central to our understanding of Shakespeare, and revisits the plays he has directed with notable brilliance, including King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Professional stage actors are expected to have ready knowledge of a multitude of unwritten yet well-established protocols. Traditionally, this knowledge was passed along from one generation of stage actors to the next via word of mouth, or were learned by having one’s missteps corrected—until now.

You start with a vision, and you deliver a compromise. You want a play to be challenging, ambitious, nuanced and complicated. You also want it to sell tickets. You want to make art, and you know you're in show business. These are some of the balancing acts that the National Theatre and this book are about. This is the inside story of 12 years at the helm of Britain's greatest theatre. It is a story of lunatic failures and spectacular successes.

For more than 50 years Michael Green's The Art of Coarse Acting has been essential reading for anyone with a passion for theatre, both amateurs and professionals alike. This acerbic yet affectionate work remains one of the funniest books about acting ever written. It's a "[W]ickedly irreverent" (The Stage) exposé which ridicules pretentiousness, pokes fun at incompetence and disaster and generally lays bare life backstage. Even after all this time it remains true that however much the theatre may change, coarse actors don't.

Book Three of the Fitzkee Trilogy: MAGIC BY MISDIRECTION An Extended Explanation of the Magician's Application of the Psychology of Deception. Possibly the most popular of Fitzkee's Trilogy, Magic By Misdirection applies the psychology of deception to the art of magic. The finest minds of magic have recognized it as an important and monumental work on the subject. It makes clear the psychological devices and methods you can use to deceive your audience: Disguise Attention Control Simulation Dissimulation Interpretation Maneuver Pretense Ruse Anticipation Diversion Monotony Premature ...