All The World's A Stage

How I Paid For College: A Novel Of Sex, Theft, Friendship And Musical Theatre
Marc Acito

It's 1983 in Wallingford, New Jersey, a sleepy bedroom community outside of Manhattan. Seventeen-year-old Edward Zanni, a feckless Ferris Bueller–type, is Peter Panning his way through a carefree summer of magic and mischief. The fun comes to a halt, however, when Edward's father remarries and refuses to pay for Edward to study acting at Juilliard. Edward's truly in a bind. He's ineligible for scholarships because his father earns too much. He's unable to contact his mother because she's somewhere in Peru trying to commune with Incan spirits. And, as a sure sign he's destined for a life in the arts, Edward's incapable of holding down a job. So he turns to his loyal (but immoral) misfit friends to help him steal the tuition money from his father, all the while practicing for his high school performance of Grease. Disguising themselves as nuns and priests, they merrily scheme their way through embezzlement, money laundering, identity theft, forgery, and blackmail. But, along the way, Edward also learns the value of friendship, hard work, and how you're not really a man until you can beat up your father — metaphorically, that is.

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The Roguish Miss Penn
Emily Hendrickson

Katherine Penn, daughter of a scholar, was fascinated by the theatre. She wrote plays which she longed to see performed, even if that went against her father's strictures. Lord Ramsey was willing to help her make her stage dreams come true--but make-believe love had a surprising way of turning to reality.

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The Phantom Of The Opera
Gaston Leroux

The actors, singers, and patrons of the Paris Opera House say that a ghost haunts the labyrinthine chambers beneath its stage. While there are those who laugh off such superstitions, they always do so nervously, in the bright light of day. Nearly everyone connected with the Opera House in any way has felt the phantom's vague, troubling presence. But beautiful, talented young singer Christine Daae will soon experience a terror far more acute than any vague feeling of unease. For she is about to learn the secret of why the man who has made the tunnels beneath Paris his private domain must forever hide his face behind a mask. Part horror story, part historical romance, and part detective thriller, the timeless tale of a masked, disfigured musical genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera House is familiar to millions of readers, as well as to movie and theatre-goers. At the heart of the story's long-standing popularity lies its questioning of a universal theme: the relationship between outward appearance and the beauty of darkness of the human soul.

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Three-Act Tragedy
Agatha Christie

The novel opens as a theatre programme, with this telling credit: "Illumination by Hercule Poirot." Light must be shed, indeed, on the fateful dinner party staged by the famous actor Sir Charles Cartwright for thirteen guests. It will be a particularly unlucky evening for the mild-mannered Reverend Stephen Babbington, whose martini glass, sent for chemical analysis after he chokes on its contents and dies, reveals no trace of poison. Just as there is no apparent motive for his murder. The first scene in a succession of carefully staged killings, but who is the director?

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Community Theatre
Eugene van Erven

Community theatre is an important device for communities to collectively share stories, to participate in political dialogue, and to break down the increasing exclusion of marginalised groups of citizens. It is practised all over the world by growing numbers of people. Eugene van Erven, one of the world's foremost experts on Asian political theatre, has put together the first comparative study of the work and methodological traditions which have developed in community theatres around the world. It's an incredibly wide ranging study based on van Erven's own experiences working with community theatre groups in six very different countries. Together with a unique video record of van Erven's journey, specially produced to accompany the book, each chapter provides: a sociological impression of the relevant country--a brief history of the community theatre there--a guide to the country's overall arts scene--background of the featured artists--a case study of a specific community theatre project. This introductory guide is an invaluable resource which you can't afford to be without if you're studying or working in the field of community theatre.

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Me And Shakespeare: My Late Life Adventure With The Bard
Herman Gollob

One man's post-retirement passion for the works of history's greatest literary genius becomes an inspiring intellectual and spiritual adventure--and a lesson in the ageless wisdom to be found in literature. In the twilight of a successful career as a book editor, Herman Gollob attended a superb Broadway production of Hamlet with Ralph Fiennes. The experience proved so galvanizing that it ignited a latent passion for literary scholarship and for all things Shakespearean. Shedding the drudgery of fixing halt and lame manuscripts, he engaged in a fever of self-education via a vast array of books, videotapes, performances, and lectures--becoming, as he put it, "an old man made mad by love of Shakespeare." In short order, he became so well versed that he began teaching a popular Shakespeare course for seniors at a small local college in New Jersey. He then made a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. sought out encounters with great actors and directors--including Olympia Dukakis, Michael Kahn, David Suchet, John Barton, and Cicely Berry; took a summer course on Shakespeare at Oxford; and made a pilgrimage to the Globe Theatre in London to see, of course, Hamlet. This late-blooming Bardomania even enriched the growth of his Jewish identity, resulting in a uniquely Hebraic theory about King Lear. In relating this tale of an autodidact's progress, Gollob interweaves his rich family history, personal experience, and past meetings with the great and notorious, including Orson Welles, James Jones, Lee Marvin, Frank Sinatra, Donald Barthelme, James Clavell, Dan Jenkins, Willie Morris, and a host of others. Like Great Books by David Denby, Me and Shakespeare is a memoir that attests to the lifelong power of literature to enrich, enlarge, and exalt. It is, as well, one of the most entertaining and unusual books on Shakespeare ever written.

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Dance With Demons: The Life Of Jerome Robbins
Greg Lawrence

For decades he was one of the most commanding creative forces in America. His work on such shows as On the Town, The King and I, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, and Jerome Robbins's Broadway earned him five Tony Awards and two Academy Awards. His brilliance with the American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet established him as one of America's great ballet masters. But when Jerome Robbins, n Rabinowitz, died at the age of seventy-nine in 1998, he was a haunted man. All of his life, he had struggled with demons: his bisexuality, his Judaism, his often bitter relationship with his parents, his betrayals of others during the McCarthy hearings, and his perfectionism that bordered on the sadistic. He was loved and hated in equal parts; and only now, in this groundbreaking biography by insider Greg Lawrence, based upon two years of research and dozens of interviews with Robbins's family, friends, and colleagues, can the full measure of both the artist and the man be taken. It is a fascinating portrait of light and dark--like its subject, a work rich in complexity.

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Auditioning
Joanna Merlin

Theater veteran and acting teacher Joanna Merlin has written the definitive guide to auditioning for stage and screen, bringing to it a valuable dual perspective. She has spent her career on both sides of the auditioning process, both as an award-winning casting director who has worked with Harold Prince, Bernard Bertolucci, and James Ivory, and as an accomplished actor herself. In this highly informative and accessible book, Merlin provides everything the actor needs to achieve self-confidence and artistic honesty--from the most basic practical tips to an in-depth framework for preparing a part. Filled with advice from the most esteemed people in the business, such as James Lapine, Nora Ephron, and Stephen Sondheim, and charged with tremendous wisdom and compassion, this indispensable resource will arm the reader to face an actor's greatest challenge: getting the part.

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The Intelligencer
Leslie Silbert

On May 30, 1593, London's most popular playwright was stabbed to death. The royal coroner ruled that Christopher Marlowe was killed in self-defense, but historians have long suspected otherwise, given his role as an "intelligencer" in the queen's secret service. In sixteenth-century London, Marlowe embarks on his final intelligence assignment, hoping to find his missing muse, as well as the culprits behind a high-stakes smuggling scheme. In present-day New York, grad student turned private eye Kate Morgan is called in on an urgent matter. One of her firm's top clients, a London-based financier, has chanced upon a mysterious manuscript that had been buried for centuries--one that someone, somewhere is desperate to steal. What secret lurks in those yellowed, ciphered pages? And how, so many years later, could it drive someone to kill? As Kate sets off for England, she receives a second assignment. An enigmatic art dealer has made an eleven-million-dollar purchase from an Iranian intelligence officer. Is it a black-market antiquities deal, or something far more sinister? Like Marlowe, Kate moonlights as a spy--her P.I. firm doubles as an off-theBooks U.S. intelligence unit--and she is soon caught like a pawn in a deadly international game. As The Intelligencer's interlocking narratives race toward a stunning collision, and Kate closes in on the truth behind Marlowe's sudden death, it becomes clear that she may have sealed a similar fate for herself. Propelling us from the shadows of the sixteenth-century underworld to the glitter of Queen Elizabeth's court, from the dark corridors of a clandestine American op-center to the cliffs of Capri, The Intelligencer is at once a murder mystery, a tale of poetic inspiration, and a richly detailed foray into parallel worlds of espionage and political intrigue separated by centuries.

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The Mouser's Tales
C. Glenn Williams

A selection of the Got Theater? Project for their 2004 Children's Theatre Festival! Three world folk tales are adapted in this romp for all ages. In "The Gardener's Ring," a humble gardener is ordered to bring a King's garden back to life - and falls in love with the King's daughter! Then in "The Seven Brothers," seven brothers go swimming and panic when one of them has disappears - but which one? And finally in "The Devil and the Smith," a blacksmith sells his soul to the Devil to become best blacksmith in the world - and then uses his wits to find a way out of the bargain!

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Ghost Light
Frank Rich

There is a superstition that if an emptied theater is ever left completely dark, a ghost will take up residence. To prevent this, a single "ghost light" is left burning at center stage after the audience and all of the actors and musicians have gone home. Frank Rich's eloquent and moving boyhood memoir reveals how theater itself became a ghost light and a beacon of security for a child finding his way in a tumultuous world. Rich grew up in the small-townish Washington, D.C., of the 1950s and early '60s, a place where conformity seemed the key to happiness for a young boy who always felt different. When Rich was seven years old, his parents separated--at a time when divorce was still tantamount to scandal--and thereafter he and his younger sister were labeled "children from a broken home." Bouncing from school to school and increasingly lonely, Rich became terrified of the dark and the uncertainty of his future. But there was one thing in his life that made him sublimely happy: the Broadway theater. Rich's parents were avid theatergoers, and in happier times they would listen to the brand-new recordings of South Pacific, Damn Yankees, and The Pajama Game over and over in their living room. When his mother's remarriage brought about turbulent changes, Rich took refuge in these same records, re-creating the shows in his imagination, scene by scene. He started collecting Playbills, studied fanatically the theater listings in The New York Times and Variety, and cut out ads to create his own miniature marquees. He never imagined that one day he would be the Times's chief theater critic. Eventually Rich found a second home at Washington's National Theatre, where as a teenager he was a ticket-taker and was introduced not only to the backstage magic he had dreamed of for so long but to a real-life cast of charismatic and eccentric players who would become his mentors and friends. With humor and eloquence, Rich tells the triumphant story of how the aspirations of a stagestruck young boy became a lifeline, propelling him toward the itinerant family of theater, whose romantic denizens welcomed him into the colorful fringes of Broadway during its last glamorous era.

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Alas, Poor Yorick
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Alas, Poor Yorick is historical adventure fiction with dramatic interest--it's the "backstory" to Shakespeare's Hamlet--set in Elsinor Castle two decades before the events of the play, and featuring the political affairs and romantic entanglements that will lead inexorably to the events of the Tragedy of the Prince Hamlet. It has treason, murder, illicit love affairs, humor, pathos, and five jesters. And a sense of grim foreboding that mirrors the Bard's own, as one by one, jesters die in mysterious ways. This novel will be extremely popular with the middle-school to college age groups; with all Shakespeare fans; with fans of mysteries, adventure, and historical fiction; and with Yarbro's large loyal following. The author's university degree is in Theater, and her love for the field comes through clearly.

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Much Ado About Murder
Simon Hawke

Fledgling playwright Will Shakespeare and Symington Smythe, ostler and would-be thespian, and are now firmly ensconced in their theater company . . . But due to the plague, all of London's theaters have been closed, its players now broke, forcing our intrepid duo to seek employment in other lines of work--Smythe smithing and Will poeting. Then a murder rocks all of London. A handsome young craftsman kills a wealthy and somewhat mysterious merchant trader in what was apparently an argument over the reputation of the trader's daughter, a beautiful, dark lady to whom he was engaged.

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Return To Me
Lori Donovan

Playwright Ciara Sullivan is about to pen a new ending to a pair of historical murders. While researching the deaths of nineteenth century actress, Maeve Blackwell, and her coal baron son, Mac, she finds herself much closer to her subjects than she ever imagined. Arriving in the past just moments before Mac's death, Ciara saves his life. Suddenly her play about murder and deception has a new plot twist--romance. Mac Blackwell never imagined he'd owe his life to a woman. In fact, he's spent the better part of his thirty-seven years avoiding the gender all together. Common sense tells him Ciara's mysterious appearance points to a Molly Maguire conspiracy. So why is he making a place for her in his home, exposing his family and his heart to certain treachery? And why is he so perilously close to breaking his cardinal rule-never fall in love?

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All Night Awake
Sarah A. Hoyt

A poet with promise and little else, young Will Shakespeare is having a harder time of it in London than he thought he would. Though his contact with the world of faerie has left him with poetry in his blood-and the urgent need to express it--he is overshadowed by the favorite of Elizabeth I: Christopher Marlowe. But Will and his rival have more in common than they think. They can both trace their creative spark back to the world of faerie, back to the same bed-and now Lady Silver, who loves them both still, has come to London. She has come to track down a creature of supernatural might and vaulting ambition. It wants nothing less than to take control of both worlds.

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