Performing in Contemporary Musicals brings into sharp focus the skills performers must possess when tackling shows that are newly written, in development, or somewhere in between. The authors bust myths about contemporary musical theatre and analyze the development timelines of musicals from around the world. They also explore how performers can become invaluable to a creative team by developing the skills needed to move a new musical forward including: contemporary acting and singing techniques, dramaturgy, quickly picking up new material, and collaboration. Each chapter features insightful industry interviews, recommended activities, an extensive reading list, and an online companion for further study. This textbook is the only comprehensive resource that provides an overview of the development process of a new musical while guiding musical theatre performers to be fruitful collaborators in a new works scenario.

In this anthology, theater expert Roger Ellis culls together dramatic scenes and monologues that all deal with spiritual experience. From various religious and non-religious perspectives, the book explores various aspects of spirituality – religious faith, martyrdom, death and afterlife, fate and destiny, mercy, and romantic love. The material comes from contemporary plays by some of the most gifted playwrights – Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, John Patrick Shanley, John Pielmeier, Tammy Ryan, Elie, Wiesel, Karen Sunde, and others. Perfect for high-school through college-age students, as well as for actors and general readers, this volume contains nearly 100 scenes, ranging from comic to serious, grouped in five categories: “Scenes for a Man and a Woman ” “Scenes for Two Women ” “Scenes for Two Men ” “Monologues for Women ” and “Monologues for Men.” In addition to the monologues, Ellis includes notes on staging to help actors and directors bring these scenes to life. Some of the plays sourced for this anthology include The Crucible, Doubt, In the Shape of a Woman, Agnes of God, Epic Proportions, Our Lady of 121st Street, Angels in America, and Affection in Time.

This book analyzes recent physics plays, arguing that their enaction of concepts from the sciences they discuss alters the nature of the decisions made by the characters, changing the ethical judgements that might be cast on them. Recent physics plays regularly alter the shape of space-time itself, drawing together disparate moments, reversing the flow of time, creating apparent contradictions, and iterating scenes for multiple branches of counterfactual history. With these changes both causality and responsibility shift, variously. The roles of iconic scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, are interrogated for their dramatic value, placing history and dramatic license in tension. Cold War strategies and the limits of espionage highlight the emphatically personal involvement of ordinary individuals. This study is vital reading for those interested in physics plays and the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.

Includes the plays A Bitter Herb, Absolution, Identity, The Far Side, Mary Seacole, and Urban Afro-Saxons This second and sister volume to Hidden Gems showcases a further range of plays by Black British writers whose work reaches beyond themes too-often perceived by mainstream theatre commissioning as defining Black people's experiences. The plays, monodrama and libretto represent subject-matter from woman-centred history, revolutionary politics, trans-racial adoption and African-diasporic familial heritage, as contoured by the writers' boundary crossing profiles as poets, playwrights, performers and directors. The accompanying critical introductions are provided by people committed to recognising the aesthetic and political significance of the work, and its necessary inclusion in British theatre and literary history.

Contemporary Queer Plays by Russian Playwrights is the first anthology of LGBTQ-themed plays written by Russian queer authors and straight allies in the 21st century. The book features plays by established and emergent playwrights of the Russian drama scene, including Roman Kozyrchikov, Andrey Rodionov and Ekaterina Troepolskaya, Valery Pecheykin, Natalya Milanteva, Olzhas Zhanaydarov, Vladimir Zaytsev, and Elizaveta Letter. Writing for children, teenagers, and adults, these authors explore gay, lesbian, trans, and other queer lives in prose and in verse. From a confession-style solo play to poetic satire on contemporary Russia; from a play for children to love dramas that have been staged for adult-only audiences in Moscow and other cities, this important anthology features work that was written around or after 2013-the year when the law on the prohibition of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” was passed by the Russian government. These plays are universal stories of humanity that spread a message of tolerance, acceptance, and love and make clear that a queer scenario does not necessarily have to end in a tragedy just because it was imagined and set in Russia. They show that breathing, growing old, falling in love, falling out of love, and falling in love again can be just as challenging and rewarding in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia as it can be in New York, Tokyo, Johannesburg, or Buenos Aires.

A companion volume to Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000, this anthology contains nine emblematic scripts from twentieth and twenty-first century Asian theatre. Opening with a history of modern Asian drama and a summary of the plays and their contexts, it features nine works written between 1912 and 2009 in Japan, China, Korea, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Showcasing fresh contemporary writing alongside plays central to the established canon, the collection surveys each playwright's work, and includes: Father Returns by Kikuchi Kan Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech by Okada Toshiki Sunrise by Cao Yu I Love XXX by Meng Jinghui, Huang Jingang, Wang Xiaoli, Shi Hang Bicycle by O Tae-sok The Post Office by Rabindranath Tagore Hayavadana by Girish Karnad The Struggle of the Naga Tribe by W. S. Rendra Truong Ba's Soul in the Butcher's Skin by Luu Quang Vu The chronological and geographical breadth of the anthology provides a unique insight into modern Asian theatre and is essential to any understanding of its relation to Western drama and indigenous performance.

-- Greg Bak, Early Modern Literary Studies

It is the very nature of representation to be theatrical and self-referential. This book undercuts the fact that all representational knowledge is autonomous and sovereign. At times, theatrical representations can misguide and mislead. Representation can also ineluctably project ones own preferences and preoccupations. Thus, representation and subjective interpretation divulge into myriad domains. This book is concerned with the effects and consequences of representation and its politics. This book examines not only how language as well as representation produce meaning, but also how discursive knowledge connected to power regulates, conducts, and constructs identities and defines the way certain things are thought about practices and are studied. The book takes note of the fact that within the framework of performance, a performative subject does not wear a coherent identity as it is fragmented, decentered, simulated and is unstable, while being both virtual as well as actual. In the field of semiotics, theatre is historically and reciprocally affected by practice, especially within contingent conditions of time. In theatre semiotics, the new image of knowledge is that of turbulence. Here, knowledge is not so much a system as it is a confluence. Carrying this stance further we can say that contemporary Assamese theatre is characterised by shifting counter-voices and sub-textual underpinnings. This act forces reading into two directions: dialogic openness and variability of meaning that question the theatre directors as the only ones who know.