Upcoming Theater Book Releases for November 2011

Welcome to BroadwayWorld.com's new upcoming release calendar for Broadway and theatre related Books for November, 2011. For a complete schedule of upcoming releases as well as searchable databases of thousands of the top theatre books, cds and videos, click here.

Modern Chinese Drama
by Hongfan Zhao, Matthew Truman (translator)
Released on Long River Press on 11/1/11

This is a book for all fans of Chinese theater arts, from Kunqu and Peking Opera to Chinese and Western plays, operas, and stage or variety shows; from the smallest, most intimate neighborhood theaters to China's cutting edge or avante-garde playhouses to its grandest concert halls. Hongfan Zhao examines themes, plots, characters, and all aspects of stagecraft (artistic and technical) in China fro... (more...)

Learning to Live Out Loud: A Memoir
by Piper Laurie
Released on Crown Archetype on 11/1/11

One of Hollywood's most talented and memorable actresses ("The Hustler, Carrie") and three-time Oscar nominee presents an intimate memoir covering her life and career.... (more...)

Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be: The Life of Lionel Bart
by David Stafford, Caroline Stafford
Released on Omnibus Press on 11/7/11

Lionel Bart was a writer and composer of British pop music and musicals, best known for creating the book, music and lyrics for Oliver! He also wrote the famous songs Living Doll (Cliff Richard) and From Russia With Love (Matt Munroe).He was a millionaire aged thirty in the Sixties, bankrupt in the Seventies and died in 1999.In this first revealing biography, the authors gained exclusive access to... (more...)

Boleros for the Disenchanted and Other Plays
by Jose Rivera
Released on Theatre Communications Group on 11/15/11

Three new works from José Rivera, a writer known for his lush language, open heart, and stylistic flirting with the surreal. Boleros for the Disenchanted is the moving story of the playwrights own parents: their sweet courtship in 1950s Puerto Rico, and then forty years later in more difficult times in America. With Brainpeople, Rivera explores the troubled minds of three women in a post-apocalypt... (more...)

Acting Together II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict
by Cynthia Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, Polly O. Walker, Dr. Salomon Lerner Febres
Released on New Village Press on 11/15/11

Acting Together II continues where the first volume left off, presenting more inspiring examples of peace-building performances in conflict-ridden regions. Where the first volume emphasizes theater and ritual's potential for resistance and catharsis in the midst of direct violence and in the aftermath of mass violence, the second volume focuses on performance's ability to bridge gaps and create in... (more...)

Bringing the Body to the Stage and Screen: Expressive Movement for Performers
by Annette Lust
Released on Scarecrow Press on 11/15/11

As stage and screen artists explore new means to enhance their craft, a new wave of interest in expressive movement and physical improvisation has developed. And in order to bring authenticity and believability to a character, it has become increasingly vital for actors to be aware of movement and physical acting. Stage and screen artists - including dancers, clowns, puppeteers, singers, and other... (more...)

Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes
by Matthias Rebstock, David Roesner
Released on Intellect Ltd on 11/15/11

A unique contribution to an emerging field, Composed Theatre explores musical strategies of organization as viable alternative means of organizing theatrical work. In addition to insightful essays by a stellar group of international contributors, this volume also includes interviews with important practitioners, shedding light on historical and theoretical aspects of composed theatre.... (more...)

Theatre for Beginners
by Richard Maxwell
Released on Theatre Communications Group on 11/15/11

Theater is the room where performance happens. Where people sit and watch other people. The moment to moment event that unfolds hinges on our imperfect-ness. . . . Theatre for Beginners is a manual for the actor based in the belief that the person is interesting before the performing happens, and the essence of good stage work is rooted in a constant state of beginning. Richard Maxwell, the dow... (more...)

Costume in Greek Tragedy
by Rosie Wyles
Released on Duckworth Publishers on 11/15/11

This is the first book-length survey of tragic costume to be published for over forty years. The core of the book focuses on tragic costume in its original performance context of fifth-century Athens, but the implications of subsequent uses in Roman and more recent performances are also taken into consideration. Most importantly, the reader is invited to think about how tragic costume worked as a ... (more...)

Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare's Auditory World, Stage and Screen
by Luary Magnus, Walter Cannon
Released on Fairleigh Dickinson University Press on 11/16/11

This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by scholars such as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the acoustic world of the plays involves a real paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about Shakesp... (more...)

The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre
by Stephen Di Benedetto
Released on Routledge on 11/19/11

Di Benedetto considers theatrical practice through the lens of contemporary neuroscientific discoveries in this provoking study, which lays the foundation for considering the physiological basis of the power of theatre practice to affect human behavior. He presents a basic summary of the ways that the senses function in relation to cognitive science and physiology, offering an overview of dominant... (more...)

African Theatre 10: Media and Performance
by James Gibbs, Femi Osofisan, Martin Banham
Released on James Currey on 11/20/11

Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Several of the articles deal with popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, though the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon is not completely neglected. One article addresses the interface between live performance and video (or still photography) and the way popular liv... (more...)

Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance
by Stephanie Leigh Batiste
Released on Duke University Press Books on 11/21/11

Darkening Mirrors analyzes the complicated relationships between African American identity, as reflected in performances, and the forces of imperialist and racial oppression.... (more...)

The Hat Box: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim
by Stephen Sondheim
Released on Knopf on 11/22/11

A new boxed set from Knopf featuring Stephen Sondheim lyric books: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes and Look I Made a Hat: with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes.... (more...)

Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical
by Stuart J. Hecht
Released on Palgrave Macmillan on 11/22/11

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists--from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim--have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience’s aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while corre... (more...)

Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction
by Jonathan Pitches, Sita Popat
Released on Palgrave Macmillan on 11/22/11

This critical introduction to Performance Studies provides undergraduates with an accessible way into terminology and context. Using an innovative tripartite structure that combines the voices of artists, critics and teachers, it addresses a variety of practices moving through body, space, time, technology, interactivity and organization.... (more...)

Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present
by Alison Forsyth, Chris Megson
Released on Palgrave Macmillan on 11/25/11

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. This has led to an astonishing range of performance styles, ways of working and modes of intervention in varied sites of theatrical production. The essays in this collection place this work in context, exploring historical and contempora... (more...)

Acting in Moving-Image Culture
by Joerg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch
Released on Transcript Verlag on 11/30/11

This volume offers transdisciplinary approaches to discuss acting in moving-image culture. It assembles international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art and philosophy, who scrutinie both the actor’s presence and art in analog and digital film from historical, generic, and particularly theoretical perspectives: phenomenology, Deleue studies, new media theory to cog... (more...)

The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage
by Soyica Diggs Colbert
Released on Cambridge University Press on 11/30/11

Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary productio... (more...)

Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire
by Claire Cochrane
Released on Cambridge University Press on 11/30/11

Claire Cochrane maps the experience of theatre across the British Isles during the twentieth century through the social and economic factors which shaped it. Three topographies for 1900, 1950 and 2000 survey the complex plurality of theatre within the nation-state which at the beginning of the century was at the hub of world-wide imperial interests and after one hundred years had seen unprecedente... (more...)

Playwriting Across the Curriculum
by Caroline Jester, Claire Stoneman
Released on Routledge on 11/30/11

This book is a guide to introducing the craft of playwriting into the secondary English curriculum at key stage 3, using the TEEP (Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme) framework. The authors also provide a particular focus on applying this versatile scheme of work to other areas of the curriculum, including Citizenship and PSHE. Playwriting Across the Curriculum also contains schemes of... (more...)

For More Upcoming Books, Click Here