English Theater

When the Spotlight Fades by Susan Marie Manzke Gwenn Nichols is a young, attractive real estate agent who has been unlucky in love. Though always a loyal friend and generous to a fault when it comes to men, she often tends to be suspicious and wary. Randal Cochran is a theater director who has achieved a remarkable degree of success early in his career. And with his overwhelming good looks and arrogant magnetism, Randal is one of Wisconsin's most eligible bachelors. This unlikely couple meet at an audition for a local amateur production that Randal is directing. But the fire ignited in ...

A series of essays about the craft of acting, the various major techniques actors use, and some information about a specific technique that makes acting fun, exciting and a joy to engage in, without the self-imposed suffering actors sometimes inflict on themselves.

Amid the imperial vestiges of old Europe, Kayne Sorensen, Nick Sechi and Rebecca Quinto, face a brutal oligarch who sits at the center of a spider web of international intrigue, terror and murder controlling the forces of change on a continent rich in history and centuries of diversity. Will democracy die in the darkness of corruption and persecution of minorities or will the sacredness of human rights prevail? Amid the swirling Danube waterways and bucolic Alpine valleys, a vacation turns into a rescue mission where the allegiances of essential allies are obscured by a shroud of mystery ...

Portraits While Portraits takes place in a modern law firm with recognizable surroundings, its collection of characters are just as tragic as those vagabonds, kings, prostitutes, puppets, and clowns who search for meaning in an absurd world. It questions our values and illusions as it forces us to ask who are the real winners and losers as we pass through an existence none of us understand. Portraits peels away the masks of conventionality through a quirky host that invites us to attend Bernie Geldmann's birthday party. The party is in the firm's conference room which has two portraits ...

Three theatrical adaptations of ancient stories: Agamemnon A queen, her son, and his teacher await the return of their king after ten years of brutal war. Gilgamesh The oldest story in the world, in which a king finds and loses a great friend, and then sets off in search of an answer to the question of eternal life. The Golem In 17th-century Prague, a rabbi and his family turn to ancient mysticism in a desperate attempt to protect their community from approaching violence.

True's theatrical skills land her in hot water as she and Michael pursue a serial killer who calls himself The Ring Master.

Informative and entertaining to older and young adults alike, this biography of Giuseppe Verdi, translated from the original Italian, was written by a contemporary of Verdi one year after the great composer’s death. Filled with anecdotes about the maestro, the book presents not only the details of Verdi’s life and accomplishments, but also lessons to be learned by young people from his example of diligence, hard work, humility and simplicity. More than 30 pictures have been added throughout the original work to help bring this inspiring story to life.

Four original, full-length plays: The King of Infinite Space In the ruins of an old prison at the edge of a landscape blasted by war, teenagers enact the story of the previous generation’s struggle for survival. Scenes from a Broken Hand A young man inherits an old car from his activist parents and drags his best friend on a cross-country journey in search of meaning and understanding. Motherland A teacher in a small Slovak town tries to free herself from old ways of thinking and living in the wake of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of Communism. The Wind on the Water A Jewish ...

A once-aspiring Broadway playwright of the 1950s, Mark Gessel, now 88, looks back on his life from the dayroom of a New Jersey nursing home. While his body may be infirm, his mind is still razor-sharp and brimming with stories from the heyday of New York City’s cultural scene in the middle of the twentieth century. While old age has made it difficult for Mark to physically write his stories, he tells them with passion, humor and self-reflection to his dutiful son, who gives him a computer to make recording them easier. The white lights of Broadway illuminate Mark’s story of youthful ...

Chad, the man with the most convenient super power ever devised by an author of fiction, and his posse of, "lovely ladies", have returned! On their quest to save the universe, Chad expands his super harem even further, and gains more powers with which to combat the forces of evil...

There is no shortage of humour in Broadway, Jeeves?, an elegantly observed journal of a year in the life of the musical play by Jeeves, written and directed by Sir Alan Ayckbourn and composed by Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, in which Jarvis starred in America.

Beginning in January 2001, the listener can enjoy a detailed account of this acclaimed production as it moves from Pittsburgh to Toronto and....Will it ever get to Broadway?

August Wilson (1945-2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic everyday voice of black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from both students and some teachers, August dropped out. However, he continued reading and educating himself independently.

Helen Hayes, acclaimed "First Lady of the American Theatre", has been on stage, screen, and television for more than fifty years. In that time she moved among the world's most famous and talented: actors, film stars, writers, businessmen. She speaks with wit, wisdom, and candor on topics both public and private.

It was in Brooklyn, New York, in 1883 that William F. Cody - known across the land as Buffalo Bill - conceived of his Wild West show, an "equestrian extravaganza" featuring cowboys and Indians. The idea took off. For four months in 1885, the Lakota chief Sitting Bull appeared in the show. Blood Brothers tells the story of these two iconic figures through their brief but important collaboration.

When John, a nine-year-old boy from 1966, hears his own voice whisper in his head, it ultimately leads to a psychotic break and the truth behind the visions in his mind. Meanwhile, Edward, another nine-year-old boy from 1914, is trapped by the tragic circumstances of his family’s secrets. Somehow, their lives are linked by tragedy, redemption, pain, and triumph in a 109-year-long journey that will take a toll on them both, teach them about a bond stronger than time, and change the future for so many others along the way.

In the fall of 1943, armed with only his notebooks and pencils, Time and Life correspondent Robert L. Sherrod leapt from the safety of a landing craft and waded through neck-deep water and a hail of bullets to reach the shores of the Tarawa atoll with the US Marine Corps. Living shoulder to shoulder with the marines, Sherrod chronicled combat and the marines' day-to-day struggles as they leapfrogged across the Central Pacific, battling the Japanese on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

There are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill - the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays - more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early modern English. Why did this happen, and how? Ranging ambitiously across four continents and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global.

In Yankee Doodle Dandy, the first book on Cohan in fifty years, author Elizabeth T. Craft situates Cohan as a central figure of his day. Examining his multifaceted contributions and the various sociocultural identities he came to embody, Craft shows how Cohan and his works indelibly shaped the American cultural landscape. Informative and engaging, this book offers rich listening for Broadway musical aficionados as well as scholars of musical theater and American cultural history.

Quarantine is an adaptation for the theater by E. Thomalen of Albert Camus' The Plague translated by Stuart Gilbert. It is a play in four acts and begins with the observation of rats dying, ending with "freedom" because of the lifting of the quarantine. Not everyone finds freedom to his liking. The characters capture the angst, boredom, grief, heroism, spiritual questioning, villainy, courage and longing brought on by the quarantine and the plague.

Double, double, bard in trouble. Mob will catch him in a couple... Okay, the mobsters looking for Daniel still hadn't found him. That was the good news. Bad news? The net was tightening - and Daniel was running out of places to hide inside the Dawnlight Forest in the World of Chains. His skills and achievements as a bard did not help avoid attention - quite the opposite, in fact.