THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

{"title":"Pageant By Joan FitzPatrick Dean (review)","authors":"David J. Eshelman","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932182","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Pageant</em> By Joan FitzPatrick Dean <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David J. Eshelman </li> </ul> <em>PAGEANT</em>. By Joan FitzPatrick Dean. Forms of Drama Series. London: Methuen, 2021; pp. 177. <p>Pageants are large-scale scripted events designed to appeal to, include, and build communities. Joan FitzPatrick Dean’s book serves as an introduction to the pageant form, with three detailed analyses of pageants in history. This historical study focuses on British and US examples. Dean’s exploration spans centuries, with key examples including the Noah pageants of the Middle Ages, <em>A Pageant of Great Women</em> and other suffrage pageants of the early 1900s, and the <em>Isles of Wonder</em> that opened the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In each case, she provides abundant description and situates performances within the larger context of pageant history and theory, studying language, structure, and production elements. This book is important because it brings attention to a theatrical form that <strong>[End Page 250]</strong> has been largely ignored by critics since the early twentieth century. <em>Pageant</em> is a welcome addition to the sparse number of recent studies such as David Glassberg’s <em>American Historical Pageantry</em> (1990) and Dean’s own <em>All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry</em> (2014). Dean’s published work makes her the expert in the field. <em>Pageant</em> differs from her previous publication in that it discusses the form more broadly, but this broadness goes perhaps too far. While she makes apt use of the categories of “hegemonic” and “counterhegemonic,” I would have preferred a stronger argumentative thrust. However, I am intensely grateful for her work.</p> <p>Among <em>Pageant</em>’s strengths is the introduction, which details the form. Dean lays out features that separate the pageant from traditional stage plays: qualities such as “short shelf life” and the tendency to be “performed outside purpose-built theaters” (2); “straightforward” plotting, presentational style, and its emphasis on amateur performance (4); and a dependence on singing (7). These traits are tantalizing and point to innovative ways of doing performance. Dean’s representative performances cover key historical points typically cited in pageant studies—the medieval period and the turn of the twentieth century—along with the more recent Olympics example. Medieval pageants, or Corpus Christi plays, were religious dramas commonly performed at festivals by working-class laymen. The turn of the twentieth century is significant because it marked a spike in popularity of the pageant. Dean begins her analysis of this period with a discussion of British dramatist Louis Napoleon Parker and US playwright Percy MacKaye. Both were established “pageant-masters,” meaning that they toured their resp","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber (review)","authors":"Ryan McKinney","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929521","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Evita</em> by Andrew Lloyd Webber <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ryan McKinney </li> </ul> <em>EVITA</em>. Book and lyrics by Tim Rice. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Directed by Sammi Cannold. American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts. June 16, 2023. <p>As audience members settled into their seats for the American Repertory Theater’s revival of <em>Evita</em>, a white, shimmering ball gown hung suspended over the Loeb Drama Center stage, floa ing with ethereal life, though unfilled by a human form. The musical’s <strong>[End Page 106]</strong> opening voiceover announcing the 1952 death of Eva Duarte de Perón rang out across the theatre, and then the dissonant chords of a requiem shattered the ensuing brief silence. A chorus of Argentines processed onto the stage, grieving the loss of Argentina’s First Lady, the suspended iconic gown serving as the only visual reference of her legacy. Who or what was being mourned here? A political figu e? A humble woman? A controversial criminal? A beloved icon? These questions remained at the forefront of this stunningly directed, performed, and sung revival of <em>Evita</em>.</p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>Shereen Pimentel (Eva), Omar Lopez-Cepero (Che), and the company of <em>Evita</em>. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios.)</p> <p></p> <p>Originally released as a concept album in 1976, <em>Evita</em> marks one of the first collaborations between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Later produced as a stage musical in the West End in 1978 and on Broadway in 1979, <em>Evita</em> served as a star-vehicle for its leading ladies, Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone, respectively. These original productions, both directed by Hal Prince, and their associated cast recordings made artistic, design, and musical choices that have become embedded in the fabric of <em>Evita</em>. While the ART production honored Prince’s original vision, it also strove to reimagine <em>Evita</em>—the musical <em>and</em> the woman—by creating a piece of musical storytelling that tangled with class, humanity, and memory.</p> <p>Based on an earlier 2019 production in the City Center Encores! series, the ART production featured many returning cast and artistic team members, including its director, Sammi Cannold, who staged this production with a great deal of detail, thoughtfully foregrounding the theme of memory. The musical begins with Eva’s death, but the timeline then leaps backward to Eva’s humble beginnings and progresses from there in a sung-through narrative that details her life. These unfolding memories and events are filte ed through the eyes of the musical’s narrator, Che, an anti-Perón revolutionary who serves as Eva’s dramatic foil. Cannold embraced this memory framework to clarify not only Eva’s own story but also that of the mystical figu e of Che. Al","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mussolini's Theatre: Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics by Patricia Gaborik (review)","authors":"Alessandro Clericuzio","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929528","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Mussolini’s Theatre: Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics</em> by Patricia Gaborik <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Alessandro Clericuzio </li> </ul> <em>MUSSOLINI’S THEATRE: FASCIST EXPERIMENTS IN ART AND POLITICS</em>. By Patricia Gaborik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp. 312. <p>While much has been written about fascism and cinema, architecture, and literature, theatre studies has only recently offered new insights into Italy’s <em>ventennio</em>, the dark years of dictatorship that ended with the Allied invasion of Sicily during World War II. This is the task undertaken by Patricia Gaborik in <em>Mussolini’s Theatre</em>, a must-read for anyone interested in Italian studies or in the intersection between politics and drama. While sidestepping the concept of Benito Mussolini as actor—e.g., the mesmerizing frontman with powerful eyes and dramatic body language—this study explores lesser-known avenues such as those of the dictator-as-spectator, critic, impresario, playwright, and censor. All these roles no doubt had to do with his exercise of power, which means that the connections between thespian aesthetics and politics (and therefore history) are of major import.</p> <p>Gaborik investigates the role of theatre in the personal and professional life of Il Duce, starting <strong>[End Page 119]</strong> from his tastes as a theatregoer and then as prime minister. His favorite writers for the stage had to embody certain sentiments—apart from being “on his team”—meaning that they had to show respect and admiration for Blackshirt philosophy. Gabriele D’Annunzio and George Bernard Shaw, with their ideals of the Superman, for instance, met with Mussolini’s approval. Luigi Pirandello’s theatre, which played between reality and imagination, and his belief in the possibility of building alternative worlds appealed to Mussolini’s self-centered view of life and government. More significantly, in the case of Pirandello, who was highly estimated abroad, Mussolini used the artist as a cultural ambassador for fascist propaganda. Gaborik demonstrates the important role theatre played in telegraphing the Mussolini government’s beliefs abroad.</p> <p>Il Duce was also a meticulous censor, and he banned or heavily edited works that did not meet his criteria. Delving into archives, memoirs, and current scholarship, Gaborik manages to present a thorough reconstruction of the activities of theatre censorship, taking considerable note of the many contradictions of a difficult and at times ambiguous practice. For instance, she discusses the ways Mussolini was aided in this endeavor by Leopoldo Zurlo, whose task was to approve, reject, or suspend plays. This latter case was applied when “any determination was considered too ‘sensitive.’ It was a strategy that amounted to ignoring the problem and hoping i","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Torera by Monet Hurst-Mendoza (review)","authors":"Weston Twardowski","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929513","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Torera</em> by Monet Hurst-Mendoza <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Weston Twardowski </li> </ul> <em>TORERA</em>. By Monet Hurst-Mendoza. Directed and choreographed by Tatiana Pandiani. Alley Theatre, Houston. May 17, 2023. <p>When Elena María Ramírez (Jacqueline Guillén) and Tanok Cárdenas (Jesse Castellanos) ran onto the stage at the opening of <em>Torera</em>, the Alley Theatre’s world premiere production of Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s new play, the gender expectations and social roles that formed the core tension of the show were immediately established. Elena, dressed in a child’s white peasant dress, rapidly climbed a knotted rope representing an orange tree. Tanok, in a boy’s private school uniform, sat in a swing across from Elena. Although a projection had informed the audience that the year was 1992, the costumes could easily have been mistaken for those of a century earlier. The interplay between the potentially period dress and the contemporary setting signaled the importance of tradition in the play: in the Yucatán, history, tradition, culture (and cultural roles) matter. The costuming and the scene’s blocking worked in tandem to define the gender roles assigned to the two principal characters throughout their ensuing journey.</p> <p><em>Torera</em> arrived at the Alley after COVID-19 delays. It had been in development for six years, with readings or workshops at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference, the Public Theater, Long Warf Theatre, Alley Theatre, and elsewhere. The center of the show is Elena, whom we see at ages 12, 20, and 28 as she navigates her upbringing as the daughter of a poor maid, Pastora Ramírez (Maria Elena Ramirez), who lives in the house of a wealthy retired torero (bullfighter), Don Rafael Cárdenas (Eliud Garcia Kauffman). Don Rafael trains his son, Tanok, to follow in his footsteps, but it is Elena whose greatest ambition is to enter the arena. While the driving action of the plot is Elena’s quest to become a torera, a family drama plays out as well: unbeknownst to Elena, she is the illegitimate daughter of Pastora and Don Rafael, and the sexual attraction she and her half-brother Tanok share causes tension in their “fused-at-the-heart” relationship.</p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>Jacqueline Guillén (Elena), José José Arrieta Cuesta (Ensemble), and Jesse Castellanos (Tanok) in <em>Torera</em>. (Photo: Lynn Lane.)</p> <p></p> <p>The script demands physicality, and Tatiana Pandiani, who was credited as both director and choreographer for the Alley production, blended movement and dance to create a visually rich production. Pandiani added short dances and movement sequences into each scene transition to help the production flow across time and space. Occasionally these sequences were led by the named characters","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Parade by Alfred Uhry (review)","authors":"I. B. Hopkins","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929522","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Parade</em> by Alfred Uhry <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> I. B. Hopkins </li> </ul> <em>PARADE</em>. Book by Alfred Uhry. Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Michael Arden. New York City Center, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, New York. May 3, 2023. <p>Time moves peculiarly in Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s sobering <em>Parade</em>, which was revived on Broadway in 2023 for the first time since its debut fizzled out after only eighty-five regular performances in 1998–99. Every day seems to be Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, as the sensationalized story of Leo Frank unfolds over several years and the audience’s sense of what precisely is being commemorated thickens. The major drama-turgical challenge of its ripped-from-the-headlines plot remains the fact that many theatregoers will already know the outcome: an antisemitic mob brutally lynched Leo Frank in 1915. The success of City Center’s revival is owed in part to the celebrity status of lead Ben Platt, who along with co-star Micaela Diamond gave a commanding vocal performance. More fundamentally, however, director Michael Arden’s meticulous attention to thematic cyclicality and innovative commitment to treating the musical as a ritual service of remembrance account for the widespread acclaim it enjoyed.</p> <p>Uhry grew up in the Atlanta Jewish community, where, as the playwright describes, Leo Frank’s name remained verboten decades after the tragedy. The victim was accused, convicted, and later exonerated of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 14-year-old white girl who worked in the factory he <strong>[End Page 108]</strong> oversaw. According to Uhry, it was precisely the untellable quality of the story that drew his fascination and ultimately served as the seed for the musical. Indeed, his narrative bears out this emphasis as it highlights systems of oppression—populist yellow journalism, the court’s racist and coercive use of chain gangs, absolutist political bosses, and the sacralization of white womanhood—rather than excoriating individual villains. Actual historical figu es do populate the stage, but apart from Leo (Platt) and his wife Lucille (Diamond), Uhry’s storytelling subordinates their personal heroism or culpability to the conditions that made possible the murder of an innocent man.</p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>“The Old Red Hills of Home,” featuring the company of <em>Parade</em>. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)</p> <p></p> <p>Playing out on Dane Laff ey’s uncrowded set, Arden’s stripped-down staging embraced this structural critique. As the cast gathered along the perimeter of a bare platform, they took a breath in view of the audience before beginning the Prologue (“The Old Red Hills of Home”). This gesture to the artists’ labor in rehearsing such a grim spectacle preceded the char","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces by Joanne Tompkins (review)","authors":"Sarah Bay-Cheng","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929525","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces</em> by Joanne Tompkins <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sarah Bay-Cheng </li> </ul> <em>VISUALISING LOST THEATRES: VIRTUAL PRAXIS AND THE RECOVERY OF PERFORMANCE SPACES</em>. By Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, and Liyang Xia. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; pp. 211. <p>Over the past twenty years, practices associated with the digital humanities have become more common in theatre and performance studies, as scholars engaged modes of research, analysis, and publication beyond the printed text. Even prior to widespread digital tools, theatre historians drew on communication technologies—photography, radio, film, video—to capture, analyze, replay, and convey past performances. Each technological advance added new dimensions to the multisensory experience of performance, including sound and movement captured in increasing detail and scope. Resources such as Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library, theatre documentaries circulating on VHS, or a variety of bootlegs illicitly copied and recopied for theatre history classes added to the formal and informal networks of theatre history recordings. With the advent of digital recordings, the internet, and virtual environments, both the documentation and scholarship circulated more broadly.</p> <p>Yet, even as theatre recordings proliferated throughout the twentieth century, the discourse around them focused primarily on their lack of fidelity to the original performances. In the early 2000s, this emphasis began to change as scholarly narratives drew attention to the role that performance recordings and reenactments play as evidence in historical theatre narratives. Books ranging from Diana Taylor’s <em>The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas</em> (2003) to Toni Sant’s <em>Documenting Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving</em> (2017) explore how digital technologies create different kinds of performance records. The last ten years have seen the most significant shifts, as theatre scholars engaged the digital humanities to create resources beyond the printed book in digital projects such as Jennifer Roberts-Smith’s Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) and the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP), among others. Published in 2021, Miguel Escobar Varela’s <em>Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research</em> provides an excellent overview with detailed explanations of this emerging field’s best practices. Drawing on both his own work and others’, Varela documents how researchers integrate digital methods and technologies into the study of theatrical performance.</p> <p>The coauthored book <em>Visualis","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Performing Sphagnum: Ecological Ethics in Cryptic's Below the Blanket","authors":"Angenette Spalink","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929511","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p><i>Below the Blanket</i> (2019), a performance installation at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, staged the enmeshed multispecies relationships present in the Flow Country, the largest blanket bog system in the world. While <i>Below the Blanket</i> represented the Flow Country through various artistic mediums, the physical matter—the sphagnum and peat mosses—that comprises the bog was conspicuously absent. Using critical plant theory, ecodramaturgies, and performance theory, this article grapples with the ethics of staging ecological matter such as mosses within the colonial contexts of the botanic garden and provides insights into the complex ethics of ecological performance.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kpop by Jason Kim (review)","authors":"Kyungjin Jo","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929523","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Kpop&lt;/em&gt; by Jason Kim &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Kyungjin Jo &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;KPOP&lt;/em&gt;. Book by Jason Kim. Music and lyrics by Helen Park and Max Vernon. Directed by Teddy Bergman. Circle in the Square Theatre, New York. November 27, 2022. &lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;KPOP&lt;/em&gt; opened in 2017 as an immersive off Broadway production, curious audience members moved from room to room in a two-story building in Hell’s Kitchen that had been reimagined as a K-pop factory. The show allowed them to voyeuristically observe the manufacturing process for K-pop idols and eavesdrop on their private conversations. K-pop was portrayed as a peripheral subculture waiting to win US acceptance and approval, and the audience became a focus group empowered to share their input on how K-pop could successfully cross over to the US market. Five years later, in 2022, &lt;em&gt;KPOP&lt;/em&gt; proudly heralded K-pop as a “global phenomenon” as it ventured onto Broadway. This hybrid production, which blended elements of a backstage musical and a K-pop concert, explored K-pop idols’ struggles and triumphs and celebrated K-pop as a representation of Korean identity and culture, staking its claim on the Great White Way.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;KPOP&lt;/em&gt; follows the journey of K-pop idols signed to the fictional Korean label RBY—female solo singer MwE, the boy group F8, and the girl group RTMIS—as they prepare for their international debut in New York City. The central tension is MwE’s emotional breakdown as she verges on quitting during dress rehearsal, revolting against Ruby, the label’s dominating CEO and her surrogate mother, in an attempt to pursue her artistic and personal independence. &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 110]&lt;/strong&gt; Through fla hback scenes, the audience learns about MwE’s eighteen-year career progression, from her audition as an 8-year-old K-pop trainee for the RBY label to her rise as a global star.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;br/&gt; Click for larger view&lt;br/&gt; View full resolution F8. &lt;p&gt;and RTMIS perform “Blast Off” in &lt;em&gt;KPOP&lt;/em&gt;. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;One of two subplots highlights F8’s internal strife. Brad, a mixed-race Korean American who joined the group for the US tour, is shunned for being “not Korean enough.” In another plotline, RTMIS’s relentless pursuit of perfection pushes them to the edge of disbandment as they struggle to endure their grueling training regimen. The idols ultimately persevere through the chaotic dress rehearsal and successfully make their New York debut. The show’s final twenty minutes are a spectacular concert.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In performance, &lt;em&gt;KPOP&lt;/em&gt; presented K-pop as a platform to joyfully celebrate Korean and Korean American identities. The upbeat and lively electronic dance track “This Is My Korea” introduced K-pop as an exuberant medium to claim and affir Korean culture. The lyrics exclaimed, “This is my Korea / This is my ","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett (review)","authors":"Elizabeth A. Osborne","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929535","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal&lt;/em&gt; by Kate Dossett &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Elizabeth A. Osborne &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;RADICAL BLACK THEATRE IN THE NEW DEAL&lt;/em&gt;. By Kate Dossett. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020; pp. 338. &lt;p&gt;Kate Dossett’s &lt;em&gt;Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal&lt;/em&gt; joins the work of scholars like Rena Fraden, Glenda Gill, and Adrienne Macki Braconi that delves into the Federal Theatre Project’s (FTP) Negro Units. Widely celebrated by scholars as socially progressive, examinations of the Negro Units frequently appear in articles and book chapters rather than in complete monographs. As such, extant research tends to focus on single units, people, or productions—often Harlem’s behemoth, popularly known as Unit 891, and famous productions like Orson Welles’s “voodoo &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.” In contrast, Dossett’s extensive study offers a scrupulously researched examination of the archival remnants of the 1930s using a multifaceted historiographic approach. Rather than focusing only on staged productions, she traces the lengthy and often fraught process of creation, including work that has never reached the stage. To do so, Dossett centers on what she calls “black performance communities”—a concept based on Richard Barr’s “temporary social organization” of performance, which incorporates the creative team, performers, audience, and the surrounding community as a temporary and fluid group. This approach allows her to consider the many invisibilized influences on a performance text. As Dossett argues, the FTP’s manuscript collection serves as “an archive of black agency, for they not only record how and when white mastery was contested within and beyond the theatre, they also document the scope and ambition of black creativity” (6–7).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Dossett organizes &lt;em&gt;Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal&lt;/em&gt; into two primary sections, both of which include multiple chapters. The first two chapters focus on how Black performance communities operated outside of predominantly white theatre institutions. They functioned in ways that enabled these institutions to represent Black life on US stages, whether they were adapting white-authored plays for Negro Unit performances, writing manuscripts that were ultimately left unstaged, or engaging in debates within Black journals or newspapers. The first chapter examines the popular and well-known white-authored play &lt;em&gt;Stevedore&lt;/em&gt; (George Sklar and Paul Peters). The second chapter delves into two living newspapers written by Black authors for staging in the Negro Units: &lt;em&gt;Liberty Deferred&lt;/em&gt; (Abram Hill and John Silvera) and &lt;em&gt;Stars and Bars&lt;/em&gt; (Ward Courtney and the Connecticut Negro Unit). Each chapter uses multiple script iterations to tra","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith (review)","authors":"Carla Neuss","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a929519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a929519","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Wife of Willesden&lt;/em&gt; by Zadie Smith &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Carla Neuss &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;THE WIFE OF WILLESDEN&lt;/em&gt;. By Zadie Smith. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham. Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. April 16, 2023. &lt;p&gt;Zadie Smith’s &lt;em&gt;The Wife of Willesden&lt;/em&gt;, which premiered in November 2021 at London’s Kiln Theatre, transposes Chaucer’s (in)famous Wife of Bath from &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; to the present-day, multicultural suburb of London named in the title. For those needing a refresher on fourteenth-century literature, Chaucer’s magnum opus is comprised of twenty-four stories told by medieval English travelers to pass the time while on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. The stories range from biography to sermons, farce to fantasy, but the Wife of Bath’s tale has had particular staying power due to her proto-feminist narrative of sexual fulfillment and female autonomy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In Smith’s reimagining of Chaucer’s original, the Canterbury road is relocated to a pub in contemporary Willesden that is holding an open-mic storytelling night. Using this conceit, Smith reincarnates Alyson, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, as Alvita, a British Jamaican woman in her fifties who, like Alyson, has been married five times and is more than happy to recount the story of her misadventures in love and matrimony. In addition to her titillating autobiography, Alvita, like Alyson, offers her audience a tale that promises to divulge what women really want. Smith’s theatrical adaptation is loyal to the narrative structure of Chaucer’s text; the play devotes sixty minutes of its one-hundred-minute run time to Alvita’s account of her life and lovers. The final thirty minutes feature the story of a rapacious knight who must ascertain the true desire of women or else forfeit his life, but transposed to a mythic colonial Jamaica instead of the idylls of medieval England.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Smith maintains some key aspects of Chaucer’s original: her dialogue features a rhyme scheme that echoes Chaucer’s poetic meter; her Alvita, played virtuosically by Clare Perkins, is as arresting and entertaining as Chaucer’s Alyson; and her use of &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 99]&lt;/strong&gt; contemporary slang cannily captures the cheek and wit of Chaucer’s pantheon of personalities. In other ways, though, &lt;em&gt;The Wife of Willesden&lt;/em&gt; faltered in attempting to transpose its literary source material to the dialogic medium of the stage. Smith’s Alvita was backed up by an ensemble of nine other players who enacted her story as she narrativized it; however, the production at times seemed to reduce the ensemble to dioramic puppets, whose actions merely served as visual aids against which Alvita’s monologue played. In this way, it struck me that the Wife of Bath’s tale would perhaps be in better company not with ensemble-based performance but wit","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141264784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}