Plays

A grand performance ... a first rate read. -Digby Diehl, Good Morning America The nostalgia book of the year ... it's hard to see how anything could be so comprehensive. -Cleveland Plain Dealer The most wonderful gift book for a musical fan! -Kathie Lee Gifford, Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee

Heaven's Gate, by comparison, was a party in Paradise. Some of cinema's legendary artists - renowned for their work with Fellini, Godard, Fassbinder, and Herzog among others - would unwittingly unite to create the greatest financial disaster in movie history: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Andrew Yule goes behind the scenes of Gilliam's epic and unravels, twist by agonizing twist, the contorted drama which saw the original budget of $23.5 million rocket to an astronomical $46 million - making it one of the most expensive features in history. Hardcover.

Mix one American director with a German producer on a period extravaganza, set the locations in Italy and Spain and start the cameras rolling without enough money to do the job. Then sit back and watch disaster strike. That is the scenario Andrew Yule has painstakiingly reconstructed. The more problems and reverses, the greater our interest: costly postponements, overwhelming language difficulties, elephants and tigers turning on their trainers, illnesses, sets not being ready, special effects breaking down and cameo stars (from Marlon Brando to Sean Connery) backing out of the project. You name it, Andrew Yule reports it!

Sharland's dramatic anthology provides a fascinating window onto the lives and careers of the cream of the British acting profession. The combination of plays, poems and extracts from the letters and diaries of the stars makes for a uniquely stimulating performance. - Sheridan Morley, Playbill

If there ever has been a groundbreaking edition that likewise returns the reader to the original Shakespeare text, it will be the Applause Folio Texts. If there has ever been an accessible version of the Folio, it is this edition, set for the first time in modern fonts. The Folio is the source of all other editions. The Folio text forces us to re-examine the assumptions and prejudices which have encumbered over four hundred years of scholarship and performance. Notes refer the reader to subsequent editorial interventions, and offer the reader a multiplicity of interpretations. Notes also advise the reader on variations between Folios and Quartos. The heavy mascara of four centuries of Shakespearean glossing has by now glossed over the original countenance of Shakespeare's work. Never has there been a Folio available in modern reading fonts. While other complete Folio editions continue to trade simply on the facsimile appearance of the Elizabethan look, none of them is easily and practically utilized in general Shakespeare studies or performances.

This Applause edtiion allows the reader and student to look beyond the scholarly reading text to the more sensuous, more collaborative, more malleable performance text which emerges in conjunction with the commentary and notes. Readers and students are faced with real theatrical choices in each speech as the editors point out the challenges and opportunities to the actor and director at each juncture. Readers will not only discover an enlivened Shakespeare, they will be empowered to rehearse and direct their own productions of the imagination in the process.

Mad About Theatre is a systematic analysis of the major issues confronting our theatre today: The Decline of Broadway; The Generally Poor Quality of American Stage Acting; The Pretentiousness of our Avant-Garde; The Narrowness of our Playwriting; Broadway In Search of a Musical Fix; Subsidized British Theatre in the Age of Thatcher and Beyond; The Inflated Directing of the Classics; The Growing Vitality of our Regional Theatres (in Playwriting as well as Acting and Directing); The Innovative Use of the Theatre by Minority Groups. Mad About Theatre is not only a major contribution to contemporary theatre criticism, but a call to account for a culture in danger of losing its way. Taken together, these reviews from The Hudson Review, weave a powerful indictment against the status quo, while offering a constructive blueprint for the future.

Startling discontinuities and surprises erupt throughout these avant-garde landscapes by Poland's outstanding modern dramatist where duchesses and policemen, gangsters and surrealist painters, psychiatrists and locomotive engineers wander in and out, kill one another, and carry on philosophical conversations at the same time.

Here is a cartoon album sure to bring a smile and a bravissimo from classical music buffs and concertgoers everywhere! Some classic Fisher moments: Mrs. Schubert chides Franz for spending ten years writing an Impromptu. A disgruntled king offers an avant-garde band a few coins: For minimalist music, minimalist pay!

Many have told the tragic tale of Mary Queen of Scots - it is irresistible - but none more powerfully than Friedrich Schiller. Like Mary Stuart herself and the legends which pursued her to her death, Schiller's drama continues to captivate the modern imagination nearly two centuries later. Eric Bentley's lean, forceful rendering of the German masterpiece will command the attention of theatre audiences for years to come.