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Performing Arts
Offering a critical evaluation of the most important and groundbreaking TV programs ever created, this book tracks television's evolution through decades of social, cultural, and stylistic change. Included are shows that broke new ground, influenced the future, and left a lasting mark, ranging from the wholesomeness of Leave It to Beaver or The Andy Griffith Show through the mod cool of Laugh-In and The Avengers to the present day. Every important genre and era is represented, from award-winning sitcoms such as All in the Family and Seinfeld to the recent wave of high-quality cable series, including The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men.
This volume is the perfect guide to what next to binge watch--every program is available via DVD or streaming on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.
In 1973, Rosanne Cash's father gave her a list of 100 songs, many from the Southern tradition, that he felt a young musician had to know. Always Been There tells the inside story of the album that, more than thirty-five years later, resulted from "the list."
Based on original interviews conducted in the studio, at home in New York City, and on tour in Europe, Always Been There documents a pivotal episode in Rosanne Cash's long and fascinating career. As she, along with producer and husband John Leventhal, painstakingly reconstructs what songs made "the list" and why, we gain an unmatched understanding of a longer musican continuium that includes the Carter Family and other fabled names of the Southern pantheon and their influence on her music and writing. We also see how Leventhal's talents as an arranger and musician pair with Rosanne's searching vocal performances to make these old songs new again.
Always Been There tracks Rosanne Cash's singular and storied career from her early commercial hits with albums like King's Record Shop through her controversial split with Nashville tradition on albums like the mercurial Interiors to the sublime Black Cadillac. It paints an unforgettable portrait of Rosanne confronting music-making in the aftermath of serious brain surgery, her lifelong search for her legacy, and her unique creative partnerships.
Anything Goes stages a grand revue of the musical from the 1700s through to the present day, narrated in Mordden's famously witty, scholarly, and conversational style. He places us in a bare rehearsal room as the cast of Oklahoma! changes history by psychoanalyzing the plot in the greatest of the musical's many Dream Ballets. And he gives us tickets for orchestra seats on opening night-raising the curtain on the pleasures of Victor Herbert's The Red Mill and the thrill of Porgy and Bess. Mordden examines the music, of course, but also more neglected elements. Dance was once considered as crucial as song; he follows it from the nineteenth century's zany hoofing to tap "combinations" of the 1920s, from the injection of ballet and modern dance in the 1930s and '40s to the innovations of Bob Fosse. He also explores the changing structure of musical comedy and operetta, and the evolution of the role of the star. Fred Stone, the avuncular Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, seldom varied his acting from part to part; but the versatile Ethel Merman turned the headlining role inside out in Gypsy, playing a character who was selfish, fierce, and destructive.
From "ballad opera" to burlesque, from Fiddler on the Roof to Rent, the history and lore of the musical unfolds here in a performance worthy of a standing ovation.
Aristophanes (ca. 446-386 BCE), one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. In this third volume of a new Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristophanes, Jeffrey Henderson presents a freshly edited Greek text and a lively, unexpurgated translation of three plays with full explanatory notes.
In Birds Aristophanes turns from the pointed political satire characteristic of earlier plays to a fantasy that soars literally into the air in search of a carefree world. Here the enterprising protagonists create a utopian counter-Athens, called Cloudcuckooland, ruled by birds. Lysistrata blends boisterous comedy and an earnest call for peace. Lysistrata, our first comic heroine, organizes a panhellenic conjugal strike of young wives until their husbands end the war between Athens and Sparta. Athenian women again take center stage in Women at the Thesmophoria, this time to punish Euripides for portraying them as wicked. Parody of Euripides' plots enlivens this witty confrontation of the sexes.