Performing Arts

Of the movies that writers and historians call Noir Westerns, none is more celebrated than 1948's Blood on the Moon. The comingling of the Western genre and the noir style crystalized in this extraordinary film, in turn influencing Westerns in the 1950s to become...

A concise history of the drag tradition--from 13th century to today Men have been dressing as women on stage for hundreds of years, dating back to the thirteenth century when the Church forbade the appearance of female actors but condoned that of men and...

America has gone Hamilton crazy. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony-winning musical has spawned sold-out performances, a triple platinum cast album, and a score so catchy that it is being used to teach U.S. history in classrooms across the country. But just how historically accurate is Hamilton?...

A drifter with no name and no past, driven purely by desire, is convinced by a beautiful woman to murder her husband. A hard-drinking detective down on his luck becomes involved with a gang of criminals in pursuit of a priceless artifact. The stories...

"A knockout of a biography." -- Newsweek A silent-film star. A woman who played children, wide-eyed and gamine, skipping about in frills and long curls. That's how most people remember Mary Pickford. In reality, Pickford was a towering figure in movie history, central to...

Dancing with Merce Cunningham is a buoyant, captivating memoir of a talented dancer's lifelong friendship with one of the choreographic geniuses of our time. Marianne Preger-Simon's story opens amid the explosion of artistic creativity that followed World War II. While immersed in the vibrant...

Oscar Wilde created his final and most lasting play, comic masterpieces of all time, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, in 1895. Considered one of the greatest THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST is a farce, playing with love, religion, and truth as it tells the...

More Doctor Who and Philosophy is a completely new collection of chapters, additional to Doctor Who and Philosophy (2010), by the same editors. Since that first Doctor Who and Philosophy, much has happened in the Whoniverse: a new and controversial regeneration of the Doctor,...

Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city's reputation as a "good show...

Phyllis Cole Braunlich sketches the life story of Lynn Riggs (18991954), the playwright best known as the author of Green Grow the Lilacs, the play that formed the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Today Riggs is recognized as one of the...

Satisfying to the point of sensuousness. -The New York Times Book Review Like no other instrument, a grand piano melds the magic of engineering with the magic of great music. Alone among the big piano companies, Steinway & Sons still crafts each of its...

David Mamet is one of America's most celebrated playwrights. The author of plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, and children's books, he has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross. The Obie award-winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago is about two office workers,...

The Real Thing is one of Tom Stoppard's most enduring and highly acclaimed dramatic works, first performed in 1982 at The Strand Theatre in London, starring Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees. The Real Thing begins with Max and Charlotte, a couple whose marriage is...

(Piano Collection). This edition brings together for the first time the three early ballets of Igor Stravinsky in versions for solo piano. Intended as both virtuoso performance pieces as well as study aids for musicians, they have been carefully proofread against the orchestral scores...

The ultimate coast-to-coast guide for armchair travelers who never leave their armchair because they're watching their favorite television shows. For more than 75 years, television shows have used their fictional or real settings as major characters. When you think of shows like Seinfeld, E.R.,...

Have you ever watched a Marx Brothers film and wondered what "habeas Irish rose" is? What is the trial of Mary Dugan with sound? What is a college widow? When exactly did Don Ameche invent the telephone? Their films are full of such in-jokes...

More than 700 films from the classic period of film noir (1940 to 1959) are presented in this exhaustive reference book--such films as The Accused, Among the Living, The Asphalt Jungle, Baby Face Nelson, Bait, The Beat Generation, Crossfire, Dark Passage, I Walk Alone,...

These were unique, complex, personal and professional relationships between master director John Ford and his two favorite actors, John Wayne and Ward Bond. The book provides a biography of each and a detailed exploration of Ford's work as it was intertwined with the lives...

From 1928 through 1982, when Columbia Pictures Corporation was a traded stock company, the studio released some of the most famous and popular films dealing with horror, science fiction and fantasy. This volume covers more than 200 Columbia feature films within these genres, among...

"A buoyant, delightfully Almond-ine coming-of-age novel about fish, fate, and family; moonlight, madness, and myth; runts, "Rackanruwin" and, finally, redemption." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) When Stanley Potts's guardian, Uncle Ernie, develops an unhealthy obsession with fish, Stan has no choice but to strike...