When Henry Fielding enlarged his one-act afterpiece, The Welsh Opera (1731), he named the new version The Grub-Street Opera to point to the extensive travesty it contains. The title also makes a target of hack-writers of the day and implies a connection with The Grub-Street Journal, whose authors maintained a policy of non-partisan satire on hack-writing. The amount of imitation it contains makes it resemble the literary travesty of The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730), likewise written by Scriblerus Secundus, Fielding's pseudonym which alluded to the “Scriblerus” of his illustrious contemporaries, most obviously to Pope in the Dunciad notes and “Peri Bathous” (1728). The Grub-Street Opera has remained a puzzle to scholars of Fielding's plays, perhaps because its relationship to contemporary drama, politics, and journalism has been neglected.

In his informative account of Bernard Shaw as a director, William Armstrong has noted a distinctive practice of the playwright during the rehearsal period:“…Shaw regularly sent private letters or postcards to his actors to supplement the advice he gave them in the theatre. It is to be hoped that one day a more or less complete collection of these documents will be made. They will reveal not only his great mastery of detail but also the remarkable shrewdness with which he adjusted his powers of persuasion to actors with very different temperaments.” Vast indeed is the undertaking Armstrong proposes, but it is possible to proceed towards its realization with respect to particular plays. Such documentation can be supplemented in some cases by the testimony of actors and other theater artists who worked with Shaw, by data from the extant prompt copies of his productions, and by his rehearsal notes. The result would do much not only to illuminate the particulars of his directorial performance, but to clarify many specific problems of dramatic interpretation as well.

I am grateful to the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, for allowing me free access to Morning Exercises and to the archives housed at the school. I would also like to thank the many current and former teachers and students who took the time to answer my questions, especially Andy Kaplan and John Holabird. I also thank Eric Martin, Christine Harris, and the anonymous readers at Theatre Survey for their patient editorial work.

By Mabel Rowland's public accounting, the Institute of the Woman's Theatre helped hundreds of so-called stagestruck girls realize their ambitions by providing a safety net for the pitfalls of the commercial theatre. The organization, officially established in 1926 and in operation until roughly 1930, was said to have begun years earlier, “the outgrowth of a group which was formed in 1910 and used to meet in the Fitzgerald Building.” As president, Rowland—a press agent, well-known comedic monologist, and all-around theatre factotum—was supported by society women and a cadre of famous female writers and performers, including Florence Reed, who served as Vice President, and charter members Julia Arthur, Irene Castle, Rachel Crothers, Helen Hayes, Violet Heming, Elsie Janis, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford, and Mary Shaw, plus about a dozen more. At the time of its official founding, the institute announced that it would undertake three activities. First, it sought to establish a professional Broadway theatre as exclusively a women's operation, employing female playwrights, designers, directors, managers, producers, box-office staff, and so forth: “The only men who will be connected with the enterprise … are the actors and stagehands.” Second and third, the institute would give “aid and advice to girls from out of town who think they have something to offer the theater, read scripts and give opinions thereon, and in other ways labor in behalf of the feminine side of the stage.” The institute's goal of a theatre in tandem with discovering talented women looked to create a meaningful shift in women's inclusion and power within commercial theatre.

Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”

Originally published in 1999, this book is the first and still the only major collection of primary sources in English translation for the study of Chinese theories of theatre and performance. In an earlier Theatre Survey review of this anthology (42:1 [May 2001]: 96–8), Sara Davis focused on the historical development of Chinese theatre and devoted a substantial portion of her comments to the earlier periods, noting with regret that these eras and the professional folk performance that flourished during them are underrepresented in this volume. This is undoubtedly true, but the unequal coverage does not originate with editor Fei. Very few literati-scholars wrote for or about the performing arts prior to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Written theatre theory in China being primarily in the hands of these gentlemen until the modern era, the relative paucity of early primary sources is therefore an unavoidable reality. With the 2002 republication of Fei's anthology in paperback form, it therefore seems appropriate to reassess her work, describing and evaluating the materials that are included for the larger readership now provided access.

Samuel Phelps' revival of The Duchess of Malfi at Sadler's Wells on November 20, 1850 resulted in Webster's tragedy holding the boards in Great Britain and America for some twenty-five years. These performances were enumerated and their casts identified in an earlier article. I want now to attempt a fuller description of some representative productions, both for the light they throw upon the attitudes and practices of nineteenth-century theatre and for the useful insights they give us into the nature of Webster's tragedy itself.

When Tyrone Guthrie rescued Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great from three centuries of theatrical oblivion, he raised several issues—some intentionally, some not—touching on the play's, and Marlowe's, adaptability to the modern stage and pertinence to the modern temper.

An early stage in the writing of the Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat is captured in a typescript marked “from the Ziegfeld Collection” in the Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The script, #7430 in the Library numbering, is undated, but Paul Robeson, Elizabeth Hines, and Guy Robertson are penciled in for the roles of Joe, Magnolia, and Gaylord, with “Aunt Jemima” (Tess Gardella, in her famous blackface role) set for Queenie, Norma Terriss for Ellie, and Andy Tombes for Frank. These are principal parts. Magnolia is the ingenue who will fall in love with the dashing, undependable Gaylord, a gambler, in Act 1 and then will grow up to become a singing star after her marriage fails in Act 2; Ellie and Frank are performers on the show boat; Queenie is the boat's cook, and Joe—the part intended for Robeson—is her husband. As yet uncast are Julie, the leading actress who is forced off the show boat when it is discovered that she is mulatto, and Magnolia's parents, Cap'n Andy Hawkes and his shrewish wife Parthy.

To view street actions of the American colonial period as theatrical events is nothing new. As Jeffrey Richards has shown in his much-admired book of 1991, writers of the colonial period—even in towns where “official” theatre performances were strictly prohibited—preferred the metaphors of theatre over any others in describing the actions of individuals and crowds upon what these writers saw as the “world stage.”

Rather than negotiate first with protesting and then striking students, the administration of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) shut down its flagship Río Piedras Campus from 21 April to 6 July 2010. Regular academic activity on the campus came to a standstill, and as a consequence the semester programmed to end in mid-May could not be finished until mid-August. Yet in those seventy-plus days of closure (cierre) a poignantly expressive culture of resistance took shape out of the continuous tension among the striking students who occupied the campus, the remote administration that refused to respond to their issues, the heavily armed state police officers who were stationed just outside the campus's gates, and the crowds of professors, nonteaching personnel, parents, and student supporters who gathered daily to urge the administration to open a dialogue with the students. Along with independent radio broadcasts, the skillful use of cyberspace, celebrity concerts, and other strategies to capture public and media attention, the protest movement also fostered the spectacle of mass rallies and marches that featured acts of performance and theatre. If the university's theatres were dark, the streets that surround the campus became the stages for seminude, placard-carrying bodies moving serpentine through crowds; stilt-walking masked portrayals of local politicians and university administrators; large, painted-cardboard dragons and wolf heads to stare down police officers; a twenty-foot-tall puppet whose shirt front read “the university is not for sale” (“La UPR no se vende”); processions of black coffins accompanied by black-clad lloronas (mourners); and red-nosed, broom-carrying clowns decked out in tactical police gear to parade comically in front of the heavily armed and real tactical forces.

The vast caravan out of Ceylon … arrived safely in Europe in April 1884 … There were sixty-seven people, twenty-five elephants … and a great many oxen of various kinds. The ethnographic exhibition included hundreds of different shows, and even the vegetative world was represented in numerous exhibits … My Singhalese troupe was veiled in the ancient wondrous world of India; not only had we captured the vibrant, picturesque, outward appearance of India, but also the shimmer of its mystique. The colourful, captivating sight of the caravanserai, the majestic elephants, partly bedecked in golden saddlery, partly in work harnesses, pulling gigantic loads; the slim, attractive, doe-eyed dancers with their sensuous movements and last of all the great religious Perra-Harra procession-conjured up a magic web which subjected the public entirely to it … The exhibition was opened in Hamburg… After Hamburg came Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Vienna … From Vienna it went to Berlin … In the following years, 1885 and 1886, I traveled with the same exhibition through southern Germany, Switzerland and Vienna a second time, and finally set out for England … It was in Paris, at the height of its success, that the Ceylon exhibition finally came to an end. The average number of visitors to the Jardin d'Acclimatisation on a Sunday was 50,000-60,000. Throughout the two and a half month duration of the exhibition, the number of visitors was nearly one million.

In the closing months of 1699, the winter of his discontent, an established London actor and occasional dramatist hit upon a plan to change his public image from comedian to tragedian; he would fashion for himself a leading tragic role in which his uncontrollable voice and ungainly figure might prove to be assets rather than liabilities; in this way he would demonstrate to himself and to the world that he was unquestionably a complete master of his art. The alteration of Shakespeare's Richard III, the effort by which Colley Cibber, dramatist, attempted to aid the career of Colley Cibber, actor, was for the adapter a decided failure; Cibber's portrayal of England's most notorious monarch was too comic to be convincing. Yet in reshaping Shakespeare's play to suit the taste of the contemporary playgoer, he unknowingly manufactured one of the greatest box-office attractions in the history of the theatre. His alteration was to be the most lasting of all the many revisions of the plays of Shakespeare and was to hold the stage in preference to the original for nearly two hundred years. Although Cibber never explicitly admitted the reasons behind his choosing the role of Richard III for his tragic bow, his motivations become clear to the reader who patiently follows his career through the intricacies of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.

The Galli-Bibiena Family, whose members were summoned, one or another, sometimes several together, to the principal centers of Baroque culture, created fantastically grand scenic decorations for the lavish courts of Europe and built magnificant theatres for both prince and populace. Although charm of artistic beauty and power of phantasmal scenic creation were found in varying degrees among all of this mighty line of scenographers, their grandiose conception was epitomized in the illusionistic immensity of Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena. The Baroque period was the supreme age of illusion in the sphere of theatrical scene design and decoration, and Giuseppe was its reigning genius.

When Richard Klepac's monograph on Charles Mathews' “At Homes” appeared a few years ago, it addressed a glaring need in early nineteenth-century British theatre history. Mathews, one of the lions of the stage in his era, had been too long neglected, and existing biographies, aside from the two-volume memoir assembled by his wife, consisted of no more than a few puffing pamphlets.

Between 1921 and 1925, an experimental form of nongovernmental censorship of the theatre was developed and practiced in New York City. Referred to variously as volunteer juries, citizens' juries, or the play-jury system, the experiment attempted to overcome the shortcomings of existing legal controls on the theatre and to relieve public concerns about the exploitation of sexually suggestive and obscene materials in stage plays. Although the play-jury system was short-lived, a review of its brief career reveals significant accomplishments and can provide a clearer picture of some of the issues confronting the American theatre in the first part of the twentieth century.