Playbill: Get to class! The school year is here, and it’s time for students to pick up academic titles that will help with learning their crafts. Playbill has selected 14 books essential for any budding artist to help narrow down the many choices for incoming theatre majors.
4 comments:
From the list, I got two recommendations that I am interested in looking at during my own time. Before I mention anything though, I wish they had made a more general list of theater as a whole instead of focusing so much on performance. I felt like half of it was about acting but anyway, that’s just me. “The Secret Life of the American Musical” just sounds really interesting. I learned over the summer just how much time and effort and resources it takes to get a show running. It has to go through sometimes decades of writing before it even gets a shot at a workshop – which may only lead to more rewrites or finally labeling the project as dead. It is truly remarkable what writers have to go through in order to see their works exist out there. I imagine “Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama” delves into how Broadway is kind of falling apart. Most of the stuff now are revivals or adaptions, which leave very little room for new stories to be seen.
I love seeing articles like this. I hope to see another list focusing on each aspect of theatre so people can hone in on their craft and have alternate resources. Lists like this interest me as I always want to read more books and if I can tie it into the industry we work in thats a win. I have read "An Actor Prepares" before and it gave me a good understanding on what actors encounter and a possible outlook on what their process may be. I am definitely interested in reading the directing books to be able to gain an insight on their outlooks and processes but also what the thoughts behind their choices may be. I am also interested in reading "Theatre of the Unimpressed" as it seems like it would delve into a side of theatre that is not usually talked about, we are so used to redoing shows over and over again trying to put a slight spin on them instead of taking a risk and creating something new.
It makes me happy to see The Dramatic Imagination on here. Both of my main mentors in theatre before coming to CMU independently gifted copies of that book to me. It's so basic to the way theatre works and I think we often get too wrapped up in the technicalities of the production side without really taking a step back and focusing on what it is we are actually doing. Which is creating such a convincing facsimile that it is able to evoke worlds that draw people in. it's really cool. I think everyone that feels the spiritual power of theatre should give this book a read at some point and at least consider it. Some of what it talks about might stick, others might be incompatible. But I think anyone that has worked in live entertainment will stumble on at least one or two verses within that will resonate with them.
I found this article to be a somewhat informative piece about what topics are deemed important for theatre students to gain insight within. Specifically, the following books are the ones that caught my attention the most: The Art and Craft of Playwriting, The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, and Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama. The Art and Craft of Playwriting is a book that is regarded as a critical guide to the development of`modern plays, and seems like a decent book to compare with a book like Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama. The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre is a book that is regarded to go into detail about the ways in which we think of theatre, and I find this to be a very interesting topic that could relate well with the themes of other books referenced such as The Feminist Spectator as Critic and The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. You may see that a majority of the books I picked from the list directly relate to one another, and that is because I find that books that evaluate the social lens’ of theatre are educational read from a designer’s perspective; they give more insight into how elements of a show could be perceived by an audience, and how certain elements of a play create an environment fit for social advocacy.
Post a Comment