Style: Acting in High Comedy (Applause Acting Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)If anyone is wondering about Maria Aiken's comedic genius, just watch A Fish Called Wanda again (she plays the wife). Her acting career on stage is legendary, and she has directed in the style of High Comedy all over the place, and to great renown. Read this book and you will know why. Based on her teaching experience (which includes The Juilliard School among many illustrious others), this book is a useful guide to the skills that will put a High degree of polish on your verbal stage comedy pyrotechnics, from Shakespeare to Coward. It should be on every working stage actor's shelf. It is on the reading list for the course that I teach in Shakespearean acting at Princeton. I have been known to hand copies to cast members here in NYC as well! Read it and weep... with laughter!

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This book isn't a critical examination of high comedy. Rather, it's a collection of suggestions for the middlemen: the actors who have to catch the comic spark from the playwright and pass it on to the audience. The effort involved must be imperceptible: one has to acquire the cleverness, the articulacy, the febrility of the characters - and then make the whole laborious exercise seem like swimming through silk...The characters in high comedies don't find verbal sophistication difficult or unfamiliar; they enjoy it as you might enjoy slang.

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The Comedy Songs of George & Ira Gershwin Review

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(More customer reviews)The songs in this slender volume are delightful but the binding is so poor that after only a few weeks of use many pages have become completely detached.

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George and Ira Gershwin wrote many of the best-known Broadway standards of our time. This book focuses on some of their best comedic work, which helped to define the characters as well as the story lines of many of their greatest shows. Titles include: The Babbitt and the Bromide * Could You Use Me * I Won't Say I Will, but I Won't Say I Won't * I'm a Poached Egg * Just Another Rhumba * Mischa, Jascha, Tascha, Sascha * Stiff Upper Lip * Union Square and many more.

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The Divine Comedy Symphonic Band Works of Robert W. Smith Review

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(More customer reviews)This music is amazing. I first heard The Divine Comedy performed at a summer music clinic that I attended this past summer. I must admit that the music is more powerful live than on the CD, however even without the whole "atmosphere" that goes along with a live performance, it's still amazing. It gives me the chills every time I listen to it, because it's such a powerful piece. The other pieces on this disc are also very good. There are a couple that are for a beginning band, yet even those are powerful, despite their simplicity. I strongly recommend this CD to anyone who is a fan of Robert W. Smith, and classical music in general.

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From the pen of Robert W. Smith has come some of the most impressive writing for contemporary bands and wind ensembles. THE DIVINE COMEDY, a monumental four-movement work, is presented along with other memorable compositions on this compact disc, which fe

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The National Black Drama Anthology: Eleven Plays from America's Leading African-American Theaters (Applause Books) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a beautiful represention of today's Black theater.We so often "forget" that there are talented Black playwrights, who are rarely given notice.The book shows the broad spectrum of life and viewsin one culture.Today I notice and give accolades to those with the Godgiven talent of dramatic creativity.

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"Though New York remains the de facto capital of American theater, much of the most daring and interesting work today is done by regional theaters. This is doubly true of plays by African American authors, who, despite a few notable exceptions (August Wilson, George C. Wolfe), suffer under a commercial apartheid that keeps black plays off Broadway. Of necessity, African American theater artists have to create their own venues from the ground up. This wide-ranging anthology edited by the founder of the New Federal Theater celebrates the work of that companyÕs black-owned, black-run peers by presenting work by 11 dramatists. Among the most interesting are Jeff StetsonÕs moving The Meeting, which imagines a meeting between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and Shauneille PerryÕs fascinating updating of In Dahomey, the 1903 musical hit that was the first Õall-Black showÕ on Broadway." - Jack Helbig, Booklist

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Psychology of Music Review

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(More customer reviews)So far there are two reviews preceding mine. One gives the book five stars, the other gives it one. The one star reviewer complains that the book is out of date, and that is true. Unfortunately the author is not in a position to bring it up to date, since he was born in 1866 and is now continuing his research in a different realm. You would be foolish to take everything in this book as the gospel truth, but the quality of this man as a scientist and as a writer is head and shoulders above what we are capable of doing today. "They don't make 'em like this anymore." The field has advanced in the more than 100 years since the author commenced his research, and much of what we have achieved collectively today is the result of successive generations of people standing on Seashore's shoulders. I think this book is still of very great value today, at various levels. As I said above, I won't accept everything in this book at face value, but it is a book worth reading through more than once. In a world full of books that aren't even worth reading through one time, that's saying a lot, especially when you consider that it was published in 1937. The author was 70 years old at the time and you can see a lifetime of effort has gone into it.

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Standard study by founder of Seashore test. Relationship between physical phenomena of sounds and our perception of them. Music as a medium, physical acoustics, auditory apparatus, sound perception, host of other topics. 88 figures. "The thinking is rigorous and objective"-Music Teacher (London).

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