Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies. Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 243+xii. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook’s co-edited volume Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies advances the cross-disciplinary discourse inspired by the cognitive turn by interrogating the ways practitioners and […]
Book Review
103 posts
Maya Roth, Editor Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics By Soyica Diggs Colbert Reviewed by Eleanor Russell Law & Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America By Jacqueline O’Connor Reviewed by Susan C. W. Abbotson Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze By Shane Vogel Reviewed by Isaiah Matthew Wooden Staging Family: Domestic […]
If you would like to write a review for JADT, please contact our current book review editor Maya Roth at mer46@georgetown.edu. If you know of a book that would be suitable for review in JADT, please arrange for a copy to be mailed to the Editors, JADT/Martin E. Segal Theatre […]
Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017; Pp. 232. In Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics, Soyica Diggs Colbert explores how post-Civil Rights Movement cultural products and performances of blackness re-map black ontologies and histories. In an extraordinary display of interdisciplinary […]
Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze. Shane Vogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018; Pp. 254 + xi. A trip backstage at the Imperial Theatre in late fall 1957 promised brushes with a number of black performers who would help radically transform the cultural and racial logics […]
Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. Dorinne Kondo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Pp. 376. Using dramaturgy, autoethnography, psychoanalysis, and critical race theory, Dorinne Kondo argues that performance shapes race in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. She stakes a claim to creativity as work that […]
Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America. Jacqueline O’Connor. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016; Pp. 215 + xii. Taking a new historicist approach, Jacqueline O’Connor’s Law and Sexuality examines Tennessee Williams’s representations of sexual transgression in his drama and fiction as connected to issues of legality and social responses […]
Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses. Nan Mullenneaux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018; Pp. 400. In Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses, Nan Mullenneaux looks at significant figures of American theatre in a new way. From actresses active on the US stage in […]
Donatella Galella, Editor Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical By Kevin Winkler Reviewed by Phoebe Rumsey Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance By Stephanie Nohelani Teves Reviewed by Angela L. Robinson Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre By Cindy Rosenthal Reviewed […]
If you would like to write a review for JADT, please contact our current book review editor Maya Roth at mer46@georgetown.edu. If you know of a book that would be suitable for review in JADT, please arrange for a copy to be mailed to the Editors, JADT/Martin E. Segal Theatre […]
Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical by Kevin Winkler offers educators, students, and Bob Fosse enthusiasts a history of the choreographer’s early life, creative influences, apprenticeships, […]
Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. The precarious era of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976-1982) stifled political resistance and artistic expression. However, the years following the administrative regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera, and Leopoldo Galtieri prompted […]
In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. A crucial contribution to the historiography of the Black Arts Movement, La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the […]
Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. A new addition to Hamilton scholarship, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past marks another valuable collaboration between […]
Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre is the first book-length study to chronicle Ellen Stewart’s exceptional contributions to twentieth and twenty-first century theatre. Written by […]
Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Given the ubiquity of “aloha” in Pacific tourism and marketing, Hollywood feature films, and Hawai’i state politics, what precisely does the concept offer for Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) now? Stephanie […]
If you would like to write a review for JADT, please contact our current book review editor Donatella Galella at galella@ucr.edu. If you know of a book that would be suitable for review in JADT, please arrange for a copy to be mailed to the Editors, JADT/Martin E. Segal Theatre […]
The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era offers in-depth, historical reconstruction of the instrumental role that Harlem’s American Negro Theatre (ANT) company […]
Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches is an exceptional addition to the field as it turns the spotlight on “Black/African ritual, processes, and […]
Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences testifies to the fact that “today’s theatre workers know the value and importance […]
