While successful plays tend to share certain storytelling elements, there is no single blueprint for how a play should be constructed. Instead, seasoned playwrights know how to select the right elements for their needs and organize them in a structur...

"Objects as Actors" charts a new approach to Greek tragedy based on an obvious, yet often overlooked, fact: Greek tragedy was meant to be performed. As plays, the works were incomplete without physical items in the form of theatrical props. In this b...

Celebrated as an outstanding conceptual dance piece on the one hand and harshly criticized for being a contemporary freak show on the other, "Disabled Theater" by Jerome Bel and Theater Hora polarizes the public. In either case, the production raises...

In this clear-minded but sobering book, Michael M. Kaiser assesses the current state of arts institutions – orchestras; opera, ballet, modern dance, and theater companies; and even museums. According to Kaiser, new developments in the twenty-first ce...

In the 1930s and '40s, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo toured the United States and the world, introducing many to ballet as an art form, while spreading the enduring image of the ballerina as an embodiment of feminine grace and sophistication. Thi...

I am Iphigenia, daughter of the daughter of Tyndareus My father killed me Few contemporary poets elicit such powerful responses from readers and critics as Anne Carson.  "The New York Times Book Review" calls her work "personal, necessary, and impor...

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism – blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm – early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body", Gail K...

The first known "Chicago Tribune" theater review appeared on March 25, 1853. An anonymous notice, it shared the page with two other announcements – one about a pair of thousand-pound hogs set to be slaughtered and another trumpeting the largest load...

In the third book of his popular trilogy on creating and sustaining arts organizations, Michael Kaiser reveals the hidden engine that powers consistent success. According to Kaiser, successful arts organizations pursue strong programmatic marketing c...

Allan Sherman was the Larry David, the Adam Sandler, the Sacha Baron Cohen of 1963. He led Jewish humor and sensibilities out of ethnic enclaves and into the American mainstream with explosively funny parodies of classic songs that won Sherman extrao...