Who will you be? Puck? Bottom? Oberon? Titania? The Wall?!
Midsummer like you have never experienced it before: quick, fun, and easy to understand. Designed for 9-20+ actors, kids, families, or anyone who wants to enjoy and perform Shakespeare's classic play. Midsummer for Kids is a play versatile enough for sibling fun, classes, drama groups, homeschool groups, or backyard performances. It's appropriate and fun for all ages! Plays range from 15 to 25 minutes. Which character your kids be?! What you will get:
This mini-melodramatic masterpiece is sure to spark a love of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is difficult enough in class or watching onstage, let alone trying to teach the stories to children, but as the author's mantra states in the book, there is no better way to learn than to have fun! Kids who have read this have also eventually purchased the entire Shakespeare works, and have completed 'hero' reports on Shakespeare at school. Guaranteed to have you coming back for more!
When the Atlanta-born Paul Ford first fell in love with the American musical theatre at the age of five, after seeing the movie version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific, he never imagined that his future skills as a piano thumper would lead him to a career on Broadway playing rehearsals or in the pit for such classic Stephen Sondheim musicals as Sunday in the Park with George, Follies in Concert, Into the Woods, Assassins (both off-Broadway and the Broadway revival), Passion, the 2005 production of Pacific Overtures, Wiseguys, Stephen Sondheim at Carnegie Hall, and numerous concerts, birthday tributes, and television spectaculars. In two of his Tony award acceptance speeches, Sondheim publicly declared Paul Ford the indefatigable master of the musical theatre and the world's most tireless rehearsal pianist and a walking memory bank of every song that has ever been written for any musical on any continent.
For more than 25 years, Paul Ford was also Mandy Patinkin's exclusive accompanist and musical collaborator on a series of recordings and live concerts that took the duo from Broadway to London to Australia and beyond. Patinkin offers a heartfelt tribute to his former associate in the book's Foreword.
Now retired, the candid (and admittedly opinionated) author looks back on the performances and personalities that defined the American musical theatre in the waning years of the Twentieth Century. Patti LuPone, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Donna Murphy, Elaine Stritch, Victor Garber, Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon, Stockard Channing, Donna McKechnie, Lauren Bacall, Chita Rivera, Liza Minnelli, Martin Charnin, Liv Ullman, Teresa Stratas, Charles Strouse, Harve Presnell, Nancy Walker, James Lapine, Madonna, Mario Cantone, Warren Beatty, Julie Harris, Michael Cerveris, Debra Monk, Leonard Bernstein and, of course, Stephen Sondheim, are just a few of the legendary Broadway and Hollywood performers and creators who are lovingly (and sometimes not so lovingly) recalled in Paul Ford's honest and vivid account of his life and work both on and off-Broadway. He also provides a portrait of his conflicted childhood in Atlanta, Georgia as a sissy piano player, followed by a self-destructive period of alcoholism. Miraculously, a haunting encounter in a Hell's Kitchen saloon in May of 1995 with the leading lady of one of his favorite childhood movies, gave Ford the incentive to clean up his life.
Good intentions collide with absurd assumptions in Larissa FastHorse's wickedly funny satire, as a troupe of terminally woke teaching artists scrambles to create a pageant that somehow manages to celebrate both Turkey Day and Native American Heritage Month.
What does it mean to be a diva? A shifting, increasingly loaded term, it has been used to both deride and celebrate charismatic and unapologetically fierce performers like Aretha Franklin, Divine, and the women of Labelle. In this brilliant, powerful blend of incisive criticism and electric memoir, Deborah Paredez--scholar, cultural critic, and lifelong diva devotee--unravels our enduring fascination with these icons and explores how divas have challenged American ideas about feminism, performance, and freedom.
American Diva journeys into Tina Turner's scintillating performances, Celia Cruz's command of the male-dominated salsa world, the transcendent revival of Jomama Jones after a period of exile, and the unparalleled excellence of Venus and Serena Williams. Recounting how she and her mother endlessly watched Rita Moreno's powerhouse portrayal of Anita in West Side Story and how she learned much about being bigger than life from her fabulous Tía Lucia, Paredez chronicles the celebrated and skilled performers who not only shaped her life but boldly expressed the aspiration for freedom among brown, Black, and gay communities. Paredez also traces the evolution of the diva through the decades, dismayed at the mid-aughts' commodification and juvenilizing of its meaning but finding its lasting beauty and power.
Filled with sharp insights and great heart, American Diva is a spirited tribute to the power of performance and the joys of fandom.
My book is simply about how groups and singers got their names. Many started with a variety of different names before becoming the name we are all familiar with. For example, would you be able to name the group that started with the following names: The Blackjacks, the Quarrymen, Johnny and the Moondogs, the Beat Brothers? Those were early names of the group we now know as the Beatles! And there are so many others.
Between 1934 and 1968, no Hollywood studio could make a movie without the permission of and a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration. The Production Code was Hollywood's official censor. Screenplays, books, plays, costumes and even story ideas and songs had to be okayed by the Code before they could be filmed, and the Code monitored every stage of the production process to ensure compliance. The correspondence between the Code and the studios was confidential, and the memos within the Code office itself were even more so.
Well, not any more. The Naughty Bits pores through those files to show how the censors did their job. What was the world prevented from seeing in some of the greatest movies ever made, including Stagecoach, Some Like It Hot, Convention City, Psycho, His Girl Friday and even The Ten Commandments? Here is the sometimes funny, sometimes outrageous, always riveting history of movie censorship on a nitty-gritty level.
Filmmakers Thinking begins from a simple premise: that we do not take the ongoing reflections of filmmakers about their medium, their art and their craft, seriously enough. Every day, everywhere, filmmakers are asked to talk mainly about themselves and their own works. Yet their vocation springs from a deep engagement with the history and possibilities of cinema as a whole. Going beyond the usual, oft-cited sources, Filmmakers Thinking delves into a vast archive of writings (public and private), interviews, talks, and anecdotes to discover what filmmakers think about how to create cinema - and what cinema is, or could be.
Meet Diane, a permaculture gardener dripping with butch charm. She's got supernatural abilities owing to her true identity--the Greek god Dionysus--and she's returned to the modern world to gather mortal followers and restore the Earth to its natural state. Where better to begin than with four housewives in a suburban New Jersey cul-de-sac? In this Obie-winning comedy with a twist, Pulitzer Prize finalist Madeleine George pens a hilarious evisceration of the blind eye we all turn to climate change and the bacchanalian catharsis that awaits us, even in our own backyards.
What does it mean to be in a place and out of place at the same time? Gabrielle Civil explores this question by making black feminist performance art in Mexico. She asks unsuspecting Mexicans if they have good hair, visits legendary black expatriate artist Elizabeth Catlett, celebrates Obama's first election with mariachis, embarks on love affairs, dresses up as a Mexican doll, and christens herself with Negrita rum. Archiving her 2008-2009 Fulbright fellowship project, In and Out of Place combines diary entries, images, performance texts, critical commentary, and current reflections. Civil explores--and expands--the parameters of her own body, artistic process, heritage, and culture. She retraces--and activates--her trajectory as a black woman artist in the world.
Innovative Prose
The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro Classroom in a Book 2025 Release contains 17 lessons that use real-world, project-based learning to cover the basics and beyond, providing countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive with the program. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you. Learn to:
Classroom in a Book(R), the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, offers what no other book or training program does an official training series from Adobe, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.
A comprehensive entertainment history of the Washington, DC area's captivating theater, film, and music artists. Includes esteemed figures from the masterful John Philip Sousa to the provocative Root Boy Slim. Legends such as Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, Helen Hayes, Patsy Cline, The Slickee Boys, Mark Russell, Pick Temple, The Langley Punks, Eva Cassidy, Billy Eckstine, Danny Gatton, Tommy Lepson and hundreds of others populate this vibrant tapestry of talent and innovation that thrived or continues in the area. Illustrated with Index.