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Why Gary Neal Hansen's Christmas Play?
Your church wants to put on a pageant this December. You want more than kids as shepherds in bathrobes and tinsel-winged angels. Sure, they're cute, but you want your congregation to know why the baby Jesus matters.
You want to show the real meaning of Christmas: the story of the coming of Christ into the world, Jesus born of Mary, the Son of God.
It is easy to go wrong in a play about Christmas. In a heartbeat things can get too sweet, or too preachy, or downright tacky.
Despite the best of intentions, plays can even take our attention away from Jesus. Focusing too hard on modern problems like materialism, they can almost forget to show the world-changing story of the coming of Christ.
So you fear that your play will aim too low. You fear missing the once-a-year opportunity to help people see and feel the story of how our salvation began to be revealed.
Gary Neal Hansen's Christmas Play tells the whole biblical story of the coming of Jesus in the Bible's own words. It weaves all the relevant Gospel passages into one seamless drama.
This is the story of the Light coming into a world of shadows -- the Light that darkness can never overcome.
Gary Neal Hansen is the award-winning author of Kneeling with Giants: Learning to Pray with History's Best Teachers (InterVarsity, 2012), and Love Your Bible: Finding Your Way to the Presence of God with a 12th Century Monk (Climacus, 2015). He serves as Associate Professor of Church History at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.
Connect with him (and get free books ) at GaryNealHansen.com
Whether you are a seasoned drama director or a beginner, you will find this book to be an invaluable tool kit of aid and assistance Written specifically for the middle school or high school drama director, this book is about how one person can run a successful extracurricular drama program, from administrative detail and play selection to the actual performance before an audience. This is not intended as a manual or a comprehensive study of stagecraft but rather as a collection of suggestions and vignettes of personal experience. Nineteen chapters cover everything from rehearsal schedules to budgets to hair and makeup. It's just possible, though, you'll love the additional resources even more -- 20 pages of various reproducible forms to use and hand out, followed by an extensive glossary of theatrical terms and a bibliography of additional resources.
From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in the Montmartre district of Paris captivated tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and widely featured amusements in the city. Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.
Cabarets of Death documents the dinner shows, the character interactions with guests, and the theatrical goings-on in these unique establishments. Presenting original images and drawings from contemporary journals, postcards, tourist brochures, and menus, Mel Gordon leads a tour of these idiosyncratically macabre institutions, and grants us unique access to a form of popular spectacle now gone.
Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day.
This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk, and social dance imports and America's indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. This historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway-style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage.
This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance, and Cultural History.
Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.
Theater and performance have played vital political and pedagogical roles in the history of HIV/AIDS advocacy and activism in the Global North. From the shoestring dissident work of the 1980s and 1990s to contemporary educational plays challenging extant stigma surrounding HIV, the stage has long provided a space for identificatory community and activism. However, the nature and purpose of HIV/AIDS theatre has changed significantly over the past four decades or so. While the introduction of anti-retroviral therapies in the 1990s altered the trajectory of the pandemic and positively impacted many lives, the simultaneous consolidation of neoliberal hegemony generated a range of new and heightened challenges for theater makers, activists, and advocates hoping to improve the lives of people with HIV. Drawing on cultural materialist and Western Marxist traditions - most notably Gramscian political theory - this book examines the extent to which the stage has been able to offer a space for counterhegemony in the context of the pandemic. In establishing a genealogy of HIV/AIDS theater that incorporates both close dramaturgical analysis and wider materialist considerations, it elucidates how neoliberalism has established an ever-stronger grip on the genre and its messaging. In so doing, it poses wider questions about theater's role as a political strategy in the contemporary context of neoliberal hegemonic crisis.
The orchard's white, all white. You haven't forgotten, have you, Lyuba? The avenue lined with trees, unfurling like a slender ribbon. And on moonlit nights, it shimmers. You remember, don't you? You haven't forgotten?
Can anyone persuade Ranevskaya and her aristocratic household that the world is changing, and they must too? Following internationally acclaimed productions of The Seagull (Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney) and Three Sisters (Young Vic, London), director Benedict Andrews has a reputation as one of the world's leading interpreters of Chekhov. For the Donmar Warehouse he stages the great writer's final play. It's a work that predicted and captured the end of an era, but is timeless in its humanity, prescience, humour and pathos. The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov's masterpiece. This edition was published to coincide with its world premiere at London's Donmar Warehouse in April 2024.
This new textbook edition of Audience Participation in Theatre: Evolutions of the Invitation situates the text in evolving theory, emerging practice, and changing contexts, re-establishing itself as the key reference point in its field. An updated review of the literature and a new chapter develops its original argument with respect to historical change in how audiences and their expectations are constituted, and changes to how participation is invited, mediated and valued.