Bigger Brighter Louder

“A constantly engaging and illuminating lesson in the role a great newspaper played in developing and sustaining a great theater town.” —Artvoice Chicago is regarded as one of the world’s premier cities for theater, and no one has had a more consistent front-row seat to its ascendance than the Chicago Tribune theater critics. Bigger, Brighter, Louder weaves together more than 150 years of Tribune reviews into a compelling narrative, pairing full reviews with commentary and history. With a sharp eye for telling details and a keen sense of historical context, Jones, longtime chief Tribune theater critic, takes readers through decades of highs and lows, successes and failures. The book showcases fascinating early reviews of actors and shows that would go on to achieve phenomenal success, including a tryout of A Raisin in the Sun with newcomer Sidney Poitier and the first major review of The Producers. It also delves into the rare and the unusual, such as a previously unpublished Tennessee Williams interview and a long conversation with Edward Albee’s mother. With reviews from Claudia Cassidy, Peregine Pickle, William Leonard, and more, many never collected before, Bigger, Brighter, Louder offers a unique lasting record of an ephemeral art and a riveting look at the history behind Chicago’s rise to theatrical greatness. “Bigger, Brighter, Louder gives us dozens of reviews—some perceptive, some notorious, and some bitingly funny. I warrant that you will find Mr. Jones’ Chicago-eyed view of theatre sharp, amusing and incisive.” —Playbill “Bigger, Brighter, Louder is a fascinating read, with Jones providing a thoroughly accessible exegesis.” —Time Out Chicago

What do you do if you find yourself weeping in the stalls? How should you react to Jude Law's trousers or David Tennant's hair? Are you prepared to receive toilet paper in the post? What if the show you just damned turns out to be a classic? If you gave it a five-star rave will anyone believe you? Drawing on his long years of experience as a national newspaper critic, Mark Fisher answers such questions with candour, wit and insight. Learning lessons from history's leading critics and taking examples from around the world, he gives practical advice about how to celebrate, analyse and discuss this most ephemeral of art forms - and how to make your writing come alive as you do so. Today, more people than ever are writing about theatre, but whether you're blogging, tweeting or writing an academic essay, your challenges as a critic remain the same: how to capture a performance in words, how to express your opinions and how to keep the reader entertained. This inspirational book shows you the way to do it. Foreword by Chris Jones, Chief theater critic, Chicago Tribune

Asian City Crossings is the first volume to examine the relationship between the city and performance from an Asian perspective. This collection introduces "city as method" as a new conceptual framework for the investigation of practices of city-based performing arts collaboration and city-to-city performance networks across East- and Southeast Asia and beyond. The shared and yet divergent histories of the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore as postcolonial, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual sites, are taken as points of departure to demonstrate how "city as method" facilitates a comparative analytical space that foregrounds in-betweenness and fluid positionalities. It situates inter-Asian relationality and inter-city referencing as centrally significant dynamics in the exploration of the material and ideological conditions of contemporary performance and performance exchange in Asia. This study captures creative dialogue that travels city-based pathways along the Hong Kong-Singapore route, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities, through scholarly analyses and practitioner reflections drawn from the fields of theatre, performance, and music. This book combines essays by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, ethnomusicology, and human geography with reflective accounts by Hong Kong and Singapore-based performing arts practitioners to highlight the diversity, vibrancy, and complexity of creative projects that destabilise notions of identity, belonging, and nationhood through strategies of collaborative conviviality and transnational mobility across multi-sited networks of cities in Asia. In doing so, this volume fills a considerable gap in global scholarly discourse on performance and the city and on the production and circulation of the performing arts in Asia.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds -- how they live and how they think. “There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries –– What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play. Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of, well, birdness: a mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own; a bird that collaborates in an extraordinary way with one species—ours—but parasitizes another in gruesome fashion; birds that give gifts and birds that steal; birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves; birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call—and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter. Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It is what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

Do you struggle with anything? Relationships? Family? Work? Money? Want to stop? Are you diligently trying to make things better and yet youre miserable? The struggle to improve things can make them worse! Struggle itself can become a way of life. If you want to improve your life versus getting stuck in the struggle, I suggest getting clear about the difference. Where are you creating fear instead of freedom? Where are you struggling unnecessarily? And how can you stop?! This book is an exploration of struggle, a personal look at how I struggled and the tools I used to quit. Filled with stories, reflections and exercises drawn from 12 years of giving and receiving help, this is an intimate description of my struggles and a workbook for letting yours go. Use the stories, explanations and exercises to get clear about the ways youre creating pain when you think youre creating solutions. You can transform your struggles into joy, and this book shows you a way.

All wordsmiths, both technically savvy and not, will find a foothold in this inclusive writing careers guide. Every chapter provides a specific career path and all of the information a job seeker would need to pursue it, including websites, organizations, additional reading materials, and first-person accounts from working writing professionals. And every included career path can be pursued without college, giving students of all types access to an interesting and satisfying career without the worry of paying off college loans.

An Incredible Adventure of the Mind In his provocative and engaging new book, Imagine That!, James Mapes shares the knowledge and experience he has gained in his thirty-plus years as a researcher, speaker, and personal coach. Well-written, engaging, and very accessible, Imagine That! is a guidebook that shows readers how to lead an exceptional life. Enhanced by exercises, in-depth research, real-life anecdotes, and URLs for relevant videos, Mapes dives deep into topics as diverse as reframing thinking patters, shattering a series of limiting myths, hypnosis, stretch goals, transforming fear into love, and forgiveness.