The Villainous Stage

Live theatre was once the main entertainment medium in the United States and the United Kingdom. The preeminent dramatists and actors of the day wrote and performed in numerous plays in which crime was a major plot element. This remains true today, especially with the longest-running shows such as The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and Sweeney Todd. While hundreds of books have been published about crime fiction in film and on television, the topic of stage mysteries has been largely unexplored. Covering productions from the 18th century to the 2013-2014 theatre season, this is the first history of crime plays according to subject matter. More than 20 categories are identified, including whodunits, comic mysteries, courtroom dramas, musicals, crook plays, social issues, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie. Nearly 900 plays are described, including the reactions of critics and audiences.

The villain's journey is rare in popular culture--most characters are fully-formed tyrants with little to no story arc. However, a few particularly epic series take the time to develop complex villains, including Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Increasingly, villains' origin stories have found new popularity through films like Wicked, Maleficent, and Despicable Me, alongside shows starring serial killers and Machiavellian schemers. This book examines the villain's decline and subsequent struggle toward redemption, asking why these characters are willing to cross moral lines that "good" characters are not. The first half follows characters like Loki, Jessica Jones and Killmonger through the villain's journey: an inverse or twisted version of scholar Joseph Cambell's hero's journey. The remainder of this book examines the many different villainous archetypes such as the trickster, the outcast, the tyrant, or the misunderstood hero in greater detail. Written for writers, creators, fans, and mythologists, this book offers a peek into the minds of some of fiction's greatest villains.

Live theatre was once the main entertainment medium in the United States and the United Kingdom. The preeminent dramatists and actors of the day wrote and performed in numerous plays in which crime was a major plot element. This remains true today, especially with the longest-running shows such as The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables and Sweeney Todd. While hundreds of books have been published about crime fiction in film and on television, the topic of stage mysteries has been largely unexplored. Covering productions from the 18th century to the 2013-2014 theatre season, this is the first history of crime plays according to subject matter. More than 20 categories are identified, including whodunits, comic mysteries, courtroom dramas, musicals, crook plays, social issues, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie. Nearly 900 plays are described, including the reactions of critics and audiences.

Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘the Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners. Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and other representations in the sixteenth century, through to the emergence of black and Asian actors, companies, and theatre groups in their own right. Thorough analysis uncovers how they led to a flourishing of black and Asian voices in theatre at the turn of the twenty-first century. Figures and companies studied include: Ira Aldridge Henry Francis Downing Paul Robeson Errol John Mustapha Matura Dark and Light Theatre The Keskidee Centre Indian Art and Dramatic Society Temba Edric and Pearl Connor Tara Arts Yvonne Brewster Tamasha Talawa. Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an enlightening and immensely readable resource and represents a major new study of theatre history and British history as a whole. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes bring together the stories of all of the remarkable men and women and all of the violent contrasts that made up one of the most entrhalling chapters in American history. Fisher, a respected scholar and versatile creative writer, devoted three years to the writing of this book.