Stage Lighting: Fundamentals and Applications

Because you can’t stay a beginner forever…

Many books deal with the basics of theatre, but the recently-released works featured this month delve more deeply into those topics.

Actually, Stage Lighting: Fundamentals and Applications, by Richard Dunham, does both, exploring not only the fundamentals, but changes in the profession that call upon professionals to light types of subjects or environments for which they may not have received formal training—film/video, landscape lighting, retail/museum lighting, virtual lighting, concert, spectacle performances, and architectural lighting—and highlighting both the unique and shared qualities that exist between them. Thus the book can be used as a college text, or as a reference for working designers. [$75.60, Allyn & Bacon]

Our review of the first edition of Lisa Mulcahy’s Building the Successful Theater Company summarized it as “an outstanding resource that should be on the shelf of anyone wanting to form a theatre company.” That assessment continues with the new, second edition. Readers will everything from finding a performance space to creating a first season, from promoting your company and production to designing a long-term plan. Chapters include developing business and budget plans, rehearsing, attracting attention with publicity and word-of-mouth, adapting to growth, and more. [$24.95, Allworth Press]

The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance is a first-rate reference book that encompasses drama and musical, opera, dance, radio, circuses and parades. Based on the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, the more compact Companion features more than 2,000 up-to-date entries, covering styles and movements, buildings, organizations, and traditions—plus biographies of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers. Editor Dennis Kennedy also provides an appendix of useful Web links. [$45, Oxford University Press]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blumenfeld’s Dictionary of Musical Theater is pretty much what its title indicates. Packed with nearly 1,800 entries, it includes plot summaries of shows (both well-known and obscure, ranging from revues to opera), thumbnail biographies of composers and writers, plus terminology for dance, theatrical, singing and music. Historical terms and foreign terms (with pronunciations) are included, along with information on available recordings of many obscure pieces. Many will appreciate the lists of the works of Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and many others. [$19.99 Limelight Editions]

 

 

 

 

 

 

First published in 1946, Eric Bentley’s The Playwright as Thinker is a classic survey of over 150 years of dramatic art that provides, in essence, an intellectual history of Western thought. The new, fourth, edition not only contains the original, long-suppressed foreword, in which Bentley lambastes the climate of Broadway at the time, but also the author’s 1987 afterword. Thus, even those familiar with the original will find much new to chew on here. [$20, University of Minnesota Press]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Ludwig is one of the most successful of modern comic playwrights, and four of his works are now combined in Lend Me a Tenor and Other Plays. Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo and Leading Ladies are all love letters to live theatre that focus on second chances, issues of compromise, and social barriers. (It’s a shame that Ludwig’s Sullivan & Gilbert was not included, since it deals with those same issues.).The fourth play in the collection, Shakespeare in Hollywood deals in comic terms with a time in our history when censorship took on frightening proportions. [$19.95, Smith & Kraus]

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