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W.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen: Becoming a Character Comedian
Arthur Frank Wertheim
Hardcover (Palgrave Macmillan, Jan. 18, 2017)This book reveals how Fields became a character comedian while performing in Broadway’s most illustrious revue, the Ziegfeld Follies.As the first biography to use the recently opened Fields Papers at the Motion Picture Academy, the book explores how Fields years as a Follies entertainer portraying a beleaguered husband and a captivating conman became a landmark turning point in his career, leading to his fame as a masterful film comedian. The book also untangles a web of mysteries about Fields’s turbulent private life, from the heartrending stories about the tragic relationship with his calculating wife who refused to divorce him, to his estranged son controlled by his mother, to the seven-year extra-marital affair with a chorus girl that led to the birth of an unwanted child.This electrifying saga illuminates a complex dual personality, whirling from tenderness to brusqueness, who endured so much anguish in order to bring the gift of laughter to millions. Although vilified by Ziegfeld and assailed by demons, Fields survived the cutthroat rigors of Broadway show biz to become a legendary American iconoclast and cultural icon.
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Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics
E. Essin
Paperback (Palgrave Macmillan, April 22, 2015)By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.
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Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics
E. Essin
Hardcover (Palgrave Macmillan, Dec. 5, 2012)By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.
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Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture
P. Reed
Hardcover (Palgrave Macmillan, July 14, 2009)Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.
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Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics
E. Essin
Paperback (Palgrave Macmillan, Dec. 4, 2015)By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.