- The best thing to show them is the Theater Arts Research Guide (home page > research guides > arts > theater arts)
- On that guide direct them to the International Index to the Performing Arts database. It's right on the front of the guide.
- Once in that database, they can try searching for the name of the play and "production review" and perhaps a geographic location if there were many places the play was produced. This should give them some full-text results they can look through.
- The other thing they may ask for is "Theatre World." Look that up as a title in Cruzcat, choose the first record in the results, and you see that the current volume is in Ref and the previous volumes are upstairs on 4th in the PNs. They'll determine which volume could help them by the year of the production of their play.
- There are other resources they can try on the Theater Arts Research Guide as well.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Theater Arts: Finding play production reviews
An assignment this quarter for a Theater Arts class dealt with searching for production reviews and for a modern production of an ancient play (for example, "Medea"). Here are some strategies for dealing with this question (and more comments are welcome!):
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International Index to the Performing Arts was my first stop also. However, the students I helped with this question were very insistent that their instructor wanted them to use "books" for their research and pointed to Theatre World indicated in the syllabus. As noted above, Theatre World is of limited use for their purposes.
I'd recommend they start with International Dictionary of Theatre: Plays (McH Ref PN2035.I58 1992) though the 1992 date can be an issue. Or use IIPA database to narrow down a date of production to get them over to the current volume of Theatre World or another source.
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