Showing posts with label Theater Arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theater Arts. Show all posts

Friday, January 11, 2013

Finding theatrical production histories


(Adapted by LM from the Harvard Production Histories Guide)

What is a production history?

A production history (also called performance history or stage history) is an account of significant productions of a theatrical work (play, opera, dance, etc.).
There are two levels of research on production history:
  • Dates, places, interpreters: When, where, and by whom has the play been performed?
  • What was each production like? What made it significant or unique in terms of style, approach, or reception?
Why study a play’s production history?
  • A play can serve as a case study of changing cultural norms and theatrical styles over time.
  • Seeing how different interpreters have approached a play can deepen our understanding of it.
How do you find production histories? Unless someone else has compiled one for you, there’s no single, simple place to find them. You have to piece the history together from several kinds of sources, both primary and secondary.

Production History: Primary Sources

Performances and productions can be documented with various types of primary sources:

  • Newspaper Clippings
  • Theatre Reviews (also see E-Resources)
  • Playbills (organized by title of production, date, and theatre)
  • Promptbooks
  • Prints & Photographs
  • Posters
  • Scene and costume design / artwork
Some of these resources are cataloged Cruzcat.  The more information you can supply about a particular production -- production dates, place, theater, persons involved -- the more likely it is that you will be able to find material. This information can often be found in secondary sources (see below) and reviews.

Production History: Secondary Sources

To find out when and where a particular play has been performed, consult secondary sources such as these. Books can be found using Cruzcat (see suggested subject headings below); journal articles can be found in the databases listed here. To find the full text of a journal article in print or online, use the Citation Linker.

Production History Subject Headings

Library of Congress subject headings can be useful for finding production histories in Cruzcat. In Cruzcat, choose subject search and enter the name of the playwright by last name, first name. Then scroll down to find entries such as these below.

EXAMPLES:



Friday, November 30, 2012

Theater Arts 61A "Ancient & Medieval Drama" assignment

Here are a few Cruzcat subject headings for an assignment for Theater Arts 61A "Ancient & Medieval Drama". They have to find a medieval play (500-1500) and then a modern production of it. It would probably be helpful for them to have some context for the medieval version.
Reference material:

A companion to the medieval theatre
McH Ref PN2152.C66 1989


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!):

  • 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.