Search results for ""Author Robert Viagas""

When you sit down at a play, movie, or concert—or even in front of the TV or scrollinl on your—you are taking part in one of the oldest and most mysterious forms of human behavior. Being part of an audience is an age-old experience that we all crave that has evolved from amphitheaters to screens. Right This Way is a pop history of audiences through the ages.Playbill editor Robert Viagas unfolds the unique aspects of what he calls “audiencing” with stories from the age of the Greeks to the world of Zoom. He walks through the different types of audiences and the history of their responses, what science has to say about how our brains respond to what they see and the reactions of the people around them, and why, during COVID-19, people risked a deadly virus to be part of a crowd. Right This Way explores what the audience experience brings us and how it may evolve in the 21st century.

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Taking the format of a school yearbook the tenth edition of ÊThe Playbill Broadway YearbookÊ is packed with photos (more than 4 000 many in color) and memorabilia from the entire 2013-2014 Broadway season.ÞThis edition documents the more than 70 Broadway shows of that season ä which is every show that ran during the season ä not just the new shows like ÊBullets Over BroadwayÊ ÊAladdinÊ ÊAfter MidnightÊ ÊBridges of Madison CountyÊ ÊIf/ThenÊ and ÊBeautifulÊ but the long-running ones from seasons past like ÊThe Book of MormonÊ ÊMatildaÊ ÊOnceÊ ÊMotownÊ and ÊWickedÊ. In addition to all the headshots of all the actors who appeared in Playbill the book has photos of producers writers designers stage managers stage hands musicians ushers ä even Sky the winner of the Westminster Kennel Club competition who did a walk-on in ÊKinky BootsÊ. This year's roster is expected to top 10 000 (human) names.ÞThere is also a wealth of photos from Broadway insider events including Gypsy of the Year Broadway Bares Forbidden Broadway and the annual Broadway League softball championship players. To top it all off each production was asked to appoint a member of the cast or crew to report on things only those who worked backstage would know: Opening night presents daily rituals celebrity visits ghostly encounters favorite health tips and regimens memorable ad-libs etc. Correspondents range from stage managers and dancers to featured players understudies and in some cases the star of the show.

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Hamlet calls death "that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns."But he's wrong. Some do return.Each night after the applause dies, the curtain falls, the audience vanishes, the cleaners dust, and the lights are killed, great theatres become dark and silent places. But not always quite empty. That's when the theatre ghosts make their entrance and strut and fret their hour upon the shadowed boards, illuminated only by the ghost light, the solitary lamp that is required to burn through the night on every Broadway stage.Many of Broadway's busiest theatres continue to be just as busily haunted by spirits, some with well-known names and histories. Good Morning, Olive (named for one of the most beautiful and temperamental of Broadway's ghosts) is about the ghosts that haunt theatres in New York and around the world.Broadway is the playground of stars, so it's probably not surprising to learn that even its ghosts are stars. Meet some of Broadway's best known—and most active—celebrity ghosts. Don't worry: like Casper, they tend to be friendly. For the most part. There's something special about theatres, something especially conducive and welcoming to ghosts. Charles J. Adams III wrote, "By its very nature, a theatre is a vault within which every human emotion is at once imprisoned, impersonated, imitated, and elicited. Tangles of cords and ropes…tall curtains and backdrops which fade into high darkness…cubicles and trap doors and passageways."Good Morning, Olive takes readers on a tour of that world.

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