Palace Theatre Research Articles

The Merchant of Venice 1936 by Watford Palace Theatre (review)

The Merchant of Venice 1936 by Watford Palace Theatre (review)

Reductionist attitudes towards theatre and women as tools of modernity in the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat period

The study is explored from two perspectives to show that women's relationship with the theatre was an important element and tool in the modernisation process that took place in the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Tanzimat reforms initiated by the Gülhane Rescript of 1839. The first is women's restricted freedom of going to the theatre, and the other is how women were portrayed in plays. Although women living in the palace can regularly attend performances at the Palace Theatre, the public did not approve of Muslim women going to the theatre. Reformist writers and Young Ottomans saw the theatre as a school for educating people. It was believed that men going to the theatre could be trained there, and then women, in turn, would be trained by their husbands or fathers. In the plays, women were portrayed as good and bad types, using a propaganda tool like the theatre. It is claimed that there is a reductionist attitude towards theatre and women as tools of modernity.

GEÇ OSMANLI DÖNEMİ İSTANBUL’UNDA VENEDİK TACİRİ OYUNUNUN SANSÜRLENMESİ VE YASAKLANMASI

Researchers studying the bans on dramatic works in the Ottoman Empire mainly put forward two possible reasons in relation to censoring and banning of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in the late imperial period. One of these possibilities is a rumour alleging that Abdülhamid II, during a performance at the palace theatre, became so frightened when the actor playing Shylock began sharpening his knife that he immediately banned the play. The other reason is related to the play’s capability to cause a conflict among religious minorities in the Empire. The lack of comprehensive academic sources on the incident prevented researchers from reaching precise outcomes. Moreover, there is no existing research on the ban of the translation of the play. This is largely due to the limited availability of formal papers in the State Archives until recently. The classification and scanning of the documents held at the State Archives in Turkey have provided researchers with new evidence. Accordingly, this study explores the process of censoring and banning of The Merchant of Venice in the light of historical documents and formal correspondence with the aim of contributing to the discussions in this field.

The Country Wife, Southall Style: Restoration Comedy and the Multicultural Gaze

Abstract First performed at Watford Palace Theatre in 2004, Tanika Gupta’s version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) relocates the Restoration classic to twenty-first-century London, reframing its libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, Wycherley’s comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective, and his merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the adaptor’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities. This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s “new ethnicities,” I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

Guest Editor's Introduction: The Ballets Russes in North America

Guest Editor's Introduction: The Ballets Russes in North America

The Electric Pleasure District: The West End of London in the Age of Empire, 1880–1914*

This study examines the cultural work of the West End of London in the long Edwardian period (1880–1914). It argues that the pleasure district was changed in a number of ways in which electricity was one thread. The coming of electricity affected the character of the area, not only transforming theatre lighting but also introducing new forms of street advertising, notably on Piccadilly Circus. The West End was physically changed by the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross, which then became sites of a wave of theatre building (all of which showed off their modernity by adopting electricity). These theatres, especially the Palace Theatre of Varieties, are examined in terms of the entertainments they offered but also the ways in which they produced forms of cultural capital for spectators. Finally, the study considers another electric medium, the cinema. The West End became known for upscale cinemas that emulated the theatres nearby and sought to make film-going attractive to wealthier customers who, a few years earlier, disdained it. By 1914, the West End had, to a large extent, taken on its modern form.

Doubling Down on Stupid: Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque

Doubling Down on Stupid:Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque Robert L. Turner III (bio) Although Tirso de Molina (1579–1648), pseudonym for the Mercedarian priest Gabriel Téllez, is best known as the author of El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) and El condenado por desconfiado (Damned by Despair), his corpus includes dozens of plays spanning multiple subgenres.1 Tirso is one of three key playwrights who dominated Spanish theater in the early modern period. Together with Lope de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), the creator of the comedia nueva ("new theater"), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), the master of baroque language and palace theater, Tirso de Molina helped to elevate an immensely popular public entertainment to a deeply philosophical commentary on society, identity, power relationships, and justice. For early modern Spain, the corral ("theater") was an extremely popular destination with a higher per capita attendance than that at North American movie theaters in the early twenty-first century.2 The comedia, as the dominant theatrical form of the period came to be known, took form in the late sixteenth century as Lope de Vega created a winning formula based on domestic and Italian sources. As he explains in his El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo [End Page 33] (The New Art of Writing Plays in Our Time), his vision includes a break with the classic tradition in favor of a more popular set of themes, all set within a three-act structure that runs for roughly three thousand lines of verse. The comedia is characterized by the use of multiple verse forms and a plot that almost always ends in either marriage or murder. Parallel or doubled plots, with the nobles' efforts frequently being echoed by a coarser or more satirical version involving the servants, is a common element as well. The genre is also full—especially in the urban and cloak-and-sword subgenres—of derring-do, battles, duels, disguises, secret marriages, betrayals, mistaken identities, and similar attention-grabbing plot devices. At the same time, the comedia includes a focus on character development and a psychological depth that was lacking in earlier Spanish theater. Born Gabriel Josepe López Téllez to humble parents in the San Sebastian parish of Madrid (Vázquez, "Gabriel Téllez" 22), Tirso joined the Mercedarians as a young man and served within the order until his death. This religious involvement formed a core part of his literary identity and may also explain his use of a pseudonym since some religious leaders strongly opposed the ribald nature of these secular plays (Vázquez, "Tirso de Molina" 358). While both Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca were also ordained to the priesthood, each entered into formal religious orders in their fifties, and writing was always their paramount focus. In contrast, Tirso took on several important roles within his order, including writing its history as the order's chronicler. At the time of his death he was the comendador ("interim abbot") for the Mercedarian monastery in Soria. Tirso's plays are often structured around the overarching concept of justice, where divine and social justice excuse actions that violate contemporary mores.3 His criticism of societal corruption, including that of King Philip IV's favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, is likely the reason that the Junta de Reformación ordered him, in 1625, to cease his writing and leave Madrid, calling his works "scandalous."4 Tirso's work consistently tilts toward psychological conflicts and shows an obsession with the use of disguise, a love of mistaken identities, a tendency to write sympathetic and norm-breaking female characters, and a fascination with multiplications of the self—all of which further his exploration of issues surrounding power and justice. These themes are [End Page 34] frequently expressed through various forms of doubling. This doubling includes the creation of doppelgangers (as is the case in this play); the creation of multiple identities, such as in La celosa de sí misma (Jealous of Herself), where the protagonist has to win against an idealized version of herself; layered identities, as in El amor m...

Data Publics: Urban Protest, Analytics and the Courts

Data Publics: Urban Protest, Analytics and the Courts

Protest in Progress/Progress in Protest

Protest in Progress/Progress in Protest

« Ce n’est pas un livre, mais une pièce de théâtre… » : la lecture de Harry Potter et l’enfant maudit par les utilisateurs du réseau social littéraire Babelio

“It’s not a book, it’s a play… ”: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Read by the Users of Babelio, a Social Network for Book Readers. On the 31st of July 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play written by Jack Thorne in collaboration with J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, was performed for the first time at the Palace Theatre in London. On the same day, the bookshops of Great Britain were literally invaded by the young wizard’s fans, whom were curious to know what happens next to their favorite heroes. Thereby, The Cursed Child is a play, not only to be performed, but also – and mostly – to be read. Whereas the Theater Studies, at least in France, consider the drama text mainly as a scenic performance element and thus, limits the drama text reading to text analysis, the reception of Thorne’s play allows to ask about the possibility of reading the drama text as a self-sufficient fictional text and invites us to investigate the specificities of this kind of reading. In order to do this, I have analyzed three hundred Cursed Child readers’ reviews, which are located on the babelio.com website, one of the biggest French social networks for book readers. It appears that the Cursed Child’s readers tend to read that drama text by comparing it to the seven Harry Potter novels. The main two differences perceived within the scope of this comparison (and which the readers often tend to attribute to the dramatic form specificities) are the so-called lack of descriptions and the rapid reading rhythm. However, these differences may receive a completely opposite evaluation, depending on the reader’s openness to the dramatic form. In this way, for the “reluctant” readers, it constitutes an obstacle which prevents the fictional immersion and therefore the pleasure of reading, whereas for the “enthusiastic” readers, it allows them to go through a new and pleasant experience. Moreover, it is not unusual to see that the reading of The Cursed Child markedly reduces the reader’s reluctance towards the dramatic form. In fact, the reader reviews analysis proves that The Cursed Child text activates the reader’s imagination, regardless of his reluctance. Consequently, the Thorne’s drama example demonstrates that a drama text can be considered as a self-sufficient fictional text which is able to arouse the pleasure of reading and we can therefore conclude that the reluctance or the pleasure is led by the reader’s own readiness to accept the alterity of the dramatic form.

Los autos sacramentales en Palacio: algo más que una fiesta

This article undertakes the study of the allegorical plays that Calderon composed for Corpus Christi in Madrid as a form of Palace theater. Taking into consideration that these works were composed primarily to be staged for the King and his family, this study sheds new light on certain textual passages at the same time that it allows for an interpretation from an historical-political perspective that, in some cases, proves to be very enlightening. The fi rst part of the article shows how those individuals responsible for the organization of the Corpus Christi plays were very close to the King, and in some cases used their positions in order to serve the monarch’s interests, and even to assure that he received certain messages. In the second part a number of the Corpus plays are analyzed summarily in order to show that this perspective adds new information that allows the autos sacramentales to be interpreted more completely and correctly.

La princesa de Éboli: Cautiva del rey. Vida de Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda (1540–1592) by Helen H. Reed and Trevor J. Dadson

Reed, Helen H. and Trevor J. Dadson. La princesa de Eboli: Cautiva del rey. Vida de Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda (1540-1592). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica y Marcial Pons Historia, 2015. 539 pp.Two distinguished scholars of early-modern literary history have come together to examine and contextualize the remarkable life of Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda (1540-1592), the Princess of Eboli (hereafter Eboli or Dona Ana). Reed and Dadson anchor their study in the primary-source documents they compiled and glossed for an earlier partnership, the Epistolario e historia documental de Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, princesa de Eboli (Madrid, Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main, Vervuert, 2013). A collaborative spirit towards scholarly labors animates the book. As the authors explain in the preface, Reed had prepared a biography of Eboli in an initial draft in English. Dadson then joined her, translating this text into Spanish, adding material from his own archival work along the way. The authors also take great care to recognize the works on which they build, most notably Gregorio Maranon's classic biography of Antonio Perez and Esther Alegre Carvajal's series of studies on the Princess of Eboli.Reed and Dadson's foremost aim is to peel away the layers of myth and caricature that have accumulated around Eboli. In theater history, a particularly durable fiction took shape when Giuseppe Verdi-following Friedrich Schiller-transformed a complicated noblewoman from the storied Mendoza family into a Romantic character informed by stereotypes of Spain, blending motifs of Moorish allure with the darker visions of Inquisitorial oppression associated with the Black Legend. In his Don Carlos (debut 1867), Eboli is a secondary character who complicates the tragic love story, as she vies with Isabel de Valois for Don Carlos's love. The crowning moment of this mezzo-soprano part is the Veil Song of Act 2 (Au palais des fees; Nel giardin del bello in the Italian version). In Hispanic studies, Eboli has also assumed a somewhat villainous profile as the estranged patron responsible for subjecting Teresa of Avila to Inquisitorial scrutiny.To provide an accurate assessment of the full life in all its complexity, the authors present ten chapters organized with the precise chronology of traditional biography. Thus, they begin with a first chapter on Familia, infancia y educacion de Ana de Mendoza, continuing with nine more chapters focused on the following milestones: betrothal and marriage to the up-and-coming courtier Ruy Gomez de Silva (Chs. 2-3); the court of Isabel of Valois (Ch. 4); the organization of Pastrana as a ducal village (Ch. 5); her widowhood and fateful entanglement with Antonio Perez (Chs. 6-7); and finally, the murder of Juan de Escobedo and the resulting imprisonment (Chs. 8-10).Theater scholars will find Chapter 4 (En la corte de Isabel de Valois) of special interest, with its analysis of documents that record the emergence of a sophisticated palace theater in the milieu of Philip Il's third queen consort. Isabel of Valois sponsored over forty performances by professional actors between 1561 and 1567 in the room of the Alcazar palace known as the salon de comedias o saraos. Eboli, as a close contemporary and companion of the French queen, was a key protagonist among the court damas who acted in invenciones teatrales on such occasions as the feast of the Epiphany in 1564. The alluring portrait of Dona Ana in pastoral costume by Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1565) records the extent that popular literature informed the courtly pastimes. But the levity and sophistication here would contrast with the horrific consequences of Don Carlos's mental unraveling. Indeed, the chapter closes with the double tragedies of the royal heir's death while imprisoned by his father and the young queen's death in childbirth. Here, Reed and Dadson draw attention to the letter of condolence Eboli writes to Isabel's mother, France's queen mother Catherine de'Medici. …

Recent Color Reproductions of Qing Dynasty Palace Multi-Colored Play Scripts

RESEARCH NOTE: RECENT COLOR REPRODUCTIONS OF QING DYNASTY PALACE MULTI-COLORED PLAY SCRIPTS DAVID L. ROLSTON University of Michigan It is fairly well known that many of the Qing emperors (and one empress dowager, in particular) were dedicated consumers of a wide variety of theatrical performances in the various Qing palaces, and that the court insisted that several different kinds of written plays scripts would be prepared and archived for all drama performances. An increasing number of scholars have been making use in their research of play scripts that were prepared for these performances and were preserved in the imperial archives or were bought by collectors after they made their way onto the old book market and eventually ended up in library collections in China and abroad. 2012 saw the long-awaited appearance of the first book in English on Qing dynasty palace theater, Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Drama and the Qing Imperial Court (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2012), by Ye Xiaoqing (1952–2010). Her study is more concerned with documents about performance than performance itself and rarely mentions play scripts in any detail.1 While it is true that only a few of us will choose to do research on Qing palace stagecraft, I think those of us interested in traditional Chinese theater need to have some familiarity with the kinds of things that happened on the stage in the Qing palaces since the court was generally able and willing to commit resources, human and material, that commercial troupes could only dream about. Commercial troupes had to be able to carry what they needed for performances from venue to venue. What we tend to think about as essential to traditional Chinese theater such as the use of the bare stage, limited props, no or little scenery, etc., characterized the practice of commercial troupes but not that of the imperial court.2 Palace performances could get quite complicated in terms of the number of people and things whose movement had to be coordinated, and this seems to have stimulated the creation of different kinds of production scripts and written aids with far more stage directions than was typically the case. Luckily, reproductions of Qing dynasty palace play scripts and auxiliary documents have become more and more readily available. In 2010, in my first letter as 1 The major exception is the performances put on for Lord Macartney in 1793 with which she opens the book and which she described in an earlier article, ‘‘Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Tributary Drama and the Macartney Mission of 1793,’’ Late Imperial China 26.2 (December 2005): 89–113. However, neither work includes an image of the script involved. 2 It was not until fairly late in the nineteenth century, beginning in Shanghai, that you begin to get the phenomenon of theaters maintaining their own troupes. CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 34. 2 (December 2015): 188–193© The Permanent Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. 2015 DOI 10.1080/01937774.2015.1096570 editor in this journal, I mentioned the availability of photo-reproductions of Qing dynasty palace play scripts in volumes 660–696 of Gugong zhenben congkan 故 宮珍本叢刊 (Collection of precious holdings of the Forbidden Palace; Haikou: Hainan chuban she, 2000–2001).3 The following year saw the photo-reproduction of the holdings of the National Library in Beijing from the Qing dynasty palace theater bureau Shengping shu 昇平暑 (Bureau of ascending peace): Zhongguo guojia tushu guan cang Shengping shu dang’an jicheng 中國國家圖書館藏昇平暑 (Compendium of Shengping shu archives held in the National Library), 108 volumes (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011). Volumes 51–108 of this set contain play scripts and other texts used for performances.4 Previous to these two publications , the largest single set of photo-reprints of palace scripts was the ninth series of Guben xiqu congkan 古本戲曲叢刊 (Compendium of old texts of indigenous Chinese drama; Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), which included ten serial plays (the longest of which have 240 scenes). The trouble with these photo-reprints, however, is that they are not in color and some of the originals made rather spectacular use of color, as we will see. Although you can...

Research note: recent color reproductions of qing dynasty palace multi-colored play scripts

It is fairly well known that many of the Qing emperors (and one empress dowager, in particular) were dedicated consumers of a wide variety of theatrical performances in the various Qing palaces, and that the court insisted that several different kinds of written plays scripts would be prepared and archived for all drama performances. An increasing number of scholars have been making use in their research of play scripts that were prepared for these performances and were preserved in the imperial archives or were bought by collectors after they made their way onto the old book market and eventually ended up in library collections in China and abroad. 2012 saw the long-awaited appearance of the first book in English on Qing dynasty palace theater, Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Drama and the Qing Imperial Court (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2012), by Ye Xiaoqing (1952–2010). Her study is more concerned with documents about performance than performance itself and rarely mentions play scripts in any detail. While it is true that only a few of us will choose to do research on Qing palace stagecraft, I think those of us interested in traditional Chinese theater need to have some familiarity with the kinds of things that happened on the stage in the Qing palaces since the court was generally able and willing to commit resources, human and material, that commercial troupes could only dream about. Commercial troupes had to be able to carry what they needed for performances from venue to venue. What we tend to think about as essential to traditional Chinese theater such as the use of the bare stage, limited props, no or little scenery, etc., characterized the practice of commercial troupes but not that of the imperial court. Palace performances could get quite complicated in terms of the number of people and things whose movement had to be coordinated, and this seems to have stimulated the creation of different kinds of production scripts and written aids with far more stage directions than was typically the case. Luckily, reproductions of Qing dynasty palace play scripts and auxiliary documents have become more and more readily available. In 2010, in my first letter as

Ve službách knížete Liechtensteina: několik poznatků k provozu zámeckého divadla ve Valticích

Ve službách knížete Liechtensteina: několik poznatků k provozu zámeckého divadla ve Valticích

Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musical by Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musical by Colin Bateman (review)

Reviewed by: Roddy Doyle’s the Commitments: A New Musicalby Roddy Doyle, and: Teenage Kicks: A Punk Musicalby Colin Bateman Mary Jo Lodge RODDY DOYLE’S THE COMMITMENTS: A NEW MUSICAL. Book by Roddy Doyle. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Choreographed by Ann Lee. Palace Theatre, London. 3November 2013. TEENAGE KICKS: A PUNK MUSICAL. Written by Colin Bateman. Directed by Des Kennedy. Choreographed by Jennifer Rooney. Co-produced by the Millennium Forum and the Nerve Centre. Millennium Forum, Derry, Northern Ireland. 6November 2013. In the autumn of 2013, two new stage musicals that explored the intersections of Irish identity in the 1980s with popular music, The Commitmentsand Teenage Kicks, premiered in the UK. Both experimented with the ways in which popular music forms rarely seen on the musical theatre stage—soul and punk—can be modified for dramatic performance. While the adaptation of popular music for the stage is as old as the art form of musical theatre, it is sometimes a tricky business, particularly when the adapted, nondramatic music is used to advance the plot, as it was in one of these new shows. The much higher profile of the two shows was the stage musical version of The Commitments, based on the popular 1987 novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who also co-wrote the screenplay for the successful 1991 film of the same name and serves as book writer for the stage musical. The Commitmentsmusical, directed by Jamie Lloyd, opened on the West End in London on 8 October 2013 and featured the same catalog of soul music made famous in the film. I attended the production on Sunday, 3 November, and while there were no fewer than four understudies appearing that night, including Thomas Snowdon in the role of Jimmy (normally performed by Denis Grindel) and Ian McIntosh, who played the demanding role of Deco every Sunday evening (played otherwise by Killian Donnelly), it was an enjoyably entertaining evening, although it often felt more like a musical revue than a book musical. The Commitmentsmusical follows the same plot as the previous film and book, exploring the lives of impoverished, working-class, young white men and a few white women from the rough northside of Dublin. It centers on Dubliner Jimmy Rabbitte’s formation of a band he dubs “The Commitments,” one that will exclusively play American soul music, typically associated with African American musicians, even though the entire band is white. The musical is not especially plot heavy and the story is told almost exclusively in the brief book scenes rather than through its adapted soul music. As in the film and book, The Commitments achieve a small degree of success in Dublin, much of which is depicted in a single concert that makes up the bulk of act 2, but their internal struggles with personality conflicts, romantic entanglements, and outsized egos eventually overwhelm the band. The show is primarily a musical celebration that includes an extended character study, particularly of driven band-manager Jimmy, as well as of Deco, the arrogant and difficult lead singer, and Joey “The Lips” Fagan, the philandering veteran musician who joins the young band. Unlike The Commitments, the other, smaller scale new UK musical, Teenage Kicks, premiered in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 1 November 2013 and was billed a “punk musical.” Teenage Kickswas written by Irish novelist and television writer Colin Bateman and featured punk music from the 1980s, particularly songs drawn from the catalogs of English band The Stranglers and Northern Irish bands Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones. It was created as part of the inaugural yearlong UK City of Culture celebration, which was held in Derry in 2013. During its first week I attended the show in Derry, and while the production lacked the big-budget punch of The Commitments, the talented cast offered strong performances, in spite of occasional script problems. Teenage Kicks, which attempted to use its adapted punk music to advance and develop its plot, is set in both Derry, Northern Ireland, and then Iowa, in America, in 1981. The Troubles—as the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Loyalists, who were mostly Protestant, and the Republicans...

The Jaffe effect

By 1940, nearly every sizable city in America had a movie palace or movie-adapted vaudeville theater. As these regal houses for the silver screen were replaced by cinemas, the palaces and vaudeville theaters of the early 20th century sat with empty stages, taunting orchestras, theater companies, and would be audiences. Christopher Jaffe's most noted contribution to architectural acoustics was championing the adaptive re-use of these theaters through the development of an orchestra shell system. These light-weight shell systems allowed the theaters to support multiple performing arts organizations without a monumental capital campaign that neither the cities nor art organizations could afford. Chris' most singular contribution to acoustics was, however, his mentorship. This maverick in the field, always on a quest to prove himself, never missed an opportunity to share his knowledge or work out a new concept with a colleague or apprentice. He fostered the growth of consultants at all stages of their careers, first in his practice and later in the establishment of an architectural acoustics program at his alma mater.

Minton Sparks at the Cumberland Mountain Storytelling Festival, Palace Theater, Crossville, Tennessee, November 1, 2013

Minton Sparks takes the stage of the Palace Theater in Crossville, Tennessee, like an avenging angel of the order of rural Southern womanhood. Carpetbag dress and sensible heels, bone leather purse broad and deep enough to carry a family Bible and a .44 Magnum, she stakes out a tight arc between the music stand freighted down with texts at her right hand and her remarkable musician John Jackson to her left behind a palisade of guitars and foot pedals. She paces that stage space, one hand clutching the mic to her chin and the other hand treading air as if weighing whether to preach or to fly. In one piece she struts like a gaggle of gossiping hens. In another she opens that purse, inventorying the contents of a life both lived and unlived, revealed and deeply hidden even from its bearer. Her performance poetry brims with unconstrained voices, conversing in a glossolalia both intelligible and opaque, though all the words and phrases are from some channeled font of Delta English.Hers is a sturdy, evocative performance persona: outer garment of tough feminine Americana imagery and attitude, with an inner lining blended of literary and slam poetry techniques, all stitched together with a satiny underscoring of blues licks and hymn tunes. It is a fabric that is unique on the storytelling circuit, at least in the United States, where music, poetry, and narration tend to be broken into more discrete segments. Diane Ferlatte's recent work with Eric Pearson combines traditional and personal narratives with blues guitar accompaniments, and tandem duos such as Barry Marshall and Jere Burns of the Storycrafters often weave musical interplay into their arrangements. In the early 1990s the late Julie Portman and husband Paul Reisler performed fully accompanied theatrical narratives, one-woman plays with guitar and dulcimer backdrops that stylisti- cally seemed to just miss connecting with storytelling audiences. Collaborations between storytellers and musical accompanists are relatively common in Britain (e.g., Hugh Lupton with Chris Wood on fiddle and guitar, Xanthe Gresham with Arash Moradi on frame drum and saz, Robin Williamson with his own folk harp), where the connection to bardic antecedents are vividly sensed and sought. There are a number of singer-songwriters whose mix of folk ballads and elaborated song introductions constitute a subgenre on festival stages. What sets Sparks apart in this era is the cool precision of her free-verse narratives in visual and aural coun- terpart with the unsettling fidelity of her vocal and clothing impersonations-all eerily echoed by flowing guitar loops drawn from the John Fahey catalogue of ruminative American Gothic.A flaking, putrid pink-skinned womandecays in a four-poster bed,eyes the size of chicken eggsthat could have been laid this morningand sold this afternoon . . .faceless relatives shuffling around her bed,embarrassed to acknowledge the specter.Images this stark are vanishingly rare in the storytelling world constituted around family-friendly events. Yet the literary format relieves the audience of its habitual guilty retreat into sentimentality. Sparks's oral interpretive stance poses her fixed texts as sensed intermediaries between performer and audience, absolving them of the social obligation to play nice. The peculiar sprung torsion of the free-verse lines repels conventional resolutions, and her narratives suspend themselves in contemplative space, balanced on the point of a fading guitar note in a bracing solution of wonder and horror.The Palace Theater is a vintage small-town Main Street movie house, lovingly restored as an arts center. The proscenium is elevated above the usual height of a storytelling platform, and the seats, tilted backward toward the stage, are rather too comfortable for full alertness on the part of the genteel, snowy-headed audi- ence. This is the conservative, Medicare-eligible demographic that has overrun the festival-based flank of the storytelling movement, while younger, hipper audiences have gravitated toward open-mic Moth-style personal story nights now filling urban venues. …

Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London, by Judith R. Walkowitz.

Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London, by Judith R. Walkowitz. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2012. xiv, 414 pp. $40.00 US (cloth). In Nights Out, Judith Walkowitz explores the Soho area of London between 1890 and 1945, vividly illuminating it as a world of immigrants, political dissidents, theatrical and musical performers, gangsters, prostitutes, reformers, and avid male and female consumers from all classes, who operated within and alongside the ever-expanding commercial cultures that included variety theatres, restaurants, street markets, and nightclubs. In so doing, she seeks to answer a scholarly call for localized and historically specific studies of the meanings and practices of cosmopolitanism, and argues for Soho's role as a potent incubator of metropolitan change (p. 3), leading the city and nation onward along the path to heterogeneity and modernity. book draws upon a rich and diverse source base of memoirs, travel guides, novels, newspapers, police reports, and oral histories to reveal Soho as a space for cross-class, multi-ethnic, and interracial interaction and sociability; for the policing and challenging of boundaries of gender, sexuality, and bodily display; and for political expression and conflict. It is an ambitious and highly readable account, which bridges and expands numerous historiographies, from the burgeoning scholarship on commercial leisure, to histories of British multiculturalism, to ongoing debates about the British experience of the Second World War. One of the particular strengths of Nights Out is its contribution to a growing body of scholarship that situates the development of British culture within global (rather than merely imperial) networks of cultural exchange. Soho's cosmopolitanism arose not only from its position as a neighbourhood within the imperial capital, but from its longstanding history as a home to immigrants from the European continent and its connection to expanding Anglo-American commercial entertainment industries. In two early chapters, Walkowitz reads the 1890's anti-vice campaign against the Empire Theatre of Varieties and the sensation caused by North American dancer Maud Allan's performances at the Palace Theatre in 1908 in a transatlantic frame. She shows that feminist purity reformers drew upon hybridized Anglo-American ideas about virtue during the Battle for the Empire, while Allan's original dance, the Vision of Salome, positioned her outside a single national framework (p. 69), drawing on contemporary ideas about the Orient, but also American styles of modern dance and physical culture. Then turning eastward to the European continent, in a chapter entitled The Italian Restaurant, Walkowitz skilfully weaves together the biographies of two Italian immigrants to Soho, restaurateur Peppino Leoni and market-owner Emidio Recchioni, to illustrate the strong influence of continental cuisine within British culinary culture in this period, but also Soho's important position vis-a-vis contemporary European political transformations. Soho catering industry became a vital enclave for supporters (like Leoni) of Mussolini's fascists in the Italian diaspora, while at the same time, a smaller group of Italian anti-fascists like Recchioni used their Soho storefronts as bases from which they could forge alliances within a transnational group of leftist political activists. …

A Palimpsest of Place and Past

How does one perform memory? And in particular, how does one perform cultural memory, or what generally passes as history? This essay looks back to the ancient practices of the memory arts and ahead to today's location-based digital technologies, considering machines for the performance of memory. It begins by disambiguating the subtle but important distinctions between the projects of the memory palace and Camillo's theatre of memory, distinguishing the performance of space characteristic of the palace from the memory theatre's space of performance. Camillo's theatre introduced a new twist to the memory palace, functioning in some senses as a memory machine and requiring of its users a particular kind of performance. The essay explores these differences and their implications for thinking about performative navigation and the meanings bound up within the city as a historically accrued repository of material practices and subjectivities. We continue to have access to the city's materialities, of course, but how can we recover its experiential contingencies and the ephemeral views of its inhabitants? How might we give voice to its pluriform significance? How can we activate, articulate and put into play these assignments of meaning? The essay explores these questions and the possibilities of using location-based digital technologies as machines for the performance of urban space and memory. It extends the analogy of Camillo's creation, in which the scholar-spectator inhabits a physical theatre and generates memories through interaction with an elaborate and logical system of all knowledge, to the smartphone or iPad-equipped flâneur-spectator, doing something similar in his wanderings of the city. Location-aware technologies together with vast databases combine to generate personalized assemblages of public information, rendering any particular location – like Camillo's theatre – a space of performance.