The Stratford Festival Story - (Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance) by J A B Somerset & James Lindroth (Hardcover)

About the Book

This reference book records the activities of the Stratford, Ontario (Shakespeare) Festival, which is considered the premiere professional festival in North America. Alan Somerset documents not only the Stratford theater activities, but also the Festival's many tours, television productions, and out-of-season and workshop performances. Somerset has used the latest database-management techniques to create the most complete reference book on the Festival to date. He has organized his work into three parts: a catalogue index, title index and name index. Somerset also offers a summary of the Festival's history and guides readers to the range of material preserved in the Festival Archives.

Somerset introduces the indexes by sketching the Festival's history and guiding readers to the Festival Archives and to his own database, which can be used by the public. The Catalogue Index documents all the recoverable details (including important review information) about each production, workshop, tour, television broadcast, and other type of performance mounted by Stratford. The Title Index provides complete reference to particular plays, and the Name Index allows readers to trace the careers of all performers and production staff members in the Festival's history. This book, which also contains several photographs, is valuable to theater critics, Festival patrons, and students of performance criticism, Shakespeare, and modern theater history.

Book Synopsis

This reference book records the activities of the Stratford, Ontario (Shakespeare) Festival, which is considered the premiere professional festival in North America. Alan Somerset documents not only the Stratford theater activities, but also the Festival's many tours, television productions, and out-of-season and workshop performances. Somerset has used the latest database-management techniques to create the most complete reference book on the Festival to date. He has organized his work into three parts: a catalogue index, title index and name index. Somerset also offers a summary of the Festival's history and guides readers to the range of material preserved in the Festival Archives.

Somerset introduces the indexes by sketching the Festival's history and guiding readers to the Festival Archives and to his own database, which can be used by the public. The Catalogue Index documents all the recoverable details (including important review information) about each production, workshop, tour, television broadcast, and other type of performance mounted by Stratford. The Title Index provides complete reference to particular plays, and the Name Index allows readers to trace the careers of all performers and production staff members in the Festival's history. This book, which also contains several photographs, is valuable to theater critics, Festival patrons, and students of performance criticism, Shakespeare, and modern theater history.

Review Quotes

?The scholar will applaud the thoroughness of Professor Somerset's research. Every production is catalogued, including much of the ephemera that appears every season as workshops or fringe activities. . . . The Stratford Festival Story is an important addition to the growing literature on the Stratford Festival and Canadian theatre.?-English Studies in Canada

?This chronological listing of personnel and cast, length of run, and selected reviews of every production at the Stratford Festival, was inspired by Michael Mullin's comparable Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon: A Catalogue-Index. 1878-1978 (CH, Jan '81). Usefully indexed with all titles and names, the book can offer only the most immediately needed information out of vast, consultable, on-going databases. The 40 printed review sources, for instance, have been culled from an archive, now newly quartered at Stratford, containing some 1,250 sources and 400,000 clippings. Particularly valuable, but in relatively few entries, is an archive note recording the existence of additional production materials such as scripts, music, property and costume sketches, photographs, and videotapes. A random handful of photographs includes one of the extraordinary opening production of Richard III in 1953, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and starring Alec Guinness. Intended for reference collections and scholars of the contemporary theatre.?-Choice

"The scholar will applaud the thoroughness of Professor Somerset's research. Every production is catalogued, including much of the ephemera that appears every season as workshops or fringe activities. . . . The Stratford Festival Story is an important addition to the growing literature on the Stratford Festival and Canadian theatre."-English Studies in Canada

"This chronological listing of personnel and cast, length of run, and selected reviews of every production at the Stratford Festival, was inspired by Michael Mullin's comparable Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon: A Catalogue-Index. 1878-1978 (CH, Jan '81). Usefully indexed with all titles and names, the book can offer only the most immediately needed information out of vast, consultable, on-going databases. The 40 printed review sources, for instance, have been culled from an archive, now newly quartered at Stratford, containing some 1,250 sources and 400,000 clippings. Particularly valuable, but in relatively few entries, is an archive note recording the existence of additional production materials such as scripts, music, property and costume sketches, photographs, and videotapes. A random handful of photographs includes one of the extraordinary opening production of Richard III in 1953, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and starring Alec Guinness. Intended for reference collections and scholars of the contemporary theatre."-Choice

About the Author

J. ALAN B. SOMERSET is Associate Professor and Chairman of the English Department at the University of Western Ontario. He is author of Halliwell Phillipps' Scrapbooks: An Index, and editor of Four Tudor Interludes and A Play of Love. He also has several articles on theatre to his credit, including Secular Drama in A Companion to the Medieval Theatre (Greenwood Press, 1989).