Theatre - CCNY Libraries

American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920 -- The American Variety Stage is a multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings. This collection illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini. Groups of theater posters and additional sound recordings will be added to this anthology in the future.

Ben Jonson -- Ben Jonson was one of England's most renowned playwrights during the 17th century. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Jonson was born in 1572, educated at the Westminster School, and as a young man joined the theatrical company of Philip Henslowe in London. This site, provided by the Luminarium, contains most of Jonsons' plays and lyric poetry, a brief biography (with hypertextlinks), additional Web resources, and a number of critical essays on Jonson's body of work.

Bob Hope and American Variety (A Library of Congress Exhibition)
The exhibition sections include: Early Life, Vaudeville, The Bill, Moving On, Bits & Sketches, Motion Pictures, Radio,Television, Joke File, On the Road: USO Shows, Public Service, and Faces of Bob Hope.

(Broadway) Internet Broadway Database -- A definitive source for the facts on Broadway musicals and plays from Aristophanes to Ziegfeld. Includes number of performances, extensive credit information, theatres, characters, and more.

Hispano Music and Culture from the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection (Library of Congress) -- Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection is an online presentation of a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. In 1940, Juan Bautista Rael of Stanford University, a native of Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, used disc recording equipment supplied by the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center) to document alabados (hymns), folk drama, wedding songs, and dance tunes. The recordings included in the Archive of Folk Culture collection were made in Alamosa, Manassa, and Antonito, Colorado, and in Cerro and Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico. In addition to these recordings, the collection includes manuscript materials and publications authored by Rael which provide insight into the rich musical heritage and cultural traditions of this region. This presentation is made possible by the generous support of The Texaco Foundation.

The Ibsen Centre -- The Centre for Ibsen Studies was begun in 1992 at the University of Oslo, largely to serve as a place for scholars and students to gain access (and work on) projects related to Henrik Ibsen, one of the most celebrated playwrights of modern drama. The site contains a good deal of basic information about the activities of the Centre, along with upcoming conferences dealing with Ibsen, and forthcoming and recently released publications originating from the Centre. The site offers asearchable Ibsen bibliography, and access to manuscripts and papers written by Ibsen himself (all of which are, understandably, in Norwegian).

Internet Broadway Database -- A definitive source for the facts on Broadway musicals and plays from Aristophanes to Ziegfeld. Includes number of performances, extensive credit information, theatres, characters, and more.

Internet Movie Database -- Huge, fully-searchable database of film information, including credits, plot summaries, character names, movie ratings, year of release, running times, soundtracks, country of production, genres, production companies, distributors, special effects companies, reference literature, filming locations and movie trivia.

The Internet Public Library: Theatre Collection -- Sites selected by the IPL, a project of the School of Information, University of Michigan.

Internet Resources in Film -- Selected by Librarians in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and the Dance and Drama Circulating Collections at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Internet Resources in Theatre -- Selected by librarians in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and in the Dance and Drama Circulating Collections at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Librarians' Index to the Internet: Theatre -- A searchable collection of over 35 Web sites related to the theatre. Overall collection sponsored by the Library of California.

Masterpiece Theatre Online -- Masterpiece Theatre has joined the rest of PBS online with a nice collection of resources for current, past, and future programs. At the site, users will find a broadcast schedule for this season, teaching resources for the current and upcoming films (Oliver Twist and Cora Unashamed), an interactive literary timeline, a forum, and a free email newsletter. In addition, the site also contains an archive of past performances, including a searchable database, program chronology, and poster gallery. Fans of the program or particular films it has featured as well as teachers who use Masterpiece Theatre in the classroom will find plenty of interest.

The Mercury Theater on the Air -- Most famous for its War of the Worlds broadcast, this New York drama company, founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman, produced a number of highly acclaimed radio-adapted dramas in its brief tenure (July-December 1938). Created and maintained by Kim Scarborough, this site is a treasure trove for fans of radio drama, featuring all of the surviving Mercury Theatre programs in their entirety in both streaming and downloadable RealPlayer format. In addition to the War of the Worlds, highlights include Julius Caesar (set in Fascist Italy), The 39 Steps, Heart of Darkness, and The Pickwick Papers.

The New York Public Library, Best of the Web: Theatre -- This collection of Web sites presents the following broad categories: indexes to Internet theatre resources, play indexes, full text play sources, journals & e-zines, history, Shakespeare, Broadway & Off-Broadway, theatre companies, libraries, archives & museums, and associations & organizations.

The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project
This online presentation includes over 13,000 images of items selected from the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress. Featured here are stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, and scripts for productions of Macbeth and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus as staged by Orson Welles, and for Power, a topical drama of the period (over 3,000 images). Also included are 68 other playscripts (6,500 images) and 168 documents selected from the Federal Theatre Project Administrative Records (3,700 images). The Federal Theatre Project was one of five arts-related projects established during the first term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Performing Arts: Internet Resources in Music, Theatre, and Dance (Internet guide) -- This Library of Congress guide provides a wide range of links to Internet sources in the following catagories: Performing Arts Libraries and Research Aids, Periodical Indexes, Doctoral Dissertaions, Obituaries and Necrologies, Theatre Sites, and Opera, among others.

Theatre History on the Web -- Maintained by Professor Jack Wolcott, emeritus of the University of Washington School of Drama, this well organized Website provides an annotated directory of links to resources on Theatre history from classical Greece to the present. The directory is broken down into Web Navigation and Web Tools; Area Studies; Cultural Sites (offering background on the theater of different times); and Centers, Museums, Libraries. This should be a useful reference for students doing research in the theater on the Web.

Sci Fi Seeing Ear Theatre -- The Sci-Fi Channel has RealAudio (3.0 or later) renderings of original, classic, and adapted science fiction stories. New stories are offered biweekly, weekly, and monthly, respectively. At present the "original" section contains Into the Sun, performed by Mark Hamill, "classics" contains the 1950 broadcast of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and "adaptations" contains Kafka's The Country Doctor.

Theatre Link.Com -- Theatre Link.Com gathers together hundreds of theatre related sites under such categories as Academic Programs, Broadway, Casting/Contact Services, People, Shows, Theatre Resources, and Theatre Groups. The database is now completely searchable.

TheatrePedia: The ELAC Internet Theatre Library -- The TheatrePedia, developed by the East Los Angeles College (ELAC) Theatre Arts Department, is "an online theatre-research library containing information about the history, aesthetics, and technique of theatre." The searchable TheatrePedia contains entries on dramatic criticism, theatre terms, and important plays and characters, as well as brief biographical entries on famous playwrights, directors, actors, producers, and managers. The TheatrePedia also indexes major plays by author and title, and links to online texts if available. In addition, the site provides a Craft & Career section, which includes compendia of resources on dramatic writing, directing, acting, and stagecraft.

*Periodical Article Databases

Academic Search Premier -- Academic Search Premier, designed specifically for academic institutions, is the world's largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database containing full text for more than 4,000 scholarly publications, including more than 3,100 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for all 7,962 journals in the collection. This scholarly collection offers information in nearly every area of academic study including: social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, medical sciences, ethnic studies, and many more. Academic Search Premier is an enormous collection of the most valuable peer-reviewed full text journals, offering critical information from many sources unique to this database.

Humanities Abstracts -- Humanities Abstracts is a bibliographic database that cites articles from English-language periodicals. Periodical coverage includes some of the best-known scholarly journals and numerous lesser-known but important specialized magazines. Subjects covered, include: Archaeology, Area Studies, Art, Classical Studies, Communications, Dance, Film, Folklore, Gender Studies, History, Journalism, Linguistics, Literary & Social Criticism Literature, Music, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Religion and Theology.

MasterFILE Select -- Designed specifically for public libraries, this multidisciplinary database provides full text for more than 750 general reference publications with coverage dating as far back as 1984. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, MasterFILE Select also includes 37 full text reference books and an Image Collection of 116,000 photos, maps and flags. This database is updated daily via EBSCOhost.

Readers' Guide Abstracts -- Readers' Guide Abstracts is a database containing comprehensive indexing and abstracting of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and Canada. Subjects covered include: Aeronautics, African-Americans, Aging, Astronomy, Automobiles, Biography, Business, Canada, Children, Computers, Consumer Education, Current Events, Education, Environment, Fashion, Film, Fine Arts, Food, Foreign Affairs, Health, and History.

Readers' Guide Retrospective -- Readers' Guide Retrospective is a database containing comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States and reflects the history of 20th century America. Current (7/2003) coverage for this database includes the years 1890 through 1982.

*Require an activated CCNY ID card for off-campus access.