Eyes on Events-An Evening with Mrs Terrell and Friends

https://youtu.be/czGijmoy_S4 In this week’s episode of Eyes on Events, we interviewed Dr Marie Molloy (Manchester Metropolitan University) and the award-winning creative producer, historian, and theatre-maker Pamela Roberts about an outreach screening of the play ‘An Evening With Mrs Terrell and Friends.’ Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was a celebrated Black women… Continue reading

Event Review: The Crucible, dir. Lydnsey Turner

The Crucible, The National Theatre, 14 Sep-15 Nov 2022  On a drizzly November afternoon, Salem’s Essex Street feels dampened by post-Halloween stillness. With the decorations packed up for another year, tourist season is officially over and the town becomes another run-of-the-mill corner of New England until next fall’s regalia rolls… Continue reading

Community Building and Articulations of Race and Gender at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 'Saturday Nighters': African American Theatre and The S Street Salon

This article is adapted from a presentation given at the London Arts and Humanities Partnership postgraduate conference, 21st January 2022 During the Harlem Renaissance period, 1461 S Street, Washington D.C., the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966), represented an important hub of creativity and community for African American women writers. ‘Saturday… Continue reading

Broadway, Hollywood, and the Problem with The Prom

Among all the necessary and welcome debates around identity in contemporary culture, few have been more pronounced in theatre and film than that of who should be cast to play characters of marginalised identities. From gender identity and religious beliefs to nationality and disability, this issue is occurring with increasing… Continue reading

Mending Fences: The Broken Bond between Theatre and Film

Play to film adaptations have fallen in prestige and numbers in recent years, and one of the main reasons for this is the decline in popularity of plays that can be adapted. For example, A Streetcar Named Desire was the 5th highest grossing film of 1951[i] while Fences was the… Continue reading

“Where is Thy Sting?”: Clifford Odets and the Problem of Audience

On September 6th 1936, The New York Times went to print with an article entitled: “Odets, Where is Thy Sting?”[i] Reflecting on the recent reception of Clifford Odets’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), Frank Nugent described the enthusiasm of the audiences who had come to see the Broadway playwright’s… Continue reading

Drama and Cinematic Adaptation: USSO Special Series

  The adaptation of plays into films has been a core part of Hollywood’s output in the 95 years since the introduction of sound into cinema. In this time a huge number of the cinema’s finest and best-regarded works have begun life on the stage, Broadway or otherwise. Despite this… Continue reading

“Vaudeville Indians” on the British Stage (British Library)

Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In the this post, which is based on her British Eccles Centre Summer Scholars talk, Christine Bold (University of Guelph) discusses the experience and performances of Indigenous, and non-Indigenous, “Vaudeville Indians” on the variety circuit across Britain in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Continue reading