Gonna Make You a (Bangsawan) Star
The bangsawan theater in early twentieth-century Malaya offered women a chance to build a public identity beyond marriage and motherhood.
Burlesque Beginnings
From its nineteenth-century origins, burlesque developed into a self-aware performance art that celebrates the female form and challenges social norms.
Remembering Sun Yat Sen Abroad
Museums around the world honor the history of the revolutionary, but as Singapore’s Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall shows, those memories aren’t easy to read.
Laura Kieler: A Life Exploited
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen mined Kieler's life for the plot of his most famous play, The Doll's House.
Virginia Woolf’s Only Play
Based on Woolf's own family, Freshwater was a tongue-in-cheek comedy full of inside jokes, written to entertain members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Temperance Melodrama on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
Produced by the master entertainer P. T. Barnum, a melodrama about the dangers of alcohol was the first show to run for a hundred performances in New York City.
The Reality Behind Kitchen Sink Realism
The gritty dramas of the 1950s and 1960s revealed the bitterness and disillusionment of Britain's working class youth.
The Living Newspaper Speaks
Scripted from front-page news, the Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper plays were part entertainment, part protest, and entirely educational.
When Black Celebrities Wore Blackface
A Black Bohemia flourished in New York before the Harlem Renaissance and with it a new type of self-determined, contradictory Black celebrity.