Drama 115 Final Vocabulary

Front 1

anti-hero

Back 1

Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan were writers who you don’t know who you are rooting for. Brick is the anti-hero as opposed to the protagonists as in an Ibsen play

Front 2

ballad opera

Back 2

what preceded operetta, 18th century, The Beggar’s Opera

Front 3

The Black Crook

Back 3

happened almost completely by accident, was a really bad normal play so thought they would bring French ballet dancers in that were around and decided to bring the girls in between scenes to supplement the shitty play – wildly successful, made million dollars in first run, toured around country for almost 40 years, was 5 and a half hours long because they just kept stuffing stuff in

Front 4

choreographer

Back 4

designs movements and creates visual vocabulary of musical

Front 5

composer

Back 5

who writes the music and instrumentation in a musical

Front 6

Dyer

Back 6

Richard Dyer. “Entertainment and Utopia” (1992)…film critic…talks about how musicals are populist and appeal to a wide audience and are kind of conventional, but in means of using song and dance as dramatic elements he says we take a temporary trip into utopia (an ideal world)…so what we get in musical numbers is a temporary easing of the conflicts that we get in a typical play, then we revisit those conflicts in the spoken scenes…we can get some sort of reconciliation or synthesis by merging these two realities

Front 7

libretto/librettist

Back 7

condensed narrative, storyline characterization. “little book”/one who condenses the story

Front 8

lyricist

Back 8

the writer of lyrics in a musical

Front 9

method acting

Back 9

idea of actors blurring lines between themselves and character till its hard to tell the difference

Front 10

modernism

Back 10

breaks off with past forms and traditions; seeks new forms w/out historical distance with new content

Front 11

musical comedy

Back 11

has plot, characters, narrative, does not tightly weave those elements together. Plot often stops dead for dance number

Front 12

musical revue

Back 12

collection of song and dance that has no plot, but may be based around a theme or singer, etc

Front 13

musical play

Back 13

similar to operetta, try and integrate narrative and music together, songs and dances usually serve the plot, music and dances move the story line and help us understand our characters

Front 14

operetta

Back 14

the first movement from opera to musicals, more audience friendly, started mixing spoken scenes with music- Rosemarie scene

Front 15

Performative spectacle

Back 15

post modern era, plays into stereotypes with characters with satirical and outlandish actions that break characters

Front 16

postmodernism

Back 16

ideas like simulation, where reality takes on an air of the virtual, and the idea that everything has been said or done, and all art is recombining those things.

Front 17

reflexivity

Back 17

artists are stuck in the same world as the rest of us, and artists cant really comment on it with art

Front 18

realism

Back 18

type of modernism that uses a stable world to analyze situations. Everything has a strict cause and effect, and peoples actions are influenced by their past, situation.

Front 19

Stanislavsky

Back 19

father of modern “internal” acting. First person to teach it, from Russia. Sysem acting, late 19th century. Moscow art theatre, taught actors to inhabit their character

Front 20

Strasberg

Back 20

took over when moved to US, 1940’s “Method Acting” stars of 40’s learned ST technique from Strasberg, watched Rebel Without a Cause, Streetcar named Desire

Front 21

subtext

Back 21

Information within a text that is hidden behind the surface of action and must be inferred, Seen in a Doll's house.

Front 22

through-sung musical

Back 22

nothing but music, start to finish

Front 23

utopia

Back 23

idea of a perfect place that humanity strives for, literally means “no place”

Front 24

vaudeville

Back 24

multi act pieces, usually comedy, could involve singing and dancing, acrobatics, etc popular in the 1920’s. variety shows “voice of the city” series of unrelated novelty acts, popular commercial entertainment. Singing in the Rain.