W. S. Gilbert

The perception of our emotions, and the world we live in isn’t all that it seems. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of social psychology at Harvard has an inquisitive view of the relationship between perceived happiness, and reality. In the chapter “Immune to Reality” from his book Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert reasons that our psychological immune system causes us to be self-deceiving and as a result, causing us to have the tendency to cook the facts of situations that can affect our happiness. Moreover, we are unaware of our self-deceptive nature altogether. This viewpoint is supported and complicated by clinical psychologist Martha Stout in her book The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness who agrees that self-deception…

Willa Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee” was first published in 1904 and is a short story about a woman, named Georgiana, who finds herself transition from the ecstatic city of Boston, to the primitive Nebraska frontier. Cather’s “A Wagner Matinee” was inspired by Richard Wagner who was a German composer and conductor that lived from 1813 to 1883. He’s well known for his operas and his most famous work is that of “The Flying Dutchman”. Willa Cather, instead, wasn’t a musician but was an author of the…

performers faced terrible working conditions. They weren’t paid for rehearsals, had to pay for their own costumes and travel expenses, and could be fired without any notice if they weren’t playing roles to the manager's satisfaction. In 1919 The Actor's Equity Association went on strike to demand better working conditions. “Desperate producers tried to put together non-union casts to keep their shows running. Then the stagehands union agreed to honor the strike, shutting down almost every…

Three years ago Kent State redshirt sophomore Jimmy Hall was sitting inside of a jail cell in New York. Three years ago Hall’s basketball, and possibly his future, was over. Hall had been arrested and charged with burglary. That was the moment in Hall life when for the first time in his life when he realized that there were serious consequences for his mistakes. “We were just kids who weren’t doing the right thing,” Hall said of the situation. “We got caught up in something we weren’t…

History of Musical Theatre When people imagine Musicals they think of Big Broadway lights shining down on people singing and acting but most do not know the story behind the curtains you see. People wouldn't’ ever first think of Athens on a hill in the fifth century B.C.E. Musical Theatre started as a unpopular idea but over the years it started to grow into a world wide famous reputation. A musical is a well written play that makes living art forms in dialogues that include music and…

It is not a secret that West Side Story is what can be called the American version of the Romeo and Juliet. I will like to note the contribution of West Side Story to the history of musical theater. The creators did their research and although the creation time was long, they came up with a game changing idea in the music theater arena. At that time not many plays on Broadway attempted to introduce or present musical theater productions which explored, in depth, issues of racism, geographical,…

One of Musical Theatre’s most loved productions, Pirates of Penzance, has delighted and enthralled audiences all around the world since its first production in 1879. In Opera Australia’s 2006 performance of this Gilbert and Sullivan classic they showed that even after a century, this production was timeless, a true testament to the genius of her creators. Pirates of Penzance is about a young man named Frederic (David Hobson) who has been wrongly apprenticed to a band of pirates, led by the…

1. Hofstadter 18-21 Richard Hakluyt “Discourse of the Western Planting” The passage depicts the arguments that Richard Hakluyt makes to convince the Queen of England to support Sir Walter Raleigh's and Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colonization efforts. Through the passage, Hakluyt brings up the religion, economy, and power. He stresses that the colonies can be used as tools to convert Indians to Christianity, which has now been reformed due to the Protestant Reformation. Hakluyt also states that…

Thinking of high school plays and musicals, not much thought goes into the similarities and differences between the two people tend to think they are pretty much the same thing. Although in reality they are not, even when I start a play or a musical the audition process is different. Being part of the cast and crew can also be different depending on if a play or a musical. In the end, the performances are pretty much the same with slight differences in the preparation for the show. Auditioning…

How boring would life be without musical theatre entertainment? I can answer that—boring. Entertainment in this industry has proved the world that musical theatre is just as amusing as a football event played on the weekends. Acquiring a job in this field can be difficult, but with hard work it can be done. Musical theatre has been around for a long time and has changed over decades. Entertainment in this industry started in the nineteenth century and still thrives today. It started off…