The Theatre History Podcast

Bert Williams was one of the most important African-American performers in the history of the American stage. He became one of the first African-American superstars and starred in what was arguably the first African-American plays on Broadway. Now, actor and playwright Jeremy Morris is sharing Williams's story in a new play, The Top of Bravery.

We tend to think of the middle of the twentieth century as a litany of horrors, from the trenches of the First World War and the atrocities of the Second to the fear of nuclear annihilation that came with the early decades of the Cold War. However, as Dr. Charlotte Canning of the University of Texas at Austin chronicles in her new book, On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism, there were also plenty of theatre artists during this time who believed that they could bring about a better future by sharing their work with the world.

This podcast keeps returning to the question of how we can reconstruct theatrical performances from bygone days. For the last few years, the website 19thcenturyacts.com has done just that. It was developed by a team led by Anita Gonzalez, of the University of Michigan, as well as Project Manager and Designer Clara McClenon. The site allows visitors to both see and hear what it was like to watch some of the most prominent stars of the nineteenth century perform onstage.

We all know the classic Christmas song "Jingle Bells" —or at least we think that we do. Dr. Kyna Hamill of Boston University has been looking into the origins of this beloved holiday classic, and what she's discovered about its creator and its first known public performance may cause us to look at the song in a rather different light.

When we think of Irish theatre, we tend to think primarily of playwrights and theatre companies from the Republic of Ireland, not northern part of the island. Those Northern Irish playwrights we do know, such as Brian Friel, tend to be men. Fiona Coffey's new book, Political Acts: Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921-2012, challenges these preconceptions, exploring how female playwrights and theatre practitioners have navigated the difficult political and social landscape of Northern Ireland.

Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance is a provocative classic of the Yiddish stage, and it's recently come back into the public eye, with an upcoming revival by New Yiddish Rep and a new drama by Paula Vogel, titled Indecent, that tells the fascinating backstory behind the play's premiere. In this episode, we talk with David Mandelbaum, artistic director of New Yiddish Rep, about Asch's powerful play and about the new revival.

Of all the various eras of theatrical history, the Middle Ages might seem like one of the least immediately relevant to the concerns of the 21st century. However, Kyle A. Thomas and Dr. Carol Symes of the University of Illinois think that medieval theatre's never been more timely, and they're staging a fascinating work, known as the The Play of Adam, to prove it. In this episode, Kyle and Carol discuss their production, which will run December 17-18 at The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, as well as the dynamic, inventive theatrical context that gave rise to plays like Adam.

How can we better understand musicals through music theory? Adam Roberts talks about how we can grasp nuances of character and theme in classical musicals by exploring the theory behind the music.

The recent success of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton has led to some casting controversies as regional theatres mount productions of his previous hit musical, In the Heights. As this week's guest, Princeton University's Brian Eugenio Herrera, shows, these controversies have a long history, as Latinx actors have unsettled the simplistic racial categories perpetuated by white-dominated American society.