The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior, lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.

In Sound Alignments, a transnational group of scholars explores the myriad forms of popular music that circulated across Asia during the Cold War. Challenging the conventional alignments and periodizations of Western cultural histories of the Cold War, they trace the routes of popular music, examining how it took on new meanings and significance as it traveled across Asia, from India to Indonesia, Hong Kong to South Korea, China to Japan. From studies of how popular musical styles from the Americas and Europe were adapted to meet local exigencies to how socialist-bloc and nonaligned Cold War organizations facilitated the circulation of popular music throughout the region, the contributors outline how music forged and challenged alliances, revolutions, and countercultures. They also show how the Cold War's legacy shapes contemporary culture, particularly in the ways 1990s and 2000s J-pop and K-pop are rooted in American attempts to foster economic exchange in East Asia in the 1960s.Throughout, Sound Alignments demonstrates that the experiences of the Cold War in Asia were as diverse and dynamic as the music heard and performed in it. Contributors. Marié Abe, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, Nisha Kommattam, Jennifer Lindsay, Kaley Mason, Anna Schultz, Hyunjoon Shin, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Hon-Lun (Helan) Yang, Christine R. Yano, Qian Zhang

In this comprehensive, first and one-of-its-kind book, playwright and producer M. Stefan Strozier will guide you through how to produce a play or a musical in New York or Regional Theater, and how to become a professional producer yourself. The author will explain how to successfully produce theater on a shoestring, based on real experience and budgets in New York, where he was able to mount full productions at a tenth of what everyone else was doing. All aspects of theater are covered in great detail, from acting to lights to finding investors, and much more. Every obstacle is anticipated and given a solution. Tips and information are included on obtaining 501c3 non-profit status and operating a non-profit theater company.

Offered a spot at the Star Academy, one of the biggest K-pop companies, seventeen-year-old singer Alice Choy must navigate culture clashes, egos and extreme training practices to come out on top, despite the efforts of an influential blogger trying to tear her down.

Characters: 1m, 1f / Musical Comedy This funny and charming two-person musical is a contemporary love story based around the modern world of internet dating. A man and a woman search for that 'special someone' in cyberspace and find that romance is only a mouse click away, but discover more than they ever anticipated. Two lonely singles at home on their laptop computers have signed up with an internet dating site called "eLove.com." We hear their innermost thoughts about love and relationships as they correspond in a cyber chat room searching for their perfect soulmate. When one of them shares a unique personal moment that's too coincidental, they discover they've been "perfectly matched" ...with their former lovers! The newly reunited couple rediscover their love as they start to clear the air of misunderstandings through the safe distance of cyberspace, finding true love where they least expected it...where they last left it! This delightful and touching musical comedy is easy to produce needing only one set and a cast of two of any age. A modern I Do, I Do meets I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. A delightful musical romp! ..".Catchy tunes...clever lyrics" -LA Weekly ..".A treat" -BSW "Witty lines, fine songs, heartfelt emotion" -Tolucan "Fabulous...feel-good musical of the year!" -Florence Henderson

Congregational Music, Conflict and Community is the first study of the music of the contemporary 'worship wars' – conflicts over church music that continue to animate and divide Protestants today – to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations, who sang together despite their musical differences at the height of these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mennonites are among the most music-centered Christian groups in North America, and each congregation felt deeply about the music they chose as their own. The congregations studied span the spectrum from traditional to blended to contemporary worship styles, and from evangelical to liberal Protestant theologies. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical tastes nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals’ experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies and ethnomusicology.

First published in 1910, "Home Fun" is a guide to entertaining guests in your own home, with chapters on everything from holding amateur performances and odd experiments, to indoor fireworks, parlour games, and beyond! This fantastic volume is full of interesting ideas, and it would make for a wonderful addition to any home collection. Contents include: "Amateur Theatricals", "Mysteries of Make-up", "The Quick-Change Artist", "Character Impersonations", "the Universal Hat", "Some Suggestions in Black", "Tableaux Vivants", 'Charades", "The Possibilities of the Musical Sketch", "Vamping Simplified", "An Evening at the Phonograph", "Musical Glasses", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.