Auditioning
An Actor-Friendly Guide
Written by Joanna Merlin
Foreword by Harold Prince

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 8, 2001
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72537-1 (0-375-72537-7)

Joanna Merlin has spent her career on both sides of the auditioning process, both as an award-winning casting director who has worked with Harold Prince, Bernard Bertolucci, and James Ivory, and as an accomplished actor herself.

In this highly informative and accessible book, Merlin provides everything the actor needs to achieve self-confidence... Read more >

Acting as a Business
Strategies for Success
Written by Brian O'Neil

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 6, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-47392-9 (0-307-47392-9)

An essential handbook for actors–a modern classic–in a newly updated edition.

Since its original publication, Acting as a Business has earned a reputation as an indispensable tool for working and aspiring actors. Avoiding the usual advice about persistence and luck, Brian O’Neil provides clear-cut guidelines that will give actors a solid knowledge... Read more >

Playwrights at Work

Written by Paris Review
Edited by George Plimpton
Introduction by John Lahr

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: May 30, 2000
Price: $23.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-64021-9 (0-679-64021-5)

This third volume in Modern Library’s Paris Review: Writers at Work series gives the student a chance to study the words and opinions of some of the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. The interviews collected here range in date from 1956 to 1997 and in personality from Tennessee... Read more >

Kids Take the Stage
Helping Young People Discover the Creative Outlet of Theater
Written by Lenka Peterson and Dan O'Conner
Foreword by Paul Newman

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Back Stage Books
On Sale: May 1, 2006
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-8230-7746-5 (0-8230-7746-2)

The classic Kids Take the Stage is one of the best-selling Back Stage Books of all time. Now Back Stage is proud to present the completely revised and updated second edition of this indispensable guide to getting young people on stage and helping them create their own shows. For teachers, for... Read more >

Dancing in the Dark

Written by Caryl Phillips

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 10, 2006
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7983-4 (1-4000-7983-7)

A searing new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874–1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.

Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s—his family had recently emigrated from the... Read more >

In Spite of Myself

Written by Christopher Plummer

Format: Trade Paperback, 656 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 1, 2012
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-80322-1 (0-345-80322-1)

A vibrant, exuberant self-portrait of one of today’s greatest living actors.

Christopher Plummer’s magnificent book recounts the wild adventure that is his life, stretching from a privileged childhood in Canada to the glorious, star-studded New York of the fifties to a sensational career in film appearing in some of our most beloved... Read more >

In Spite of Myself
A Memoir
Written by Christopher Plummer

Format: Hardcover, 656 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 4, 2008
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-42162-7 (0-679-42162-9)

A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of today’s greatest living actors.

He was born a Canadian on a Friday the thirteenth in 1929—the year of the Crash. His boyhood was one of privilege: an ancestor was a Governor General; his great-grandfather Sir John Abbott was... Read more >

Acting -- Make It Your Business
How to Avoid Mistakes and Achieve Success As a Working Actor
Written by Paul Russell

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Back Stage Books
On Sale: September 30, 2008
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-8230-9955-9 (0-8230-9955-5)

Acting: Make It Your Business, written by an award-winning, veteran casting director, puts the power to land jobs and thrive in any medium - stage, film, TV, or the Internet - directly into the hands of the actor. This blunt, wise, and often hilarious guide overflows with cutting-edge audition, marketing, and... Read more >

Stephen Sondheim
A Life
Written by Meryle Secrest

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 4, 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-94684-3 (0-307-94684-3)

The first and only full-scale and definitive biography of the most important composer-lyricist in musical theater today.

Drawing on personal conversations with Sondheim himself, as well as interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers, Secrest offers new insight into the enigmatic and very private Stephen Sondheim. Here, we learn about... Read more >

Oberammergau
The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play
Written by James Shapiro

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 12, 2001
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70852-7 (0-375-70852-9)

The Bavarian village of Oberammergau has staged the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ nearly every decade since 1634. Each production of the Passion Play attracts hundreds of thousands, many drawn by the spiritual benefits it promises. Yet Hitler called it a convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry, and in... Read more >

Letters to a Young Artist
Straight-up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts-For Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
Written by Anna Deavere Smith

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 24, 2006
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3238-9 (1-4000-3238-5)

From Anna Deavere Smith here is brass-tacks advice to aspiring artists of all stripes, in the tradition of Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet.

Hailed as a pioneering force in American theater for her signature documentary style of performance, Anna Deavere Smith here looks back on lessons from thirty years of... Read more >

Finishing the Hat
Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
Written by Stephen Sondheim

Format: Hardcover, 480 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: October 26, 2010
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-43907-3 (0-679-43907-2)

Stephen Sondheim has won seven Tonys, an Academy Award, seven Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize and the Kennedy Center Honors. His career has spanned more than half a century, his lyrics have become synonymous with musical theater and popular culture, and in Finishing the Hat—titled after perhaps his most autobiographical song, from... Read more >

Look, I Made a Hat
Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany
Written by Stephen Sondheim

Format: Hardcover, 480 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 22, 2011
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-59341-2 (0-307-59341-X)

After his acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat (named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010), Stephen Sondheim returns with the second volume of his collected lyrics, Look, I Made a Hat, giving us another remarkable glimpse into the brilliant mind of this living legend, and his... Read more >

Stage Makeup
The Actor's Complete Guide to Today's Techniques and Materials
Written by Laura Thudium

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Back Stage Books
On Sale: April 1, 1999
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-8230-8839-3 (0-8230-8839-1)

This up-to-date, full-color makeup manual is designed to lie open on the makeup table right as a guide for student, amateur, or professional performers.

Whether you are an actor in a summer-stock or regional theater, an acting conservatory program, a high-school or college production, a community theater, a local holiday pageant...or... Read more >

Free for All
Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Every Told
Written by Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp

Format: Trade Paperback, 640 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: November 2, 2010
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3169-4 (0-7679-3169-6)

Free for All is an irresistible behind-the-scenes look at one of America’s most beloved and important cultural institutions.

Under the inspired leadership of founder Joseph Papp, the Public Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival brought revolutionary performances to the public for decades. This compulsively readable history of those years—much of it... Read more >

An Acrobat of the Heart
A Physical Approach to Acting Inspired by the Work of Jerzy Grotowski
Written by Stephen Wangh

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 19, 2000
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70672-1 (0-375-70672-0)

"The actor will do, in public, what is considered impossible." When the renowned Polish director Jerzy Grotowski began his 1967 American workshop with these words, his students were stunned. But within four weeks they themselves had experienced the "impossible."

In An Acrobat of the Heart, teacher-director-playwright Stephen Wangh reveals how Jerzy Grotowski's... Read more >

Buffalo Bill's America

Written by Louis S. Warren

Format: Trade Paperback, 672 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 5, 2006
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72658-3 (0-375-72658-6)

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was the most famous American of his age. He claimed to have worked for the Pony Express when only a boy and to have scouted for General George Custer. But what was his real story? And how did a frontiersman become a worldwide celebrity?

In this... Read more >

Buffalo Bill's America
William Cody and the Wild West Show
Written by Louis S. Warren

Format: Hardcover, 672 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: October 11, 2005
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-41216-5 (0-375-41216-6)

William Cody (1846–1917), a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was the most famous American of his age. A child of the frontier Great Plains, Cody was renowned as a Pony Express rider, prospector, trapper, Civil War soldier, professional buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, cavalry scout, horseman, dime-novel hero, and actor. But Buffalo Bill’s greatest success... Read more >

Man of La Mancha

Written by Dale Wasserman

Format: Trade Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: October 12, 1966
Price: $11.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-40619-0 (0-394-40619-2)

Winner of the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Musical

"To me the most interesting aspect of the success of Man of La Mancha is the fact that it plows squarely upstream against the prevailing current of philosophy in the theater. That current is best identified by its catch-labels--Theater of the... Read more >

The Wisdom of Insecurity
A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Written by Alan W. Watts

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 8, 2011
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-74120-2 (0-307-74120-6)

Alan W. Watts’s “message for an age of anxiety” is as powerful today as it was when this modern classic was first published.

We spend too much time trying to anticipate and plan for the future; too much time lamenting the past. We often miss the pleasures of the moment in our... Read more >