Download PDF by Henry Carl Bial: Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage

By Henry Carl Bial

ISBN-10: 0472052926

ISBN-13: 9780472052929

ISBN-10: 0472072927

ISBN-13: 9780472072927

Whether we regard it because the gathered inscriptions of an previous oral culture or because the divinely authored resource textual content of liturgical ritual, the Bible will be understood as a sacred functionality textual content, a framework for an educational theater that plays the shared ethical and moral values of a neighborhood. It’s no longer dazzling, then, that playwrights have grew to become to the Bible as a resource for theatrical variation. Biblical texts have encouraged greater than a hundred Broadway performs and musicals, starting from early spectacles like Ben-Hur (1899) to extra standard works such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. What occurs while a culture’s such a lot sacred textual content enters its so much advertisement functionality venue?

Playing God specializes in 11 financially and/or severely profitable productions, in addition to a couple of striking Broadway flops that spotlight the problems in adapting the previous and New Testaments for the degree. The publication is expert by means of either functionality stories and theater heritage, combining research of play-scripts with archival study into the particular situations of creation and reception. Biblical performs, Henry Bial argues, stability spiritual and advertisement concerns via a fancy combination of spectacle, authenticity, sincerity, and irony. even though there's no magic formulation for a profitable version, those 4 analytical lenses support clarify why a few biblical performs thrive whereas others have not.

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Even if we regard it because the accumulated inscriptions of an previous oral culture or because the divinely authored resource textual content of liturgical ritual, the Bible may be understood as a sacred functionality textual content, a framework for a tutorial theater that plays the shared ethical and moral values of a neighborhood.

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Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage by Henry Carl Bial


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