Dramatists Sourcebook ed. by James L. Leverett and David lzakowitz (review)

One of the leaders in the new movement from staged concertizing to exciting music-theatre, a genre Richard Wagner tried to popularize, was the late Walter Felsenstein, director of East Berlin's prestigious Komische Oper. For Felsenstein, dramatic values were always more important than musical ones, though he didn't neglect those either. From the DDR now comes a handsomely illustrated paperback showing step-by-step how Felsenstein developed his celebrated staging of Mozart's Magic Flute, working closely with actor-singers as collaborators. This documentation is rather like Brecht's Model-BUcher, which show Brecht's ideas of definitive productions of his own works. Opera in Perspective is an excellent introduction to opera theatre. Drummond begins at the beginning, with the dawning of theatre, music, and dance. Important periods with distinctive opera formats, such as Opera seria, Singspiel, French Grand Opera, Italian Romantic Opera, and Wagner's Music-Drama are studied briefly, but systematically, with ample musical illustrations carefully linked to dramatic texts. Drummond offers some fascinating aesthetic speculations as well, including the notion that the Orpheus legend recapitulates itself in Wagner's Tristan Das Rheingold, and Die Walkire. Drummond doesn't concern himself with actual productions of works, classical or modern, he's more interested in the interaction of score and libretto, in surface and symbolic meanings, in character and conflict. The substance of the book is a prelude to the later work on directors , conductors, designers, and performers. You don't have to go to the London Coliseum to see the fine productions of the English National Opera in order to make good use of its Opera Guide series, now available in America. The core of each paperback-eight have been published-is a complete libretto of the opera, with an excellent English translation side-by-side with the original text. In addition, each book has a short essay explaining the particular dramatic type the opera represents. For Cenerentola, Philip Gossett provides a provocative discussion of "Fairytale and opera buffa." For Otello, both the drama and the music are studied in tandem. William Weaver also offers an interesting commentary on "Verdi, Shakespeare, and the Italian Audience." The fine Otello translation is the work of Andrew Porter, music critic for The New Yorker. All the Guides are well illustrated with production photos-historic and modern-as well as portrait photos of creators and performers and musical quotations where helpful. Other operas in the series: Lulu, Aida, Lohengrin, Don Giovanni, Tosca, Tristan und Isolde, La Traviata, and Peter Grimes. GL Dramatists Sourcebook. Edited by James L. Leverett and David lzakowitz. Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., NYC, NY 10017, 126 pp., $6.95 (paper). Once past Arthur Ballet's flip and pointless introduction, this expanded and 144 well designed paperback version of TCG's former Information for Playwrights gets down to the real business of telling playwrights, translators, composers, and librettists how, where, and the best approach to take in looking for money and outlets for their work. The handbook is broken down into chapters on useful organizations and publications, conferences , festivals, writers' colonies, grants, contests, and emergency funding , college and university programs, special interests for minority, children's, and musical theatre (too slight here), and a marketplace directory of over one hundred non-profit theatres around the country (only those in TCG's constituency, however) that are willing, they say, to consider new plays for production. This is probably the best feature of the book. But what is no longer mentioned here is the percentage of their seasons devoted to new work. Often it is slight. Although no book like this can ever be up-to-date or totally complete, there are, however, serious omissions. While the well-known O'Neill Theater Center's playwright and television conferences are listed, its composer and librettist conference is not. And though a fledgling section on media (film, radio, and video) outlets is included, no mention is made in the membership section of either Writers Guild of America East or West. Rutgers University's New Plays program makes it to the contest section but their MFA program for playwrights is not mentioned among university programs . Nor is the extensive one...