Portal:Theatre

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Ancient Greece theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres" (or "theaters"), as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

A theatre company is an organisation that produces theatrical performances, as distinct from a theatre troupe (or acting company), which is a group of theatrical performers working together. (Full article...)

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Yul Brynner and Gertrude Lawrence
The King and I is a musical by the team of composer Richard Rodgers and dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II. It is based on the 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, which derives from the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s. The musical relates the experiences of Anna, a British schoolteacher hired as part of the King's drive to modernize his country. Their relationship is marked by conflict through much of the piece, and a love that neither can admit. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the musical for veteran star Gertrude Lawrence. Rex Harrison, who played the King in the 1946 movie of Landon's book, was unavailable, so Yul Brynner was chosen. The musical premiered in March 1951 at Broadway's St. James Theatre and ran nearly three years. It was an immediate hit, winning Tony Awards for Best Musical and for Best Actress and Best Featured Actor for Lawrence and Brynner (pictured). A hit London run and U.S. national tour followed, together with a 1956 film for which Brynner won an Academy Award. Professional and amateur revivals of The King and I are staged regularly throughout the English-speaking world.

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Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds
Samuel Johnson was an English author. Beginning as a Grub Street journalist, he made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and political conservative, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage, the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, and the play Irene. After nine years of work, Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching impact on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship". His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare's plays, and the widely read novel Rasselas. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.

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Sacha Guitry, portrait by Léon Gard
When they have a success, the producers think they are brilliant, but when they have a failure, they think the public are fools.

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