BLUM, Daniel [Alan Schneider].

Theatre World: Season 1962-1963.

Philadelphia: Chilton Books , 1963.

$125.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-152244

Custom Clamshell Box

Hand made by the Harcourt Bindery. ~90 days

+$500

Add to Cart

Ask a Question

Authenticity Guaranteed

Secure Shipping

First Edition of Daniel Blum's Theatre World: Season 1962-1963; From the Library of Director Alan Schneider with His Ownership Signature

First edition of the 1962-1963 volume of Daniel Blum’s annual pictorial record of the American theater. Octavo, original publisher's cloth, illustrated throughout with photographs. From the library of director Alan Schneider, with his ownership signature to the front free endpaper, “Alan Schneider New York November 1963." The volume documents the 1962-1963 Broadway season, in which Schneider directed the original production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which opened at the Billy Rose Theatre in October 1962 and won him the 1963 Tony Award for Best Direction. Schneider was among the foremost American directors of his generation and the great champion of the postwar stage in the United States: he directed the American premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1956 and remained Beckett’s preferred American director, staged the United States premieres of Pinter’s plays from the 1962 off-Broadway double bill of The Dumb Waiter and The Collection through the Broadway premiere of The Birthday Party in 1967, and won the 1963 Tony Award for Best Direction for the original production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Very good in a very good dust jacket.

Daniel Blum's Theatre World: Season 1962-1963 (1963) is the nineteenth volume in the annual Theatre World series, the indispensable illustrated chronicle of the American theatrical season that Daniel Blum established in the late 1940s and continued until his death in 1965, when the series was taken over by John Willis who maintained it for decades thereafter as the definitive pictorial record of Broadway and Off-Broadway production. Published annually with black-and-white photographs on virtually every page, each volume documents the productions of its respective season through cast listings, production credits, plot synopses, and photographic coverage of performers, designers, and directors, constituting in the aggregate one of the most comprehensive archives of American theatrical history in print. The 1962-1963 season was a particularly notable one for American theater, encompassing productions that reflected the cultural and artistic energies of the early 1960s at a moment of considerable ferment both on and off Broadway, and Blum's characteristically thorough documentation of its plays, players, and productions captures a theatrical world in transition between the waning golden age of the Broadway musical and the emerging influence of the European avant-garde on American dramatic writing.