John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was an American writer and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters."
The Somonyng of Everyman, usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15th-century morality play. Like John Bunyan's 1678 Christian novel The Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman uses allegorical characters to examine the question of Christian salvation and what Man must do to attain it.
Of Mice and Men is a novella written by John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it narrates the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States.
Barnum is an American musical with a book by Mark Bramble, lyrics by Michael Stewart, and music by Cy Coleman. It is based on the life of showman P. T. Barnum, covering the period from 1835 through 1880 in America and major cities of the world where Barnum took his performing companies. The production combines elements of traditional musical theater with the spectacle of the circus. The characters include jugglers, trapeze artists and clowns, as well as such real-life personalities as Jenny Lind and General Tom Thumb.
Six Characters in Search of an Author is an Italian play by Luigi Pirandello, written and first performed in 1921. An absurdist metatheatric play about the relationship among authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners, it premiered at the Teatro Valle in Rome to a mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of "Manicomio!" ("Madhouse!") and "Incommensurabile!", a reaction to the play's illogical progression. Reception improved at subsequent performances, especially after Pirandello provided for the play's third edition, published in 1925, a foreword clarifying its structure and ideas.
Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts was an American marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher. He is best known for Between Pacific Tides (1939), a pioneering study of intertidal ecology. He is also known as a mentor who influenced the writer John Steinbeck, which resulted in a collaboration and coauthorship of the book, Sea of Cortez (1941). Eleven years later, and just 3 years after the death of Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck reprinted the narrative portion of their coauthored book with a new publisher, but removed Ed as coauthor, while adding a biography of Ed Ricketts, and Steinbeck made a new title for the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951).
Clowns have always been an integral part of the circus, offering a source of amusement for patrons and providing relief from the array of animal acts and performances by acrobats and novelty artistes.
J.B. is a 1958 play written in free verse by American playwright and poet Archibald MacLeish, and is a modern retelling of the story of the biblical figure Job – hence the title: J.B./Job. The play went through several incarnations before it was finally published. MacLeish began the work in 1953 as a one-act production, but within three years, had expanded it to a full, three-act manuscript.
Victor Frankenstein is the protagonist in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. He is an Italian-Swiss scientist who, after studying chemical processes and the decay of living things, gains an insight into the creation of life and gives life to his own creature. Victor later regrets meddling with nature through his creation, as he inadvertently endangers his own life and the lives of his family and friends when the creature seeks revenge against him. He is first introduced in the novel when he is seeking to catch the monster near the North Pole and is saved from near death by Robert Walton and his crew.
Saul Hersh Rubinek is a German-born Canadian actor, director, producer, and playwright.
Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there: Lee Chong, the local grocer; Doc, a marine biologist; and Mack, the leader of a group of derelict people.
Allegro is a musical by Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II, their third collaboration for the stage. Opening on Broadway on October 10, 1947, the musical centers on the life of Joseph Taylor Jr., who follows in the footsteps of his father as a doctor, but is tempted by fortune and fame at a big-city hospital.
The Log from the Sea of Cortez is an English-language book written by American author John Steinbeck and published in 1951. It details a six-week marine specimen-collecting boat expedition he made in 1940 at various sites in the Gulf of California, with his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. It is regarded as one of Steinbeck's most important works of non-fiction chiefly because of the involvement of Ricketts, who shaped Steinbeck's thinking and provided the prototype for many of the pivotal characters in his fiction, and the insights it gives into the philosophies of the two men.
Pipe Dream is the seventh musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II; it premiered on Broadway on November 30, 1955. The work is based on John Steinbeck's short novel Sweet Thursday—Steinbeck wrote the novel, a sequel to Cannery Row, in the hope of having it adapted into a musical. Set in Monterey, California, the musical tells the story of the romance between Doc, a marine biologist, and Suzy, who in the novel is a prostitute; her profession is only alluded to in the stage work. Pipe Dream was not an outright flop but was a financial disaster for Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Nouvelle Expérience was Cirque du Soleil's fourth touring circus show, which premiered in 1990.
Martin E. Brooks was an American character actor known for playing scientist Rudy Wells in the television series The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, from 1975 onward.
Of Mice and Men is a play adapted from John Steinbeck's 1937 novel of the same name. The play, which predates the Tony Awards and the Drama Desk Awards, earned the 1938 New York Drama Critics' Circle Best Play.
The Train Driver is a play by the South African playwright Athol Fugard.
Good is a play in two acts written by British playwright Cecil Philip Taylor. First published for Methuen Drama in 1982, it was originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981 and was subsequently seen all over the world. Good has been described as the definitive piece written about the Holocaust in the English-speaking theatre. Set in pre-war Germany, it shows how John Halder, a liberal-minded professor whose best friend is the Jewish Maurice, could not only be seduced into joining the Nazism, but step-by-rationalised-step end up embracing the final solution justifying to his conscience the terrible actions.
He Who Gets Slapped is a play in four acts by Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev; completed in August 1915 and first produced in that same year at the Moscow Art Theatre on October 27, 1915. Immensely popular with Russian audiences, the work received numerous stagings throughout the Russian speaking world in the two decades after its premiere, and then later enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s in Russian theaters. The work is still part of the dramatic repertory in Russian speaking countries. While well-liked by the public, critical reaction to the work was initially negative in Russia. It was later reevaluated as a masterwork of Russian drama, and is regarded as Andreyev's finest achievement among his 25 plays.
