Edinburgh’s increase was only 150%, which makes sense because the city didn’t expand the way the others did.
17.01.2026 18:54
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Edinburgh’s increase was only 150%, which makes sense because the city didn’t expand the way the others did.
To situate my book’s narrative, I compiled data about rates of theatre building over the course of the 19th century in London, Glasgow, Manchester and Edinburgh; the overall increase in theatres was 885% London and 900% in Glasgow and Manchester. Spookily parallel! Quantitative scholarship is fun!
“Velvet Goldmine” hot take, following my fifth or sixth watch of the film: Tommy Stone isn’t necessarily Brian Slade! I will not be taking questions at this time.
Thank you so much ! This is seriously a lifesaver.
YES this is exactly what I was thinking of! Thank you!!! (Perhaps I saw an engraving reproduction of it.)
Theatre historians, esp. of 19th c. Britain: I swear I once saw an image (either photograph or lithograph) of playbills being pasted on a city wall already crowded with bills, reproduced in a scholarly volume. Does anyone have any idea or leads for what I might be thinking of?!
I am working on contextualizing the 1832, 1866, and 1892 select committees about theatre licensing and am grieving the absence of any In Our Time episode that could clarify the hows and whys of the Liberal Unionists.
Four greatest words in the English language.
Slow reply, but thank you Chris!! Broadway touring productions and holiday productions seems parallel with, say, Zeffirelli at the Met. And Gatz definitely an illuminating exception!
Crowdsourcing question from a performance historian rather than practitioner: in recent decades, how often are productions revived outside of ballet and opera? Are costumes and sets ever deliberately reused rather than simply pulled from an institution’s stock for financial reasons?
Thank you!! I’m so glad to hear that.
I remember really wanting a resource like this when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, and I sincerely hope it's of use to others. And if there's anything not indexed that should be added, don't hesitate to reach out!
Because I know there are a lot of performance scholars & practitioners here, I thought I'd share that I've just finished a website that explains the various formats that document the performing arts + collates archival collections where they can be found! web.simmons.edu/~wiet/lis488...
Who here is on Substack? I just joined so that I have a space write about the intersections between documentation and performance (and also movies) outside of the formal pitch-and-publish cycle. Let’s follow each other! I’m at ephemerance.substack.com.
Reading up on Isadora Duncan’s relationship with documentation for this project I’m doing has once again made me want to write an article titled “Ellen Terry, Mother of the Avant-Garde.” Genealogy of performance made literal!
Let’s be clear, however: starting a collection of theatrical scrapbooks was inevitable. Time will tell how whether I succeed in becoming the 21st century’s Gabrielle Enthoven.
I just purchased a theatrical scrapbook from the 1920s on eBay simply so I can post an example on a website about performing arts formats without worrying about copyright. This might be the most Victoria thing I’ve ever done!
My library school classes presume none of us have used card catalogs written in library hand — little do they know what it means to a researcher of 19th century theatre at the BL!!!
For some time I’ve felt like my intellectual interests have left literary studies and shifted exclusively to film and theatre, but reading scholarship about Middlemarch (by smart young women—fellow Dorothea’s?) has made this wayward sheep return to the fold, at least for a visit.
As I board my flight from ORD to LGA for RBMS (and my first game at Citifield), the ticket agent sees my Mets gear and says: “You’re in trouuuuuublllllle.”
I was literally texting my dad that Sara needed to break up with him so he could write good music again. 😂 The curse of the lyric poet!
I’ve been listening to all of Dylan sequentially as I pack, and though “Blood on the Tracks” has always been a top-5-of-all-time for me, I now can’t fathom the jolt of 1975: having suffered a series of duds and then lowering the turntable needle and hearing the opening chords of Tangled Up in Blue.
exploring ways to transition to a career in special collections, the counterfactual narrative another version of myself has been living ever since I got hired to work at my college library. Here's hoping this moves me forward in becoming a curator or archivist in a performing arts collection!
I'm not sure how many people here remember me from Twitter, but now that the semester's over, I figure I should share that my affiliation is somewhat changing -- after 5 years at DePauw, I'll be beginning an MSLIS in Archives Management at Simmons this Fall! For the past two years, I've been...
Modest accomplishment worth posting about here: I just finished drafting my fourth chapter, the last of my theatre history chapters. Four more to go, but they're all novel criticism based on my dissertation, with no new archival research to incorporate.
There are many worthier battles to pick with AI, but I consider it a public service to tell the world that this is literally not true! Hobhouse wrote in his diary that Lady Caro fanatically "squeezed" Vestris! He even quoted Sappho after.
Thanks to @publicbooks.bsky.social, I finally got the chance to write about Callas -- and how the gap between archives and live performance can help us appreciate why MARIA is a needed intervention into the predictability of the Oscar bait-y biopic genre.
www.publicbooks.org/perfect-reco...
The old man is still alive: the new (amazing) season of You Must Remember This, but also the start of the Mets 2025 season. 🐻❄️
Yep, this is essentially my question! It sounds cheap, and I need confirmation it is in fact cheap. 😂 (I am doing my revisions for the Theatre Things book—writing about the rise of booklet programs in the UK.)
Colleagues who study Victorian Britain: who can help me grasp what it makes for a theatre programme to cost one penny in 1880? The National Archives currency converter places this at 28p today, which doesn’t feel like much, but maybe pence were more difficult to come by due to wealth disparity??