7 February 2014 The Most Interesting Theater in the World Think about a play. During that play, was the President of the United States shot and killed in the theater? Of all the amazing places a person can visit in Washington D.C., Ford’s theater should be at the top of the list. Ford’s Theatre has had more interesting things happen to it than most theatres have ever had. The theater may have had bad luck, but nothing can bring it down for good. With the theatre’s past, it has become a national monument that everyone wants to see. Ford’s Theatre can be found on 10th Street, 511 NW Washington D.C. It was originally built in 1833 to be a First Baptist Church. After the church had been abandoned, John T. Ford saw great potential. He was the original, and first, architect of Ford’s Theatre. Ford had huge ambitions for the space, and he was determined to make things work no matter what obstacle was hurled his way. After multiple renovations, a new architect stepped in. His name was James J. Gifford. Gifford was also a hard worker who cared about the theatre. The theatre now has a ...
Just as actors are famous in America today, they were also famous in America’s 1880s. Back then movies and online videos did not exist, instead dramas and stage play occupied the American’s leisure time; well to do Americans that is. Everyone who knew anything about theater knew John Wilkes Booth. Born to actor parents, the stage’s spotlight became natural for John who debuted on stage at a young age. Now, in his thirties, people see a handsome, eloquent celebrity capable of delivering any line. Unfortunately, they don’t notice his didactic confederate sympathy or bubbling rage.
Concluding the Federal Theatre Project, it has accomplished the goal of introducing theatre to millions who had never seen theatre before. It employed thousands of people, initiated European epic theatre and Living Newspaper theatre techniques to the United States, and for this reason could be seen as a vast achievement.
Theatres and How We Had Fun." Little, Brown, and Company. (Boston, Toronto, London); 1991. P. 139, 144.
Houchin, John H. Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Overall, the Globe Theatre has a lot of history behind it, some that historians are still working on, and has had many demolishings and reconstructions in its time.
“You know some guys just can’t hold their arsenic” (Chicago). Theater in the 1920’s was greatly influenced by prohibition, mobsters and large murder cases as shown in the musical Chicago. Prohibition fueled many of the social issues of the day and also influenced theater. 1920’s theater was in turmoil as American society struggled to establish a new moral code. The musical Chicago gives examples of corruption in the legal system and the changing roles of women in society.
The Ford Motor Company (FMC) was founded in Detroit in 1903 and began shortly thereafter exporting cars to European branches. Cross-border assembly started in Canada in 1904 and was later implemented in the European markets. The first European plant was established in 1911 in England, and this was followed with other lower volume assembly plants across the European continent. All the plants and branches assembled and sold the Model T, using American methods and practices. This proved to be a success in the beginning, but in the long run, “(…) this proved a costly and unsuccessful strategy in Europe’s diverse markets” (Bonin et al., p. 15). By the late 1920s most of its European subsidiaries were struggling and Ford had to change his approach to the European market.
One of the very first electrified streets in the United States was Broadway. This gave it many opportunities to become a large icon for our nation. As we know now it is one of the most well-known places for great entertainment. However Broadway was not always the iconic entertainment center it is today; it was stolen, had New York City emerge around it, and persevered through many difficult economic and cultural times.
John Ford was an American motion-picture director. Winner of four Academy Awards, and is known as one of America’s great film directors. He began his career in the film industry around 1913. According to Ellis, Ford’s style is evident in both the themes he is drawn toward and the visual treatment of those themes, in his direction of the camera and in what’s in front of it. Although he began his career in the silent film area and continued to work fruitfully for decades after the thirties, Ford reached creative maturity in the thirties. Ford, unlike other directors continued to do some of his finest work after the nineteen thirties. Nevertheless, he shaped his art into personal and full expression during those precedent-setting years. (Pg.200)
It appears that the public does not genuinely care about the significance of a president being assassinated. The public honors and cherishes Ford’s Theatre because they romanticize Lincoln as a great American hero because of his role during the Civil War, while McKinley and Garfield are lucky to be mentioned in a high school history book. To the public, McKinley and Garfield are both footnotes in American history that barely deserve to have a plaque to signify where these leaders, chosen by the public, were murdered. Though Garfield is not worthy of a plaque, Americans have chosen to erect monuments to the events in history that they should be most ashamed of, such as slavery, yet honoring the former life of an elected president is not a selection that the public is passionate enough about to commemorate. Members of the public may choose to visit the locations where McKinley or Garfield were assassinated, but it appears it is more to say that they went rather than commemorate, or learn about, these presidents. Even with Lincoln, to some extent, the public has hidden the president in the basement of the theatre forcing his assassination to be more of an afterthought. Vowell admitted that she enjoyed the play she watched in the theatre more than she really should have while being within sight of where one of the United States’
Throughout the 1920s many things changed in the United States along with other countries. When World War 1 ended, some many countries struggled economically, but the United States was not one of them. At the time America was in a happy state with good economic standing. Since the U.S. was doing so well people were able to work less and enjoy more leisure activities such as sports, music on the radio, movies and Broadway theatre. Before the 1920s theatre was mainly for the rich and was not wildly popular, as people’s money situations changed so did theatre and Broadway Theatre grew in popularity with more people coming to the U.S. through Ellis Island. Centered in New York with its large population, Broadway theatre in the 1920s was filled of
Theatre History II Garic Tinsley Dr. Jennifer Stoessner 5/6/2014 Theatre in Prison: A Viable Engine for Rehabilitation and Social Change Prison within the society in America has sharply veered towards the idea of mass incarceration. The Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) is a criminal research group that reports on the quantity of people in the United States that are in the prison system, and in 2014 “PPI reckons the United States has roughly 2.4m people locked up, with most of those (1.36m) in state prisons” (J.F. 1). This number is cause for concern when compared to a study of recidivism released among thirty states in 2005 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
In the book Consumption by Alan Aldridge, Henry Ford links the ‘Fordist Era’ with the ‘rise of mass consumption’ conception. Henry Ford was known for his influential social innovators around the mass consumption world and for his tremendous creations of many different automobiles. Ford invented the much known “Fordism,” and it was inaugurated in 1914 in Dearborn, Michigan. During the time of “Fordism,” the mass market or the mass consumption had been involved with some closely related trends that include the growing of impersonality, self-service, advertising, packaging, and brands. The ‘Fordist Era,’ is known to be the system that was designed to create low cost goods from many production that was being made during the era. In Henry Ford career, he was able to create unique vehicles and also have his own company and three major points in the ‘Fordist Era,’ that really led a successful career and the rise of mass consumption for Ford was the standardization of the product, special and unique tools that provided workers to operate the “assembly lines,” and the third is higher wages for thousands of workers that fought to have a job during the ‘Fordist Era.” The main idea that Henry Ford enforces the idea of ‘Fordist Era’ with the ‘rise of mass consumption,' is for us as individual to enjoy the make of many products and also was the idea to rise the people prosperity in the world of industrial, and have the individuals be able to have the ability to buy all the elements and commodities that was made and advertised for the society.
My experience watching a live theatre performance on stage was a fascinating one, most especially since it was my first time. I attended a staged performance of “The History Boys” in a small theatre called “The Little Theatre of Alexandria” at 8:00 pm on Wednesday June 8, 2016 in Alexandria, Virginia. The overall production of the play was a resounding experience for me particularly the performance of the actors and the design of the scene made the play seem real.