This essay explores the socioeconomic resonance of Italian professional theatre in the early modern period by considering a few records of performance by indigent entertainers, and by exploring the persistent theatrical and textual presence of poverty and hunger in texts both central and adjacent to the professional actors. Whether or not a given troupe or actor directly experienced or even cared about poverty, famine, destitution, or other social issues, by the time of the commedia's “golden age” these themes had by dint of theatrical tradition and performance sedimentation become part of the actors' repertoire, much more central to their performance tradition than they were in English and Spanish early modern theatres. Partly because of the medieval legacy of the itinerant mendicant orders in Italy, the commedia dell'arte inherited a culture in which poverty, begging, itinerancy, and a certain disposition to perform degradation were in the air, and this was absorbed into the grammar of their performance. Not only were tropes and gags of hunger and destitution continually deployed in the commedia, but some of the actors assumed, for their own rhetorical purposes, the histrionic pose of destitution. In other words, whatever their professional fortunes, they “played” poverty both onstage and in their offstage personae.

Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess has long held a place of particular importance in studies of early modern English theatre history. Performed for a record nine straight performances (a feat not accomplished again until the Restoration), Middleton's production has attracted scholarly interest by virtue of both its unparalleled contemporary success and its overt religious and political messages of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda. Performed by the King's Men at the Globe playhouse between 5 and 14 August (except for Sunday) 1624, A Game at Chess provides the most conspicuous instance from the period in which the stage addressed issues of immediate political significance. Certainly history plays, such as Shakespeare's series of works chronicling the Wars of the Roses, dealt with English politics, but no play dealt so directly with the politics of the moment. Even more important, the politics of the moment responded. John Woolley, the secretary of the English agent in Brussels, wrote “all the nues I have heard since my comming to towne is of a nue Play. It is called a game at Chess, but it may be a vox populy for by reporte it is 6 tymes worse against the Spanyard.” The play's politics struck such a chord and the performance was deemed so scandalous that it was ultimately shut down by King James himself after he received an official complaint from the Spanish Ambassador Extraordinary, Don Carlos Coloma.

It is useful to begin with some immutable facts: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died on the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on Friday, 19 June 1953, and were pronounced dead at 8∶06 and 8∶17 p.m., respectively. Nearly seventeen years later, on 23 April 1970, Donald Freed's Inquest opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. The play about the Rosenberg case ran for eight previews and twenty-eight performances, closing just twenty-three days after its premiere. In its first minutes, Inquest alerted the audience that “every word you will hear or see on this stage is a documented quotation or reconstruction from events.” Freed asserts that he used only primary sources, no matter how “bizarre or poisoned” the words might have seemed, to construct his script. He employed these sources in three distinct ways and, accordingly, called for a divided stage to present the play. In Stage A, the players enacted portions of the 1951–3 court transcripts, whereas Stage B served as a plastic space, where flashback scenes of the characters' out-of-trial lives, pieced from letters, tapes, memos, and other available archival sources, interrupted the legal proceedings. Finally, relying on a large, partitioned screen situated upstage and on voice-over recordings, Freed assembled photographs, newspaper headlines, visual evidence submitted in the courtroom, and quotations from public figures to comment on the Rosenberg saga. The playwright thus toyed with time and place, offering the central story of the trial in a nonlinear manner. He bombarded the audience with projections and sounds to reinforce the reality on which the play was based and, at the same time, to evoke a nightmarish, multimedia world.

Money matters. In Act 2 of Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical based on the 1975 cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the show's star, Tim Curry, as King Arthur, comments that the characters are running around in a “dark and very expensive forest.” The joke, it turns out, is entirely on us. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an inexpensive independent film, costing $250,000 to make, a bargain compared to the same year's The Rocky Horror Picture Show ($1,200,000) and Python's own 1979 Life of Brian ($4,000,000). From its release, Holy Grail ran continuously in many theatres, and large numbers of people could afford the price of a ticket; it still circulates widely in relatively inexpensive DVD and VHS editions. Fast-forward thirty years to March of 2005. Production costs for Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, top $14 million (not atypical start-up costs these days on Broadway). Playing in a single theatre that seats only about 1,600, the show commands ticket prices that begin around $100 and can cost $350 and up. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spamalot is setting the pace for the spiraling costs of Broadway entertainment. Many fewer people will see the musical than the film, and those who can will tend to be more affluent; Spamalot's target audience is Holy Grail's first audience “all grown up,” prosperous, middle-aged Monty Python fans (like the authors of this article). In their youth, Holy Grail denied this audience the pleasures of narrative cinema. It made fun of film, relentlessly disturbing the seamless illusion of reality that is the cornerstone of Hollywood cinema, refusing narrative coherence and narrative closure. A parody of the clichés of mass culture, it exposed the political conservatism of the various forms of nostalgia for a medieval past that never was, a past in which strange women lying around in ponds distributing swords could be a basis for a political system. Spamalot, on the other hand, adapts its cinematic original, repackaging the youthful rebellion of the 1975 film and offering the pleasures of nostalgia remarkably free from political consequences.

It's 10∶30 at night, the day after Halloween 2003. I'm standing in line outside of the Freedom Assembly of God Church in Tallahassee, Florida, to watch their first annual Hell House. Every October, hundreds of congregations across America mount religious dramas conceived as Christian Halloween alternatives. Such productions typically invoke and alter haunted-house conventions, replacing ghosts and monsters with demons and sin—all designed to confront unsaved audience members with the reality of spiritual warfare and the necessity of being born again. Whereas the Tallahassee version promised to be relatively modest, many other Hell House events boast huge production budgets and attract thousands of visitors annually. In recent years, these shows have garnered considerable media attention for their shocking, graphically staged scenes of “sin” and its consequences. Infamous images include gay people dying of AIDS and burning in hell, black-clad, Columbine-style gunmen mowing down Christians in schools, and blood-soaked abortions featuring vacuum-cleaner noises and bowls of raw meat meant to resemble fetuses. Criticism pours in from both left-wing advocacy groups and other evangelical Christians. It's “pornography for the soul,” it's “simplistic theology,” it's “spiritual violence.”

When Mike Sell asked me to contribute to Critical Stages on the topic of “recent emigration in the field,” I had to make sure I understood. “Do you mean people like me,” I asked, “who have taken jobs outside the U.S.?” “Well yes,” he answered. “There's been quite a lot of informal discussion about this trend at various conferences and events.” Fair enough, but it has proven surprisingly difficult to quantify this phenomenon, and the data are partial and sometimes contradictory. There are a number of reasons why some American performance scholars may be choosing to work abroad now. Part personal, part professional, such reasons resist straight-ahead explanations. In what follows, I employ a somewhat paratactic structure to capture fragments of uneven cause and effect, finally placing the question of intellectual migration in the disciplinary experiences of Theodor Adorno during his period of exile in the United States.

The history of American popular entertainment is documented in many different ways, ranging from materials such as correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, company records, oral-history interviews, and autobiographies that directly tell the story of performers, business managers, and behind-the-scenes crew, to material created by others and used for the promotion of the artists. In this second category fall the subjects of this article, two letterpress show printers, Curtiss Show Print of Continental, Ohio, and Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee. There were many show printers across the country from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, but the majority of these companies have closed, and their type and printing blocks have been discarded or dispersed. Although other printers altered their operations because of changes in technology that allow work to be done in less laborious ways, Curtiss Show Print and Hatch Show Print are still working and using the old equipment and techniques. Both Nyle Stateler, owner of Curtiss Show Print, and Jim Sherraden, manager of Hatch Show Print, realize the historical and research value of their show-print materials, and both have taken steps to save those materials, forging institutional relationships that are commitments for the preservation of their show-print work.

How appropriate it seemed when I found that Joe Roach's contribution to this series began with books in manuscript form he was currently reading, since this issue arrived just when I was reading his own It in manuscript (2007). It is vintage Roach, tracing the operations of “It” in accessories, clothing, hair, skin, flesh, and bone in eighteenth-century and modern public and theatrical performance. The work is a great read—erudite, witty, and packed full of fascinating historical tidbits and brilliantly illustrative quotations. If a cultural historian can have “It,” then that would surely be Roach.