The East German poet-clowns Hans-Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching rose to prominence during the GDR's (German Democratic Republic; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) Peaceful Revolution of autumn 1989 with their cabaret production Letztes aus der Da Da eR. A film adaptation of the production was made by Jörg Foth in 1990, which was finally released on DVD with English subtitles in the United Kingdom and North America in 2009 (Latest from the Da-Da-R). In light of this long-overdue interest in Wenzel & Mensching, this article will attempt to put the work of the duo in historical and aesthetic context. Their use of character, masks, music, and philosophy combined to create the distinctly grotesque world that constituted their Liedertheater performances.

Judging from the number of its theatrical adaptations and the countries in which it was adapted, Anna Bonacci's L'ora della fantasia (The Fantasy Hour) was indeed “the most successful Italian comedy of the postwar era.” After its 1944 premiere in Rome, the play was performed again in Geneva in 1949 and in Paris in 1953 under the title L'Heure éblouissante (The Dazzling Hour). The enormous success the play received in Switzerland and France opened the way in the 1950s to numerous stagings worldwide, from Lisbon and Stockholm to Amsterdam and Mexico City. L'ora della fantasia has also been adapted for other media, including a musical, a film, and a television film. In fact, one of its film adaptations, Billy Wilder's 1964 Kiss Me, Stupid, has proved to be so well known that Bonacci's comedy is now often presented on the Italian stage as Baciami stupido!, and is sometimes even set in Climax, Nevada, the location Wilder used in his film.

In his commendatory poem from the First Folio, Ben Jonson asserted that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” This has proved true, and Shakespeare has been able to speak to many succeeding generations of readers and theatregoers. This, however, is not because essential, unchangeable, and universal truths about human nature, the world, and experience lay hidden in his plays or his characters but (quite the opposite) because succeeding generations, over the centuries, have been able to appropriate, exploit, and reuse Shakespeare to make sense of their world and their lives. Shakespeare is for all time precisely because he has relentlessly changed over time. The author and his texts have been unceasingly reinvented, and a virtually infinite number of “alternative Shakespeares” has come to embody specific contemporary issues and conflicts. As Jean Marsden put it in 1991, Shakespeare is the object of “an ongoing process of literary and cultural appropriation in which each new generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare's genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work.” This is true for both the “dramatic” Shakespeare and the “theatrical” Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays have been as tirelessly reinterpreted on the page by scholars (and others) as they have been reinvented on the stage by actors and directors. The fate of King Richard III, however, is peculiar from this point of view, insofar as an often-denigrated Restoration revision of Shakespeare's play totally replaced the “original” one in the theatre and held the stage for nearly 200 years. This peculiarity acquires interesting overtones when we look at the treatment the staged play received at the hands of the Romantics, who, in spite of the bardolatry prevailing at the time and their often-vented disesteem for the adapted version, apparently missed their opportunity to make Shakespeare's original play speak for their own time.

Geography has been accorded surprisingly little attention in the study of world theatre history. Maps are by no means the sum total of geographic knowledge, but their existence (or the lack thereof) provides a handy indicator of an author's interest in the subject. Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy's History of Theatre has numerous pictures of actors and diagrams of theatres but only one map that directly pertains to theatre. All the rest of its maps (of which there are fewer than two dozen) are standard-issue political maps. Theatre Histories: An Introduction, by Phillip B. Zarrilli and others, is groundbreaking in many ways, but it includes only six maps, and none of these directly concerns theatre. Each of the six volumes of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre includes only one map, a basic political one. Other standard reference works on the history of theatre contain no maps; these include The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Numerous types of map might be relevant for a study of theatre, but aside from the occasional political map, the basic overviews of theatre history do not include such resources.

Music theatre scholarship, and indeed theatre history research in general, can be accurately described as a subset of media studies. As much as we might claim the contrary to our theatre students, theatre scholarship is not, by and large, the study of live performance but is instead an analysis of our own reconstructions built from the traces theatrical events leave behind. We study not moments but materials, not what was live but rather what was left. Increasingly, these leavings are likely to be digital. Much has been written of late about the current and imminent challenges these “born digital” materials pose for librarians and archivists, and many are now developing processes and procedures for preserving and providing access to them. Relatively little published scholarship has been done using these archives, however, so the emerging practices have yet to be thoroughly tested by researchers.1 In this article I narrate my experiences using the born-digital artifacts in the Jonathan Larson collection at the Library of Congress in an effort to provide an example of one form this sort of scholarship might take.

I want to preface this brief piece by declaring from the outset that the title is not ironic and does not intend to sport with our or another's misfortune. In spite of its brutality, it has proved, in the end, a pleasant recession. By the time this article goes to press, we will be advertising two new faculty lines in the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. When this edition of Theatre Survey comes out, we will be interviewing candidates. Two years after the budget crisis first hit and we lost half of our doctoral faculty in one month, we will have emerged stronger than ever, with a wider, deeper, more rigorous program with far more partners and opportunities than we ever could have imagined. By the time this issue arrives, the hard times will not likely have ended, but they most certainly will have improved us.