Showing titles in Acting & Auditioning

In the cutthroat world of theater, actors need all the help they can get to have a #legup on the competition. This essential "how-to" guide explains it all - from choosing the right college to making your Broadway debut - while teaching you how to behave on social media along the way! This book will aid you in your quest to find what it means to be #SOBLESSED.

Acting is living and behaving truthfully and fully under imaginary circumstances. But why are “truthfully” and “fully” so hard for us? Why is it so difficult to be in the moment with our art and in our lives?

How the acting profession works and what to expect. The things you always do and the things you never do — and I mean ever.

A hapless elephant keeper must do everything he can to save his failing zoo Terry Lyon, assistant head keeper of Southwood Zoo, trusts animals because most people think he’s a waste of space. But as the zoo lurches towards bankruptcy, his future looks bleak. As if managing hungry elephants and...

From Tony Blair and David Frost to Aziraphale and Hamlet, Michael Sheen has taken on a host of iconic roles, inhabiting each one with complete conviction. But – whether he’s transforming himself into real figures or bringing fictional ones to life – how does he go about immersing himself in his characters? The answer lies in an obscure Russian theatre technique that has evolved to become a central plank of modern-day acting training.

When Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical Hamilton opened in London’s West End in December 2017, it was as huge a hit as it had been in its original production off - and on Broadway. For Terera, though, his journey as Burr had begun more than a year earlier, with his first audition in New York, and continuing through extensive research and preparation, intense rehearsals, previews and finally opening night itself. Throughout this time he kept a journal, recording his experiences of the production and his process of creating his award-winning performance.

In seven years of blogging only to the community of voice actors, specifically on the subject of voice acting, I've educated myself and others on the challenges of being a freelance voice artist. My first diplomatic answer to my caller is: being a success in voice acting requires more than just a voice. I've had to gingerly explain the real secret to voiceover success so often that it became clear: somebody needed to tell the truth about being a voice-actor. It's hard work! It's a business and should be approached as a business.

What makes a life truly interesting? Is it the people you meet? The risks you take? The adventures you remember? Jonathan Goldsmith has many answers to that question. For years he was a struggling actor in New York and Los Angeles, with experiences that included competing for roles with Dustin...

With so much written, rumored, told, and retold about Marilyn Monroe, it's amazing to consider how much we still don't know. On the screen she was iconic, radiant, yet her talent so rarely earned her respect. In life she was intelligent, brilliant, yet regarded as little more than Hollywood's blond bombshell. But who was the real Marilyn Monroe beyond the hit films and the headlines?

As an actor, awareness of your movement is the key to transformation. By making deliberate physical choices, you can fully and articulately embody different ways of being: you can become someone or something else. Laban's Efforts give you a way of identifying and making these choices. Working with them helps the actor to create wholly present and physically ambitious performances.

The Aspiring Actor's Handbook is written for curious and want-to-be actors, and designed to help them make informed decisions about pursuing an acting career. Veteran actresses Molly Cheek and Debbie Zipp have culled the wit and wisdom of a wide array of successful actors from Dee Wallace to Beth Grant, to bring aspiring and new actors the kind of mentoring perspective so many in the business wish they had had when they were starting out.

In Character Breakdown, Zawe scrolls through a version of her life. Or is it a version of her art? Or something in between. In it, she encounters glamour, horror, absurdity and questions like: is a life spent more on performance than reality any life at all?

Stanislavski was the first to outline a systematic approach for using our experience, imagination and observation to create truthful acting. In Acting Stanislavski, John Gillett offers a clear, accessible and comprehensive account of the Stanislavski approach, from the actor's training to final performance, exploring ease and focus, the nature of action, interaction and objectives, the imaginary reality, senses and feeling, active analysis of text, physical and vocal expression of character, the actor in the context of training and the industry.

From the celebrated film critic and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, a fascinating look at some of the cinema’s finest actors and how they approach their craft "Open to any page and you’ll become enthralled by the...tales of forgotten film lore, childhood memories, sexy...

Learning how easy improv is can be the hard part. There are important lessons in life that can lead to better improv scenes. And there are important lessons in improv that can lead to a better life. By putting improv techniques under an electron microscope of reason, The Tao of Improv: A Philosophy of Creating a Scene can improve the way we function, understand, and interact - on stage and off. Excerpts from the Tao Te Ching are woven into an overall philosophy of scenic improv acting.

Learn how to become a successful working actor in TV commercials in Los Angeles in this fun step-by-step guide by top casting session director and commercial actor Shaan Sharma. The audiobook covers everything you need to know about the business, what you need to get started, how to get the right training, and walks you through the entire process of auditioning, booking and shooting projects - all from an insider's point of view. Even veterans will learn useful tips for converting more auditions into bookings.

160 minutes of extract scenes from Shakespeare’s finest plays and read by a staggering cast. The plays of Shakespeare are fully alive only in performance, and the HarperCollins recordings of the complete plays, offers scenes from 'The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Much...

Access Accents bring the highly sought-after voice techniques of top voice coach Penny Dyer to the actor's audio device. They offer a unique opportunity to prepare for auditions at short notice.

For more than 50 years Michael Green's The Art of Coarse Acting has been essential reading for anyone with a passion for theatre, both amateurs and professionals alike. This acerbic yet affectionate work remains one of the funniest books about acting ever written. It's a "[W]ickedly irreverent" (The Stage) exposé which ridicules pretentiousness, pokes fun at incompetence and disaster and generally lays bare life backstage. Even after all this time it remains true that however much the theatre may change, coarse actors don't.

What goes on inside a great narrator to make them great? This groundbreaking work answers this question by exploring the psychophysical aspect of voiceover. The listener is given a bird’s-eye view of the professional narrator’s mental, physical, and vocal ”machinery” as well as an in-depth look at the underlying currents that power it: energy, intention, emotion, connection, and flow. Voiceover Narration inspires the listener to gain a deeper understanding of the nuances of voiceover performance within each narration subgenre.