Skip to Main Content
Today's Hours:
Menu

Theatre and Dance: THEA 362

A research guide to finding books, articles, and other resources in Theatre and Dance

Identify significant productions

Here are several ways to identify significant productions of a given play:

  • Read the Wikipedia article about the play. Look for a section called "Performance history" or "Stage history" or "Productions."
    • Don't cite Wikipedia -- just use it to identify productions to research.
  • Read books about the play, or about the playwright.
    • Find books on the Library Website. Search for the playwright's name + the title of the play.
    • If you don't get many results, try searching for the playwright's name without the title of the play.
  • You can also try Googling the title of the play + the word "productions", but brace yourself -- you'll get a very long list of search results to dig through.

Alternatively, you can browse lists of casts & crew, and look for famous names.

Some productions are more significant than others. I recommend investigating several different productions, in order to discover which one would be best to focus your project on.

  • For each production, check to see if you can find any production images. Many productions don't have any surviving images. It's better to pick a production for which you can find images.
  • Productions in New York City or London tend to be better-documented than productions in other cities.
  • The more famous the play is, the more information you'll find about productions of that play.

Find production images

For many productions, no production images exist. You're more likely to find production images if you choose a production in New York City or London, or if you choose a recent production.

Here are several tools for finding production images:

Find reviews

Depending on the date of the production you're studying, you might find reviews of that production in various ways:

  • In Library Website, search for the title of the play + the name of the theatre.
    • Limit your results to articles published in the year of the production. If you get too many results, try adding the word "review".
    • Do this in the regular Quest search, but also try it in Newspapers search.
  • Not all of UMW's newspaper databases are included in Quest. Try looking in one or more newspaper databases that cover the year of the production.
  • For recent productions (21st century), try Googling the title of the play, the name of the theatre, and the word "review".
  • For productions between 1909 and 1969, see A Guide to Critical Reviews by James M. Salem, which we have in the Reference section at REFB PN 227 .N5 S28x 1967. This set of books is an index to reviews published in various magazines and newspapers.

Identify people involved in a production

Part of your production history will be a list of people who helped to create the production, including...

  • The playwright
  • The director
  • The actors
  • The stage designer(s), including set designers, lighting designers, costume designers, etc.

Some of these people will be mentioned in reviews, but reviews alone won't be enough to identify everyone involved in a production. So, here are several tools to help you identify the rest of the cast and crew: