newspapers
Newspapers and News Media
Research Guide - BU Libraries
Finding Reviews
- Performing Arts Database This link opens in a new window
Performing Arts Database locates citations for writings spanning the disciplines of theatre, dance, and music. These writings chiefly originate in subject-specific trade journals, magazines, and more established scholarly journals. Some full-text is included. Content is international in scope with the majority of the original content having been produced in the United States and Europe.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Includes citations from worldwide publications: periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
- Readers' Guide / Reader's Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window
Readers' Guide indexes hundreds of general interest and specialized magazines dating from the late 19th century to the present with full text of articles for more recent publications.
- Gale General OneFile This link opens in a new window
This general-interest database provides indexes, abstracts and full-text articles from journal and news sources. The content includes a variety of topics, such as education, business, science, current events, politics, and technology.
Searching Newspapers
Newspapers are good sources for reviews and criticism. Check the News and Newspapers guide for individual online paper titles like the New York Times, or use the "News" tab of Nexis Uni to search several papers at once.
You may also find that you need older papers than are available through the tools mentioned above. One of the best resources to use when looking for historical newspapers is ProQuest Historical Newspapers. This will allow you to search historic newspapers from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.
Some tips:
- You can select the newspaper or newspapers that are the most relevant for your needs. The database will let you search more than one at a time but you can't search current and historical newspapers concurrently.
- You can narrow your results by limiting the results to a particular time period. This can be useful if you're looking for reviews specifically of a premiere or a later run.
- It's best to formulate a search fairly carefully because you are searching a lot of information. To make the search as effective as possible, search for as much as you know, like the title, playwright, or performers, in quotation marks with AND in between them.
Examples: "The Children's Hour" AND "Lillian Hellman"
- The quotation marks let the database know that you need those words to appear together and in that order, and the AND limits the results to articles containing both phrases.
- Try searching for reviews by particular critics. Put the critic's name in quotation marks. If you want, you can then add it to a search like the one above with a specific play in mind.
Books and Print Reference Sources
- Theatre Is Not Safe: Theatre Criticism, 1962-1986 byLocation: Mugar Stacks PN1707 .R57 1987Publication Date: 1987
On stage : selected theater reviews from the New York times, 1920-1970 by Location: Mugar Stacks PN2277.N5 B4Publication Date: 1973
Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism by
Shakespeare in the Theatre offers a rich, varied, and wonderfully evocative collection of eyewitness accounts of Shakespearian performances over the centuries. Theatre generates an excitement that stimulates fine prose: here are Hazlitt's famous accounts of Edmund Kean as Richard III and Hamlet, Bernard Shaw on Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet and his hilarious descriptions of Augustin Daly's productions, Max Beerbohm on Gordon Craig, and Kenneth Tynan on Olivier and Wolfit. Here too are lesser-known pieces by great writers: the German novelist Theodor Fontane on Charles Kean, Evelyn Waugh on Olivier, Virginia Woolf on Twelfth Night at the Old Vic. Taken together these pieces represent an appreciation of the work of the finest Shakespearian interpreters, and a survey of changing styles of Shakespearian production--ranging right across the canon--from the seventeenth century to the present, in England, America, and further afield. The collection also provides extensive coverage of the postwar period right up to the present day, with vivid accounts of landmark productions by directors such as Peter Brook, Peter Hall, John Barton, Deborah Warner, Trevor Nunn, and Declan Donellan. Stanley Wells introduces the volume with an essay on "Shakespeare and the Theatre Critics," and supplies each review with a helpful headnote and explanatory references. This unique compendium will delight all lovers of the Bard and avid theater-goers of all kinds.
Location: Mugar Stacks PR3091 .S365 1997Publication Date: 1997
