Theater

Digital Theater Plus offers HD-quality films of classical, contemporary and international productions from RSC, BroadwayHD, Shakespeare's Globe, West End, Gecko Theatre and more. Supporting materials include study guides, essays, and interviews with academics & practitioners.

BBC Shakespeare (via Ambrose Video) provides Streaming videos of the classic BBC Shakespeare productions. Includes closed captioning so you can view the text along with the video.

Broadway HD includes performances of 10 plays and musicals from writers, directors, and actors recognized by the Tony Awards® and the Pulitzer Prize®.

Films on Demand is a source of videos and multimedia for academic, vocational and life-skills content.
***Find theater productions by clicking on the menu bar, selecting "view all" under "Subjects," and searching the page for "Drama and the Theater."***

Access guaranteed through May 2027
Royal Shakespeare Company Collection offers high-definition, surround-sound recordings of William Shakespeare’s plays featuring the world’s best Shakespearean actors, from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon theater.

Note: Access to Volume II is guaranteed through May 2027
Audio Drama: The L.A. Theatre Works Collection contains dramatic works in streaming audio. The plays include dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Performing Arts Periodicals Database (formerly International Index) provides indexing, abstracts and full text journals on dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater and performance art.

International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full-Text contains content on International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance as well as full text titles, including Canadian Theatre Review, Dance Chronicle, Dance Teacher and Modern Drama.

Gale Literature Criticism provides access to a collection of literary criticism from classical to modern times and offers a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. Includes online editions of Children's Literature Review, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Drama Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Shakespearean Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.

Literature Resource Center provides access to biographical information, overviews, literary criticism, and reviews covering all disciplines and time periods from around the world.

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature Retrospective provides bibliographic information for articles from periodicals in the popular press from 1890 to 1982.

World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a database consisting of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide since 1961.

London Times provides a searchable, full-text and full-image archive of every page of the (London) Times from 1785 to 2014.

London Times provides a searchable, full-text and full-image archive of every page of the (London) Times from 1785 to 2014.

Incorporates the New York Times Index  

Incorporates the New York Times Index  

Full-text of the Philadelphia Daily News via Proquest Newsstand from 1983 to present.

Full-text of the Philadelphia Inquirer via Readex from 1829 to 1922.

The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1860-2001. When digitization is complete, the complete run will include 1829-2009.

Full-text of the Philadelphia Inquirer via Proquest Newsstand from 1983 to present.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (1/4/2018 - present) features full-page, full-color images that are full text searchable and offer keyword highlighting via Access World News.

The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive (TLS) provides access to full-text search of every issue of the TLS from 1902 to 2014 including book reviews, film reviews, play reviews and more.

Shakespeare in Performance features prompt books (scripts of the plays marked up for performance) from the collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.

Twentieth Century North American Drama contains the full text of plays as well as related productions, theaters, and production companies, and selected playbills, production photographs and other related ephemera. Each play is indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching.

Black Drama, Second contains plays by playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.

18th Century Drama includes plays submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and contextual documents featuring: John Larpent Collection of Plays from the Huntington Library, Anna Larpent Diaries, The London Stage (1660-1800), A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London (1660-1800).

Theatre in Context Collection offers O’Dell’s Annals of the New York Stage, the Oxford University Press Companion series, and Greenwood’s American Theatre Companies series alongside thousands of playbills, posters, photographs, and related theatrical ephemera.

Access to Volume I guaranteed through May 2027
National Theatre Collection offers access to high definition streaming video of world-class productions and unique archival material offering significant insight into theatre and performance studies.

Note: Due to budget constraints, this resource has not been renewed as of 12/31/2023.
Fashion Central (formerly Berg Fashion Library) provides access to Berg content collections including the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion online, e-books, reference works, and images.

MusicalTheaterSongs.com is a subscription-based database for musical theater Repertoire. Find the right song, right now, for your next audition, performance or for study. Search 11,000 (and counting) titles spanning 150 years of shows, custom-tailor your search using up to 20 different parameters and over 100 descriptive tags, get direct links to sheet music and recordings, share your searches through email and social media platforms and connect with your school’s or local library’s music collection through Worldcat.

Victorian Popular Culture is a portal comprised of four modules, inviting users into the darkened halls, small backrooms, big tops and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic, spiritualist séances, optical entertainments and the first moving pictures.

Vogue Archive (1892 - present) is a complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer and brand names.