At the height of the French Revolution, a new fear gripped many people in England: Armed women. Scenes like the storming of the Bastille and riots over the price of bread in Paris, in which women figured prominently, led to concerns like the one expressed in a 1795 letter to a magazine, in which the writer worried that "young and beautiful" women might quit "the quiet scenes of domestic life to riot in the scenes of blood" that were occurring across the English Channel. In fact, there were already plenty of arms-bearing women in Britain – but, in this case, on the stage. The figure of the armed woman is the subject of our guest's new book. Dr. Sarah Burdett is the author of The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789 – 1815.

TikTok might not seem like a natural fit with Broadway – or, for that matter, with the subject of theatre history. As our guest today writes, "an entire generation's attention span became roughly fifteen seconds" once the short video app caught on, and it's been at the center of numerous controversies, political and otherwise. But there's another side to TikTok and its relationship with Broadway, one that has changed how people from all over the world engage with and share their enthusiasm for their favorite musicals. That's the subject of Dr. Trevor Boffone's TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age, which explores how the worlds of social media and musical theatre collided between 2018 and 2022 in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.

The 1980s might not seem like a decade conducive to the emergence of a groundbreaking gay theatre. However, amidst the AIDS pandemic and a homophobic backlash to the gains of the post-Stonewall era, Charles Busch and Kenneth Elliott created something unique in New York City. The company that they founded, Theatre-in-Limbo, developed some of the biggest underground hits of the 80s, with unforgettable titles like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Psycho Beach Party. Now Elliott is out with a new book: Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York. It tells the story of Theatre-in-Limbo and makes a case for its underappreciated importance.