Bootlegs over Broadway: musical theatre (re)productions, digital circulation, and the informal media economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Peter C. Kunze
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Broadway Musical

‘Waving through a window’: Nostalgia and prosthetic memory in Dear Evan Hansen

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey R. Barr
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Positive Affect ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Dramaturgical Analysis ◽  
American Musical Theatre

Dear Evan Hansen, a popular Broadway musical whose narrative centres on connectivity and the protagonist’s social anxiety, offers a disruptive potential to the otherwise standard nostalgic leanings of the contemporary American musical. Operating dramaturgically, nostalgia offers the audience an opportunity to recall an idealized past that imbues the musical they are witnessing with their own positive affect. Dear Evan Hansen’s use of prosthetic memory disrupts the nostalgic tradition of the contemporary musical. Using dramaturgical analysis to identify the narrative operation of nostalgia and prosthetic memory, this article situates the disruptive potential of Dear Evan Hansen as an intervention into the American musical theatre canon writ large.

Dinner Theatres

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-312
Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Negative Response ◽  
Front Range ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
History Of

This chapter takes a road trip with the author and her sister to four dinner theatres in cities along the Front Range of Colorado. The first part of the chapter summarizes the history of dinner theatres in the United States and the negative response of critics in East Coast newspapers in the early 1970s when dinner theatres were invented and became popular. Critics accused dinner theatres of fostering middlebrow taste in both the theatrical repertoire and the food. Dinner theatres sprouted up in Colorado around ten years later, where they were welcomed by critics and then similarly disdained as proffering bad taste in the food and middlebrow taste in the theatre. Nonetheless, even as dinner theatres have all but disappeared across the United States, a handful of this hybrid form of restaurant and musical theatre remain successful in Colorado. Though many people have heard of dinner theatres, only in certain parts of the country can one experience this unique activity, which combines profit motives with community investment by way of the Broadway musical theatre repertoire. The chapter shows how dinner theatres are a boon to the local artistic community and how actors and audiences appreciate the dinner theatres in their region.

The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Musical Theatre ◽  
Opera Houses

This book examines the scope and ambition of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals by drawing on the perspectives of musicological and dramaturgical scholars, literary and film critics, and musical theater practitioners. Consisting of twenty-seven essays, it analyzes Sondheim’s radical re-invention of the artistic form of the Broadway musical in response to various traditions of artistic innovation and popular entertainment and how his work with several collaborators has radically transformed the history of American musical theatre. It explores problematic questions of authorship peculiar to the cultural milieu of Broadway musical theater by focusing on intertextuality in works ranging from Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970) to the film Hangover Square (1945) and Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It also probes the dramaturgical technique of songs that enable comic performers to act out the logic of character and plot in a meta-theatrical style and discusses the notion of the musical as a performance event, patterns of interpretation in the repeated performance of Sondheim’s musicals in the United Kingdom, the pleasures and challenges of performing these musicals in international opera houses, Sondheim’s work for cinema and television and his “cinematic” approach to musical theater, and his subtle and often ironic exploitation of genre conventions such as pastiche and parody. Finally, the book considers questions of cultural, political, and personal identity raised by Sondheim’s musicals in relation to contemporary American society.

The Arrival of the Zarzuela in Budapest El rey que rabió by Ruperto Chapí

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Gloria A. Rodríguez-Lorenzo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Spanish Music ◽  
Written Performance

The appearance of zarzuela in Hungary is entirely unknown in musicology. In the present study, I discuss the currently unchartered reception of the zarzuela El rey que rabió (first performed in Spain in 1891) by Ruperto Chapí (1851-1909), a Spanish composer of over one hundred stage pieces and four string quartets. Premièred as Az unatkozó király in Budapest seven years later in 1898, Chapí’s zarzuela met with resounding success in the Hungarian press, a fervour which reverberated into the early decades of the twentieth century. Emil Szalai and Sándor Hevesi’s skilful Hungarian translation, together with Izsó Barna’s appropriate adjustments and reorchestration, accordingly catered the work to Budapest audiences. Through analysis of hand-written performance materials of Az unatkozó király (preserved in the National Széchényi Library), alongside a detailed study of the Hungarian reception, the profound interest in Spanish music–particularly in relation to musical theatre–amongst the turn-of-the-century Hungarian theatre-going public is revealed. This paper explores how Az unatkozó király became a success in Hungary.

Oklahoma!

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Final Shape ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rodgers And Hammerstein ◽  
Theatre Guild

Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway on 31 March 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and today it is performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. When this book was first published in 2007, it offered the first fully documented history of the making of the show based on archival materials, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources. The present revised edition draws still further on newly uncovered sources to provide an even clearer account of a work that many have claimed fundamentally changed Broadway musical theater. It is filled with rich and fascinating details about the play on which Oklahoma! was based (Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs); on what encouraged Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Guild to bring Rodgers and Hammerstein together for their first collaboration; on how Rouben Mamoulian and Agnes de Mille became the director and choreographer; on the drafts and revisions that led the show toward its final shape; and on the rehearsals and tryouts that brought it to fruition. It also examines the lofty aspirations and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, and demonstrates just what made it part of its times.

Dance of Death

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Heart Surgery ◽  
Open Heart Surgery ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Open Heart ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
Dance Of Death ◽  
Nonlinear Fashion

This chapter looks at Bob Fosse’s most ambitious film, the autobiographical All That Jazz. All That Jazz follows Joe Gideon, a director and choreographer very much like Fosse who is at a personal and professional crossroads as he prepares to direct a Broadway musical much like Chicago while simultaneously editing a film that looks a lot like Lenny. Following graphic footage of open-heart surgery and a series of metaphoric musical comedy turns by the women in his life, All That Jazz concludes with Gideon presiding over a combined funeral and wake for himself: a glamorous, high-energy floor show to end all floor shows. Here Fosse took the movie musical further than anyone had dared—not only in subject matter, but also in structure and pacing. Fosse tells this “putting on a show” musical in nonlinear fashion, with surprising juxtapositions, fragments, and time leaps.

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