The American Musical and the Faustian Bargain

The history of the American musical is framed by spectacular successes driven by Faustian elements: The Black Crook (1866, running for decades, based loosely on Weber’s Der Freischütz [The Freeshooter]) and The Phantom of the Opera (1988; still running as of 2019). Yet, straightforwardly Faust-based musicals are rare, with Damn Yankees (1955) being the single obvious example. A discussion of Damn Yankees relates it to other treatments in popular culture, including the film version of The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), as a basis for a wider discussion of Faustian elements deployed in American musical theater, including magic, striving, earning, idealism, temptation, and sexuality, leading to a consideration of the Faustian bargain of the genre itself, which uses the magic of music, dance, sex, and spectacle to seduce audiences and achieve commercial success, but at the apparent price of its artistic soul.

Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America

American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defined the practices of Mormonism--America’s fastest-growing religion? Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America is an interdisciplinary study of voice, popular music, and American religion that analyzes the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between two of America’s most iconic institutions, Mormonism and American musical theater. This book argues that Mormonism and early American musical theater were cut from the same ideological cloth--formed in the early nineteenth century out of Jacksonian principles of self-fashioning, white supremacy, and broader understandings of the democratic principles of vicariousness. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common ideological platform, using musicals not only to practice a theology of voice but also to transition from outlier polygamist sect to become by the mid-twentieth century emblems of white, middle-class respectability in America. In an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness. Looking outward from the shared ideological roots of Mormonism and musical theater, this book offers a compelling study of how the ways Americans sound determine the paths of their belonging.

The Golden Apple

One of Latouche’s masterpieces, the opera The Golden Apple, with composer Jerome Moross, reimagines the Judgment of Paris story and the Homeric epics through the prism of early-twentieth-century America. Hanya Holm directed, and William and Jean Eckart did the memorable designs. First premiering at the Phoenix Theatre off-Broadway, it moved to Broadway for a short run there. Although more a critical than a popular sucess—it won the Donaldson Award, the Page One Award, and the New York Critics’ Circle Award for the season’s best musical—it remains a favorite among connoisseurs of American musical theater.