The Trans/national Cultural Economy of Latin American Film Musicals (1930s-50s)

This essay traces the tensions between national imaginaries and transnational global media flows of tango, samba, and ranchera film musicals, taking into account their cross-media and intercultural configurations as well as interconnections between these three “transgenres.” From a comparative perspective and by means of a “histoire croisée,” or crisscrossing history, it touches upon developments in early Latin American sound film, Hollywood’s Spanishlanguage films and its Pan-Americanism, Spain’s cinematic Hispanoamericanismo, and Pan-Latin American film productions. The essay makes a case for the multifaceted trans/national cultural economy of the tango, samba, and ranchera film musical productions during their main phase, in the 1930s and 40s.

From Camelot to Spamalot

This book explores musicalizations of Arthurian legend as filtered through specific tellings by Mark Twain, T. H. White, and Monty Python. For centuries, Arthurian legend with its tales of Camelot, romance, and chivalry has captured imaginations throughout Europe and the Americas. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, musical versions of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have abounded in the United States, shaping the legend for American audiences through song. The ever-shifting, age-old tale of King Arthur and his world is one which thrives on adaptation for its survival. New generations tell the story in their own ways, updating or enhancing the relevance for a fresh audience. Taking a case-study approach, this work foregrounds the role of music in selected Arthurian adaptations, examining six stage and film musicals. It considers how musical versions in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture interpret the legend of King Arthur, contending that music guides the audience to understand this well-known tale and its characters in new and unexpected ways. All of the productions considered include an overtly modern perspective on the legend, intruding and even commenting on the tale of King Arthur. Shifting from an idealistic utopia to a silly place, the myriad notions of Camelot offer a look at the importance of myth in American popular culture.

Leitmotivik in der Filmmusik

The influence of film music on the perception and experience of the visual worlds shown in a film can hardly be overestimated. But how can this effect, which film musicals leitmotifs exerts on both visual attention and emotional experience during multimodal film reception, be researched? To what extent do they direct visual attention, influence the emotional evaluation of film scenes and physiological emotional responses? In individual case studies of three film excerpts from commercial feature films, Henning Albrecht makes this complex interaction tangible and comprehensible in elaborate AOI analyses ("areas of interest") using modern eye-tracking methods.

Narrative and Number in Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade

The backstage film musical was a successful genre of the brief ‘Pre-Code’ era of American film history (1929-1934), in which audiences witnessed the inner workings of a theatre studio and watched the creation and performance of a musical production unfold. This essay focusses on one of these film musicals, Footlight Parade, and examines its key musical numbers: ‘Honeymoon Hotel’, ‘By a Waterfall’ and ‘Shanghai Lil’. Using these examples, the article analyses the relationship between musical number and film narrative, while relating the film to wider issues surrounding musicals in the ‘Pre-Code’ era and beyond.

Sequins and Songs on the Small Screen

By the late sixties, television was America’s medium and, just as it had with stage and film musicals in the decades prior, it embraced the increasingly legitimized musical style of Vegas. Whether through Mitzi Gaynor’s string of television specials; the repackaging of Sonny and Cher’s Vegas shtick, glitz, and musical tributes; or The Carol Burnett Show’s Bob Mackie–clad musical extravaganzas, Vegas/Broadway hybrids filled the small screen. This fusion of old-school and, to a lesser degree, contemporary musicals with the popularized pizzazz and glamour of Vegas brought the television musical comfortably in line with the cheeky sexiness of 1970s network programming. Highlighting the ongoing symbiosis among various musical platforms, this chapter explores the rise of a hybridized Broadway-Vegas style on television, or what the author terms “BroadVegas,” in the context of changing generic norms across stages and screens, heightened inter-network competition and branding, and emergent visual, generic, and promotional styles.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism

Medievalism—broadly construed as the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages—has left a powerful mark in both art music and popular music culture of the past two centuries. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism provides a snapshot of the growing field of medievalism in music by bringing together international scholars to explore a wide variety of past and present genres in which medievalism is present. The handbook is organized into six sections and takes up musical topics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, in genres as far reaching as opera, orchestral music, film, musicals, heavy metal, folk rock, and video games.

Introduction

Local musical theatre from high schools to community theatres, from summer camps to dinner theatres, is a thriving art form in the United States. Musical theatre provides a creative outlet, a way to make friends and build community, and a route to identity formation. Local musical theatre is a folk practice that is handed down from one generation to the next. The context of this book is the 2010s, a decade when musical theatre came into new visibility in the United States, building on the success of the television series Glee, reality performance competition shows, live televised musicals, and successful film musicals. Though Broadway is a global brand, musical theatre is a local phenomenon, embedded in its community and in conversation with local issues. Technology enables musical theatre through the proliferation of YouTube clips and online sites but is also anathema to it, as musical theatre is a face-to-face, live practice for both creators and audiences. Local musical theatre production both depends on and feeds the global licensing industry. Local musical theatre blurs the line between amateur and professional, as many people do musicals solely for fun and yet take their activity as seriously as work. The book relies on a feminist, empathetic ethnographic method, which incorporates participant-observation and interviews as well as an open exchange about how subjects are represented. The structure of the book is a journey across America to visit many sites and types of musical theatre production.

‘I’m Once Again the Previous Me’

This chapter on Barbra Streisand’s first three film musicals considers how her star text affects the adaptation of the three Broadway musicals on which they are based. Although Streisand starred in Funny Girl on the stage, the screen version made significant changes to the musical, relating the story as a flashback so that it could be telescoped through her perspective. Most of the other characters’ songs were cut, a ploy that was also used in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever to emphasize Streisand as the star. In both films, as well as in Hello, Dolly!, Streisand was cast opposite men with weak singing voices, empowering her performance musically in each case. A good example of how this works is in the title song of On a Clear Day, where Yves Montand performs the number complete with a simple orchestration and staging, followed by Streisand’s much grander performance. Meanwhile, in Dolly! it was necessary to make changes to the title character in order to draw attention away from the fact that Streisand was much too young for the role; thus she is depicted as a general busybody in ‘Just Leave Everything to Me,’ which replaced ‘I Put My Hand In,’ which focuses on Dolly as a matchmaker.