Epilogue

On any given Wednesday morning seven years ago, my routine regularly took me down Main Street in Pennington, New Jersey, driving to the grocery store. I would pass the St. James Roman Catholic Church, Vito’s Pizza, and Kathy’s Korner Salon. A hand-painted sign planted by the sidewalk on the corner of Main and Route 31 announcing an event would momentarily catch my eye, but I wouldn’t pay any attention. I would get to the grocery store, park, do my shopping, and on my way out, see a bunch of fliers on the community bulletin board for various activities, services offered, rooms for rent, and dogs to adopt. I would pick up a copy of ...

Dinner Theatres

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.

Musical Theatre at Girls’ Jewish Summer Camps

In the summer musicals take place in the tiny, insular, homogenous culture of girls’ non-Orthodox Jewish summer camps in Maine. Each of these summer camps was founded by Jewish women—all early twentieth-century progressive educators—for socioeconomically privileged Jewish girls. Since the early 1900s, girls who attend the summer camps have participated in theatre as a required activity alongside swimming, volleyball, and arts and crafts, so musical theatre shapes their experiences in profound ways. This chapter visits four of these summer camps in the same state where Stephen Sondheim spent many summers at Androscoggin, an all-boys’ Jewish summer camp. Over the course of their years at camp, most girls perform in seven musicals and see forty more. In this consciously created community, the excitement, pressure, and camaraderie of musical theatre production creates an even more intense bubble in its midst.

Community Theatre

2Many people who do high school musicals return to theatre as adults, maybe after college or settling into working life, in community theatre. Community theatres started in the United States in the early twentieth century to engage citizens in their towns, promote patriotism, and instill a sense of civic pride through performance. The label now applies to the thousands of amateur groups across the country that are typically run by a few paid staff but mostly operate on volunteer labor, including a twelve-group consortium, the Kelsey Theatre in New Jersey. These well-established companies cast intergenerationally, sometimes with six-year-old children and seventy-year-old adults in the same show. They proudly take on the label “community theatre,” and renew themselves through families and through webs of connections that spread to local high schools, community colleges, summer day camps, and other community theatres in the region. This chapter follows a year in the life of this community theatre, focusing on the activities of the three directors with different working styles. It describes auditions, rehearsals, and performances, and includes many voices of people who elect to spend their time after school and after work making musical theatre, which some have been doing their whole lives. The chapter discusses the themes of community, professionalism versus the amateur, and leisure in the context of community theatre.

The Junior Theatre Festival and Broadway Junior

Since 2003, more than four thousand middle school–aged children and their teachers and directors have gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, each January during Martin Luther King Jr. weekend to celebrate musical theatre at the Junior Theatre Festival (JTF). Produced by iTheatrics (the company that adapts Broadway musicals for kids), Playbill, and Music Theatre International, the convention features ninety school or community groups who present a fifteen-minute segment from a show that they rehearsed or performed at home for professional artist adjudicators’ immediate feedback. The weekend also includes performance workshops for kids and producing workshops for adults, a showcase of musical numbers from new shows, and an elaborate distribution of awards, during which almost every group is publicly recognized. Fueled by progressive language and democratic affirmations, JTF is unabashedly profit-driven, since MTI licenses the very repertoire of musicals that the children perform. The kids who attend JTF find affirmation and community in an intense, emotion-filled weekend that celebrates musical theatre. JTF combines crass commercialism and heartfelt outreach in a seamless, exuberant event.

Disney Goes to School

This chapter examines the various ways that the Disney Theatrical Group (DTG), a unit within the Walt Disney Company, engages with local musical theatre for elementary and middle school children. DTG’s involvement in the local musical theatre scene includes the creation of kid-friendly versions of shows with supplementary materials and, since 2011, an ambitious philanthropic program to support musical theatre production in underserved public elementary schools. After New York City, DTG established its first Disney Musicals in Schools Program in Nashville, Tennessee. This chapter visits schools and includes interviews with teachers and kids in Nashville, as well as the staff of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, which oversees the program. Schools across a range of racial and socioeconomic communities produce Disney musicals like The Little Mermaid JR. and Aladdin JR. By loosening its famously tight grip on its product and allowing schools to produce their shows legally, Disney has at once increased revenue and become an instigator of social change and youth empowerment through musical theatre. DTG president Thomas Schumacher said that Disney’s music “is the new American songbook . . . We are this new era of Broadway.” Disney’s vision accommodates a populist agenda as they balance profit and corporate interests with philanthropy and grassroots artistic activism.

Backstage Divas

Many towns in the United States play host to afterschool musical theatre programs for children. Typically, these programs are directed by women who become well known in their communities and powerful figures in the lives of the children they teach. This chapter calls this figure a “backstage diva.” She is the female musical theatre director who runs afterschool and summer pay-to-play programs, teaching kids dance and theatre by directing them in several shows a year. This familiar figure is a disciplined leader and powerful mentor who, though invisible in theatre history, teaches musical theatre–obsessed kids to sing and dance and act and shapes them into triple-threat performers. This chapter begin with a brief biography of a backstage diva, including how she built her business. It then offers a history of musical theatre studios in the United States. The bulk of the chapter follows the working process of a backstage diva in northern California from auditions through rehearsals and performance. Finally, it explains her legacy and what kids say they learned from her.

The Sound of Music at Outdoor Summer Musical Theatres

This chapter visits three large, unique, outdoor venues for musical theatre in the summer: the Mountain Play in Mill Valley, California, the Zilker Summer Musical in Austin, Texas, and the Open Air Theatre at Washington Crossing, New Jersey, focusing on each theatre’s production of The Sound of Music. The Mountain Play has produced of one show each spring since 1913 in a 3,750-seat amphitheatre on the top of Mt. Tamalpais. The Zilker Summer Musical, established by the local recreation department in 1959, offers an annual free musical on a hillside that attracts thousands of spectators, many of whom would not otherwise see a play. The Open Air Theatre, which opened in 1964, presents thirteen shows each summer to more than eighteen thousand spectators. Each one of these venues, all located in old and well-established state parks, also boasts a complex history in relation to state and local government. Coincidentally, these three organizations produced The Sound of Music in successive years—the perfect show for an outdoor theatre. When Maria sings, “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” it was true: The hills are alive with the sound of music, though not actually the Austrian mountains where the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is set.

High School Musicals and Into the Woods

Virtually every high school in the country—more than 26,000—hosts a theatre program and produces at least one play and/or musical a year. The Educational Theatre Association’s annual survey found that more than 37,000 high school productions took place in 2017–2018, with more than 46 million people in the audience. The chapter surveys the issues relevant to high school musicals and teachers’ engagement with the local community. Beauty and the Beast, The Addams Family, and The Little Mermaid were the most frequently produced high school musicals that year, but another, very different kind of show ranked fourth: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods. In part because its ensemble cast offers excellent performance opportunities for girls, this musically challenging and emotionally complex show sees thousands of high school productions each year. This chapter visits three public high schools in the Midwest—one small school in rural southwestern Minnesota, one tiny school in rural southern Ohio, and one medium-sized school close to Ann Arbor, Michigan—each with different racial and socioeconomic demographics and community issues. The chapter describes their dress rehearsals and performances and focuses on nine students—three at each school—who have different relationships to musical theatre onstage or backstage. The chapter documents why the students wanted to participate in the musical, what they experienced, and how their school and their community were changed because of it.

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.