Showing papers in "Studies in Musical Theatre in 2019"

The mental health of musical theatre students in tertiary education: A pilot study

Abstract: This article seeks to illuminate questions of mental health in tertiary-level musical theatre training. Professional performing artists, students of singing, dance and acting, as well as undergraduate university students are all at greater risk of mental health problems than the general population. At the nexus of these domains is the tertiary-level musical theatre student. Through a survey conducted with recent musical theatre graduates in Australia, this study investigated the impact of tertiary-level musical theatre study on the psychological wellbeing of its students, identifying relevant stressors and mitigating factors. The results demonstrate a higher instance of mental health concerns in this cohort than the general population and other tertiary-level groups. Some solutions to mitigate the issue are presented.

Special Issue: Dance in musical theatre

Abstract: This special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre examines the role of dance in musical theatre from a variety of perspectives. Given the scholarly turn from textual analysis to performance analysis, even studying musicals without extensive dance per se can benefit from understanding how movement shapes meaning. The introduction below explains some key themes that have emerged in the six articles that follow. One is the question of genre: what exactly is musical theatre dance? Another is auteurship: what is the role of the choreographer in shaping musicals? A third is technology, which reminds readers that choreography extends beyond human bodies. Finally, the articles all consider questions of methodology and history – how do we best study musical theatre? While there are several other areas of potential inquiry not covered in these six articles, this special issue, the first in the field to focus on dance in musical theatre, aims to help define and cohere an important subfield.

A Brechtian Perspective on London Road: class representations, dialectics and the Gestic character of music from stage to screen

Abstract: This article contributes to discussions about the role of music and song in the audience reception of the “verbatim musical” London Road (Taylor 2013; Zavros 2018). It uses Brechtian philosophy to assess the audience reception, and shows how London Road can illuminate the resonance of Brechtian philosophy with contemporary docu-musical. The first section analyses Brechtian class representations in London Road, with a particular focus on the dialectics and the Gestic role of the music and song. The second section explores how the adaptation from stage to screen further affected the dialectics of the musical and, paradoxically, further served key Brechtian aims. I consider the audience’s reception of both productions. I include my own reception, because I have seen both the stage and screen versions. I focus on two dramaturgical changes in the adaptation from stage to screen: the chronological order of the narrative and the alternation of interview sections and dramatised sections, which resembles the structure of the popular drama-doc genre. Given that reordering and restaging the original verbatim numbers could affect audience reception, I analyse the way the meaning is affected through the Brechtian notions of alienation and the gestic character of music. Throughout, I discuss class representations and relevant dialectical implications.

Allergies, allegiances and authenticity: Bill T. Jones’s choreography for Broadway

Abstract: The critical reception of Bill T. Jones’s choreography for the Broadway stage reinvigorates debates about high and low cultural production and reveals persistent critical biases regarding the requirement of authenticity for non-white artists. Jones’s genre crossing participates in a cultural history of choreographers and dancers who dance(d) across concert and commercial stages; Jones’s work is further complicated by a rubric of authenticity as it contributes to both the mythology of the avant-garde and audience expectations of racialized cultural producers. This article argues that the reception of Jones’s choreography evidences the interdependence between blackness as authenticity and high/low dichotomies of artistic production, particularly those that contour dance reception. I foreground the multiple ways in which the formulation of blackness as authenticity supports Broadway’s commercial, often posited as ‘inauthentic’, aesthetics and aims.

Embodying history: Casting and cultural memory in 1776 and Hamilton

Abstract: Both Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and recent all-female productions of Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 dramatize historical events of the American Revolution with women and people of colour in the roles of white ‘founding fathers’. This article juxtaposes the casting and reception of these history musicals to theorize the ways their non-traditional casting opens up new possibilities for cultural memory of that revered era in US history. Underlying the seemingly progressive embodied performance, the written texts of both 1776 and Hamilton perpetuate founders chic and rehearse traditional versions of the nation’s founding story. Thus they expose but do not subvert the construction of whiteness and masculinity as unmarked categories that have always dominated US culture. The process of upholding the old version while blending it with the new exemplifies the incremental process of cultural memory as it shapes national identity.

Dancing muses, roller disco and the phantasmagoric feminine: Reanimating Terpsichore in the movie musical Xanadu (1980)

Abstract: This article takes as its main focus Robert Greenwald’s cult classic movie musical, Xanadu (1980). Reconsidering Xanadu’s distinction as one of the most critically and commercially panned films produced in Hollywood history, my reading uncovers the ways in which the musical’s campy, neo-mythological iteration of Terpsichore resuscitates key Romantic leitmotifs of the muse as technosensual, airborne woman. Focusing on the roller skate as wearable technology, I trace Xanadu’s muse to its historical predecessors. By extension, I reveal how the moving body’s prosthetic territories (i.e. the roller skate and the pointe shoe) and motion media technologies play a central role in reviving Xanadu’s muse as the ‘phantasmagoric feminine’, forming an enduring point of intersection between dance and musical theatre. I develop and theorize this term ‘phantasmagoric feminine’ within the article in reference to a constellation of representational strategies used in the history of Romantic ballet.

Turns of ‘fate’: Jack Cole, jazz and Bharata Natyam in diasporic translation

Abstract: The musical Kismet opened on Broadway in 1953. This commercially successful play, translated into a film version released two years later, included some of Jack Cole’s most widely viewed and popular choreography, which resulted in the exposure of Bharata Natyam to a mass audience through its incorporation into jazz dance. Cole’s ‘Hindu swing’ continues to confound years later, even as Bharata Natyam has ever-increasing prominence in global theatre. This article considers how the form, in migration from Madras to Manhattan, was (and is) materialized and reinscribed, discussing how exoticism and Orientalism are implicated in the mechanisms of this transmogrification. Exploring Cole’s involvement with ‘Hindu’ dance calls into question a range of issues related to the parallel histories of musical theatre dance in the mid-twentieth century, and classical Indian dance in the period of transition from colonial possession to postcolonial independence. We investigate the ways in which Indian culture in diaspora has been translated in our practice, and the ways in which the reception of dance reflects an ‘invisibilization’ of ‘foreign’ cultural practice in American popular culture. Collaborating on presenting our juxtaposed experience brings embodied reflection into dialogue with dance scholarship, while also exploring the intersection of these distinct and seemingly discrete dance practices.

Sweeping gestures: Alberto Alonso and the revolutionary musical in Cuba

Abstract: This article examines Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso and his dance contributions to Cuban musical theatre from the 1940s through the early 1960s. The analysis integrates the histories of Alonso’s training, performance career and choreographic output with developments in Cuban musical theatre before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In particular, it focuses on Alonso’s 1964 ballet El Solar (The Slum), which became a 1965 musical film Un día en el solar (A Day in the Slum) and live musical Mi Solar (My Slum). I argue that Alonso subtly questioned officialdom with his musical choreography that showed revolutionary movements springing not from the state but from Cuban citizens of different racial backgrounds as they enacted the chores and delights of life. Moreover, Alonso’s work challenged cultural hierarchies, which held so-called high art forms like ballet above popular dance, by emphasizing the endless creativity of Cubans moving through their everyday.

Climb High : Sondheim at the gateway to his career

Abstract: Sondheim has long identified his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, as one of the most influential figures in his life, both personally and creatively. In one interview, he called Hammerstein ‘a surrogate father’ and disclosed that ‘[h]e taught me how to structure a song, what a character was, what a scene was; he taught me how to tell a story, how not to tell a story, how to make stage directions practical’. The vehicle for this training was a four-part project: Hammerstein challenged the young Sondheim to write four musicals with specific criteria. The first three of these were abandoned before completion but Sondheim wrote a full script, music and lyrics for Climb High, working on the project from 1950 to 1953 with the obvious hope of having Hammerstein produce it on the stage (a frustrated ambition). Yet very little has been written about the work and Sondheim himself has been at pains to downplay its importance in his overall output. In this article, I exploit archival documents from Sondheim’s papers at Madison, Wisconsin to shed new light on the process of writing the piece, as well as its many anticipations of Sondheim’s mature work. In this way, I will place Climb High in the context of Sondheim’s creative development: a flawed but fascinating document of a writer at the gateway to his professional career.

‘Something Bad [was] Happening’: Falsettos as an historical record of the AIDS epidemic

Abstract: This article argues for the importance of an often-overlooked aspect of Falsettos: the role of Dr Charlotte, a character whose name is never spoken in performance and who is defined by her professional and sexual identities. On the surface, her presence facilitates plot development by introducing discussion of an unknown and fatal illness in the final quarter of the two-act evening. But her identities as a woman, a lesbian and a doctor – and the signification of each – unlock largely unspoken histories, reflecting and transforming broader histories of the AIDS epidemic.

‘The first black battalion’: Casting in Hamilton

Abstract: This article places the casting practices in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton in a trajectory of casting practices utilized by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, and highlights the difficulty of pinpointing which particular casting practice is utilized in Hamilton. It also places the Hamilton casting concept in conversation with August Wilson’s famous arguments about colour-blind casting, and considers how these conversations have changed. It considers the criticisms that have arisen in response to the casting of Hamilton. Finally, the article examines the City Center’s Encores! production of 1776 in 2016, which was produced to be ‘in the style of Hamilton’ but argues that the production of 1776 was not particularly successful at recreating the Hamilton-style casting. In the end, the article questions if there is such a thing as a successful production of 1776 with Hamilton-style casting.

Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation

Abstract: This article aims to amplify disability theory’s impact in performance studies by generating a framework for understanding disability representation in musical theatre. Taking the original and revival Broadway productions of Side Show (1997, 2014) as a case study, I articulate how the musical simulates disability through a ‘choreography of conjoinment’ that relies on the exceptional able-bodiedness of the actors playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Using disability as a category of analysis reveals how disabled bodies are made to be maximally productive iterations of themselves in musicals. To support this claim, I track the shift from the 1997 production’s co-construction of disability by the actors and audience, which replicates the social model of disability, to the 2014 revival’s grounding in a diagnostic realism typical of disability’s medical model. Side Show’s trajectory generates possibilities for considering the musical as an archive for disability representation and knowledge, bioethical inquiry, and artistic innovation.

Soft Power: Hwang and Tesori’s reappropriation of The King and I in representing twenty-first-century diplomacy and the dystopic reality of contemporary America

Abstract: This article reviews David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s Soft Power. In this ‘play with a musical’, Hwang and Tesori revisit Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I to critique its Asian stereotypes. The genre-bending form is, however, much more than a simple retelling of a flawed musical of the past. As the article demonstrates, the writers question China’s attempts at public diplomacy and its efforts to acquire soft power vis a vis its dismal human rights records. The play does so by not merely reversing the narrative of The King and I but by offering a nuanced take on twenty-first-century politics. In doing so, the writers create a scathing portrayal of American reality set against a backdrop of contemporary events.

Kaspar Holten’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger: A test of ‘fidelity’

Abstract: Kaspar Holten’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger (completed in 1924) is an important realization of this complex and challenging opera. It was premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2015; a DVD recording of the London performances makes a detailed study of the production possible. This article is concerned with the issue of what constitutes fidelity in a director’s approach. It begins by discussing Szymanowski’s mise en scène, and outlines the main themes of King Roger and its relationship to Euripides’ Bacchae; then it engages with Holten’s interpretation, and the fascinating designs by Steffen Aarfing, which enable his vision to be realized. The lead characters – Roger and his Queen, Roxana – are both discussed with reference to how Holten illuminates Szymanowski’s drama and its music. His production raises fundamental questions about fidelity and innovation which have dominated critical discussion of many modernist and post-modernist productions not just of opera, but of ‘classics’ of the spoken theatre as well; these questions are posed in particular by Holten’s decision that Roxana should remain with Roger until the end of the opera, in violation of Szymanowski’s scenario.

Whitewashed Usnavi: Race, power and representation in In the Heights

Abstract: This article focuses on questions of race, power and representation in regional productions of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ 2008 Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. While issues of representation in In the Heights did not begin in 2016, this article uses the Porchlight Music Theatre production as a point of departure to analyse how the musical became a contentious performance text in the post-Hamilton era. This study focuses on how theatre companies that have not traditionally produced Latinx stories have used In the Heights as an entry-point into the Latinx community and as a way to capitalize from the unprecedented success of Miranda’s Hamilton.

‘Don’t feed the plants!’: Monstrous normativity and disidentification in Little Shop of Horrors

Abstract: The 1982 camp horror musical Little Shop of Horrors tells the story of a meek little flower shop attendant named Seymour, who comes across a novelty carnivorous plant that eats human blood. The talking plant preys on Seymour’s infatuation with his beautiful co-worker Audrey to radicalize him into feeding the plant ‘fresh’ bodies. Building on the work of theatre scholar Michael Chemers, who asserts that stage monsters represent larger social and political anxieties of their time, this article identifies Seymour, the normal, white, heterosexual everyman, as the real ‘monster’ of the musical. Thus, the musical’s creators, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, exposed the monstrousness of normativity at the poignant moment in American culture, during the early years of the conservative Reagan administration. This article uses José Muñoz’s theory of ‘disidentification’, a strategy employed by marginalized people working ‘on and against dominant ideology’ to analyse the creators’ didactic and subversive strategy.