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Broadway musicals are one of America's most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation? The Great White Wayis the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years fromShow Boat(1927) toThe Scottsboro Boys(2011). Musicals mirror their time periods and reflect the political and social issues of their day. Warren Hoffman investigates the thematic content of the Broadway musical and considers how musicals work on a structural level, allowing them to simultaneously present and hide their racial agendas in plain view of their audiences. While the musical is informed by the cultural contributions of African Americans and Jewish immigrants, Hoffman argues that ultimately the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States. Presented chronologically,The Great White Wayshows how perceptions of race altered over time and how musicals dealt with those changes. Hoffman focuses first on shows leading up to and comprising the Golden Age of Broadway (1927-1960s), then turns his attention to the revivals and nostalgic vehicles that defined the final quarter of the twentieth century. He offers entirely new and surprising takes on shows from the American musical canon-Show Boat(1927),Oklahoma!(1943),Annie Get Your Gun(1946),The Music Man(1957),West Side Story(1957),A Chorus Line(1975), and42nd Street(1980), among others.New archival research on the creators who produced and wrote these shows, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Edward Kleban, will have theater fans and scholars rethinking forever how they view this popular American entertainment.

PurposeThis study explores the trajectory and challenges faced by a doctoral researcher in her successive attempts to gain access for conducting an ethnography within the production or organisation of a musical theatre performance. Contemplating the four unsuccessful access attempts and the final, triumphant one, we ponder the reasons and impediments for conducting research within this particular context. We operate under the premise that research access possesses a relational characteristic, contingent upon the relationships established between the researcher, the researched, potential informants and the dynamics of the field as a whole.Design/methodology/approachThis is an exploratory and qualitative study, and the empirical research is based on an ethnographic-inspired case study of the organisation/production of a musical theatre play in São Paulo, SP, Brazil, which we have given the pseudonym MusiCom.FindingsThe study contributes by allowing us to affirm that access is intertwined with at least two aspects: the peculiarities of the organisation itself and the characteristics or context in which it exists or is constructed, and the identity of the researcher, developed during the formal access negotiations through the relationships formed between her and the subjects during the dynamics of the field.Originality/valueOur contribution reinforces the numerous challenges posed to researchers when conducting ethnographies and illustrates how access relies not solely on the skills, aptitudes and learning of the researchers.

The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical's evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway-the idea, if not the place-and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.

Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussions centre on the construction of the composed text, but then attention is given to performance and audience response. In doing this, the book challenges the conception of musical theatre as 'only entertainment'.

In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers’s book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged; and both negative and positive contributions of the Catholic Church and the military to operas and concerts produced in the colonies. The author also explores the level of participation of nonwhites in these productions, as well as theatre architecture, décor, repertoire, seating arrangements, and types of audiences. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments, praise, criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers à visage noirs (with blackened faces) present a clear picture of French operatic culture in these colonies. Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of “patriotic theatres,” and their role in fostering support for the king, as well as the impact on subsequent operas produced in the colonies and in the United States.

Unlike collections of essays which focus on a single century or whose authors are drawn from a single discipline, this collection reflects the myriad performance options available to London audiences, offering readers a composite portrait of the music, drama, and dance productions that characterized this rich period. Just as the performing arts were deeply interrelated, the essays presented here, by scholars from a range of fields, engage in dialogue with others in the volume. The opening section examines a famous series of 1701 performances based on the competition between composers to set William Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris to music. The essays in the central section (the 'mainpiece') showcase performers and productions on the London stage from a variety of perspectives, including English 'tastes' in art and music, the use of dance, the depiction of madness and masculinity in both spoken and musical performances, and genres and modes in the context of contemporary criticism and theatrical practice. A brief afterpiece looks at comic pieces in relation to satire, parody and homage. By bringing together work by scholars of music, dance, and drama, this cross-disciplinary collection illuminates the interconnecting strands that shaped a vibrant theatrical world. Kathryn Lowerre is a musicologist and an editor of John Eccles’ collected works (A-R Editions). She has taught at Michigan State University, Colby College, and the University of Michigan, USA. Contents: Introduction. Part I First, Music: Settings of Congreve’s Judgment of Paris: The singers of The Judgment of Paris, Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson; Harmonia Anglicana or why finger failed in ’the price musick’, Robert Rawson; The ’prize musick’ of 1701: a reinvestigation of the staging issue, Matt Robertson. Part II Mainpiece: The Lively Arts of the London Stage: Composing after the Italian manner: the English cantata 1700-1710, Jennifer Cable; Johann Pepusch, aesthetics, and the sister arts, Sean M. Parr; From Scaramouche to Harlequin: dances ’in grotesque characters’ on the London stage, Jennifer Thorp; Music, magic, and morality: stage reform and the pastoral mode, Timothy Neufeldt; Madness ’free from vice’: musical eroticism in the pastoral world of The Fickle Shepherdess, Amanda Eubanks Winkler; ’Let all be husht’: songs in praise of Anne Bracegirdle and Arabella Hunt, Anthony Rooley; Burning and stoic men: mad rants and the performance of passionate pain in the plays of Nathaniel Lee, 1674 to1678, Jennifer Renee Danby; Appreciating Bononcini’s Astianatte (1727): an Italian opera for the London stage, Suzana OgrajenÅ¡ek. Part III Afterpiece: Comedy, Farce, and Competition: The right to write; or, Colley Cibber and The Drury-Lane Monster, Melissa Bloom Bissonette; ’Quotation is the sincerest form of ...’?: signature songs as inter-theatrical references, Kathryn Lowerre. Bibliography; Index.

Alva Belmont and Elsa Maxwell's Melinda and Her Sisters (1916) is a little-known work promoting women's suffrage, which was publicly performed only once in New York City. It was advertised as an operetta, a decision which minimised its overt stylistic and functional similarities to other genres of popular musical theatre from the period, namely, musical comedy and pageantry. Framed through Jeffrey Kallberg's concept of genre as a ‘gesture of labeling’, this article asks what could be gained – artistically, financially and politically – by Belmont and Maxwell's invocation of operetta and by their disavowal of other appropriate genre alternatives. I argue that the strategy reflects their fundraising priorities, the attitudes of their intended audience, and the social, political and artistic climates that constrained women's activities. This case study offers genre as a productive lens through which to interpret gynocentric musical production and performance.

In summarizing Henry Fielding as an author, Robert Hume remarks, \"the first thing that strikes me is that ... he does startingly little work in established forms ... Fielding's debts to earlier writers are unusually minimal ... He innovates, experiments, and takes chances.\" The truth of these assertions is apparent in the well-known circumstances that led Fielding to the novel. Inspired by his dislike of Samuel Richardson's highly popular Pamela (1740), he initially burlesqued the work in Shamela (1741) and then used it as a jumping-off point for a new \"Species of writing\" in Joseph Andrews (1742). However, if that sequence of events is well known, little known is the fact that while working as a dramatist, Fielding was in the process of doing very much the same a decade earlier. Disliking a highly popular theatrical work, he moved from parody of it toward the creation of a new dramatic form. In this case, though, his efforts were cut short as the passage of the Licensing Act forced Fielding off the stage.

Ethnographic perspectives on commercial musical theatre works in the United States invite us to view a show’s composition, and thus their exercise of power, as constituted by written and aural contributions of only one to a few creators. Yet, modern listening habits and popular music positionalities champion multi-composer contributions and collaborations, giving way to the notion of a Playlist Musical. Reflecting on interviews with Broadway creators, this project investigates power structures between creator, audience, artist and aural experiences. Multi-authored musical theatre and subsequent diverse aural anatomies shape discussions around aural associations, compositional methodologies, and remix culture, thereby disrupting musical norms.

This paper examines analytic possibilities afforded by understanding exceptional uses of the subdominant as a hermeneutic signal of the past tense in contemporary Broadway megamusicals. While an emerging consensus in studies of pop music holds that the subdominant chord can comprise a variety of functions beyond its traditional predominant role, to suggest as much already betrays an approach that is steeped in the long shadow of common-practice tonality and the expectations that it entails. Rather than trying to develop a separate syntax from its common-practice antecedents, it is more fruitful to engage with common-practice perspectives in the analysis of certain styles of pop music. Through analysis of examples from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard and Boublil and Schönberg's Miss Saigon , I argue that cases wherein the subdominant receives an unconventional (over-)emphasis might be better understood through the hermeneutics of tonal temporality, rather than through attempts to codify them as an entirely new syntax.