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- Volume 3, Issue 3, 2009
Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2009
Volume 3, Issue 3, 2009
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From That's Entertainment! to That's Entertainment? globalization and the consumption of the Hollywood musical in Germany and Austria
By Olaf JubinThe media world today is dominated by multinational media operations, most of them with headquarters in the United States of America. How does the fact that most decisions regarding the advertising and preparation of products for the international market are made in the United States and not in the respective target countries influence the overseas reception of the film musical one of the most American of movie genres? The essay approaches this question by looking at the way Hollywood musicals have been and still are offered for consumption in the German-speaking film market, which originally had almost no acquaintance with the aesthetics and stars of the dream factory's All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! movies. Through examples taken from several decades of dubbing, subtitling and cutting film musicals, the article analyses how the attempts of US film distributors to raise their profile and increase their market share have drastically changed the meaning of certain film musicals and affected the reception by both the general public and film experts of the genre and some of its stars, such as Judy Garland and Doris Day. Despite the opportunity to present original as well as uncut or extended versions the advent of the DVD has done nothing to change German and Austrian (mis)conceptions of the Hollywood musical as US film companies still tend to treat foreign audiences as a mere extension of the home market.
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My School Rocks! Dancing Disney's High School Musical in India
More LessHigh School Musical, the 2006 Disney Channel original movie, was a surprise hit in the United States, but its Bollywood-style format and sanitized depiction of American high school life contributed to its popularity in India as well. The Disney Channel, which entered the growing Indian market for children's television in 2004, has been a leader in developing strategies for localization. Many standard strategies are visible in the marketing of High School Musical, including dubbing content into local languages, creating content locally or drawing on local themes, and running local promotions and competitions. The My School Rocks dance competition, run in conjunction with the release of High School Musical, added creative and performance components to the equation that encouraged Indian kids to actively alter and interpret the film's musical numbers, thus making them relevant to their particular cultural experiences. Additionally, My School Rocks took advantage of the film's musical format to exploit similarities with the popular existing Bollywood industry, by both imitating popular performance practices inspired by Bollywood song-and-dance sequences and enlisting well-known Bollywood choreographers to serve as judges. The promotion involved schools, through the existing structure of interschool dance competitions, and local communities, through the voting that took place on the Disney India website. Through this Asia-specific competition, Disney encouraged children to take ownership of the film's content by creating and performing original dances to the songs, thus developing hybrid and bilingual choreographies that function as signifiers of class-based urban Indian cosmopolitanism.
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Introduction to Bruce Kirle Memorial Panel debut papers in music-theatre-dance
By Stacy WolfIn 2007, the distinguished scholar of musical theatre, Bruce Kirle, passed away unexpectedly. In tribute to his contribution to this field of scholarship, the Music-Theatre-Dance focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) established a competition for new scholars researching in the field. The three prize-winning entries to the inaugural season of this competition were presented as conference papers at the 2009 ATHE conference in New York, and appear as written articles on the following pages of Studies in Musical Theatre. Stacy Wolf, chair of that inaugural ATHE panel, and respondent to the papers, introduces the papers in this short address.
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Establishing (and re-establishing) a sense of place: musical orientation in The Sound of Music
More LessIn the 1965 film of The Sound of Music, concepts of space and place are embedded not only in the visuals, but also in Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical score. Music itself comes to constitute a home, or alternative sense of place, for the von Trapp family. Yi-Fu Tuan's notions of the familiarity of place form the basis for a reading of this musical film: our world begins as undifferentiated space, which gradually becomes place through processes of repetition. In the genre of musical theatre, multiple levels of musical form provide a sense of orientation or place to the abstract space opened up by music: sites of internal musical repetition as well as sung and orchestral reprises. In The Sound of Music, concepts of place are performative, as the von Trapp family continually establishes and re-establishes a sense of place (a nuclear family and value system) through processes of musical reiteration.
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I had a dream: Rose's Turn, musical theatre and the star effigy
More LessI had a dream analyses the climactic Rose's Turn number, from Gypsy, in the experience of live performance. Applying Joseph Roach's concept of the celebrity effigy and Scott McMillin's theorization of the musical's dual temporality, Fitzgerald argues that, first, the book musical presents a fictive world in which non-celebrities rise to the level of effigies and, second, that Rose's Turn is Momma Rose's attempt to turn that fiction into reality by superseding the celebrity presence of the actress playing her.
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A substitute for love: the performance of sex in Spring Awakening
More LessIn Words and Music, Lehman Engel cites romance as a primary need of the musical, claiming that the genre requires romantic love as a narrative modus operandi. By his charge, love and romance drive plot and give characters a reason to sing. Sex, on the other hand, curtails what romance encourages and is therefore less requisite. Despite Engel's misgivings, several notable musicals have used song and dance to discuss or depict sex acts between adults. Representations of teenage sexuality, however, have been more infrequent and significantly more veiled. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's Spring Awakening is the first musical to offer direct representations of adolescent sexuality. This study examines the ways in which Spring Awakening uses both song and dance to represent and deploy teenage sexuality. Through its unique aural and visual vocabulary, Spring Awakening allows its adolescent characters to sing and dance their sexual desire, and in effect perform sex.
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The out-of-town tryout goes back to school
By Tracey MooreThis article proposes that the high costs of out-of-town tryouts and the proliferation of Internet gossip and critique have created a need for a new approach to musical theatre development. A brief history of out-of-town tryouts is followed by an in-depth look at how unpublished musicals are currently being developed in writing workshops and at universities. The author makes the case that the university setting provides a low-cost, low-publicity environment for musical theatre writers to develop new works, and that there are innumerable benefits to the schools and the students who participate in these events.
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Reviews
Authors: Ben Macpherson, Peter Purin, Dominic Symonds and Martin CoslettStrike Up The Band: A New History of Musical Theatre, Scott Miller, (2007) Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann Drama, vii + 264 pp., ISBN-13 9780325006420 (pbk), US$23.95
The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations, Steven Suskin, (2009) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 664 pp., ISBN 9780195309478 (hbk), 31.99
The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, Amy Asch (ed.), (2008) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, xxiv + 422 pp., ISBN-13 9780375413582 (hbk), US$65.00
Sonic Mediations: Body Sound Technology, Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns (eds), (2008) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 275 pp., ISBN-10 1847188397; ISBN-13 9781847188397 (hbk), 39.99 or $59.99
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