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- Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016
Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016
Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016
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Gypsy, June, and the lawyers: Legal negotiation as collaboration
More LessAbstractUsing the 1959 musical Gypsy as a case study, this article attempts to broaden the current understanding of collaboration to include non-creative actors. Drawing on a variety of archival sources including legal documents, date books, and private letters, the study reveals the extent that Gypsy Rose Lee’s sister June Havoc intervened during the creation of the show and the resultant strife between the creative and management/legal teams. These documents reveal the important role producers and lawyers play in the creative process and why, from Havoc’s perspective, legal action was the only recourse available to influence the content of a show being made by men she perceived as indifferent to her own story.
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‘We are all one Grizabella’: Prostitution, Theology and the cult of Cats in Japan
More LessAbstractCats has been extraordinarily successful in Japan since its first performance in Tokyo in 1983. Although the Japanese have responded warmly to the purely entertaining aspects of the musical, from the beginning they have been encouraged to find a deep meaning in it, too. This meaning is centred on Grizabella, called an ‘old prostitute’ in the Japanese translation. This article reviews the evidence for identifying Grizabella as a prostitute, the way this has only slightly registered in western criticism, the cultural factors which may have affected her explicit identification as a prostitute in Japan, and the elaborate interpretative apparatus Japanese critics have erected around the cat elevated to the status of a ‘sacred prostitute’ by Masayuki Ikeda, Japan’s most influential commentator on Cats. In conclusion, it is suggested that this study shows how even carefully ‘cloned’ musicals can develop distinctly different meanings despite the systems of controls designed to produce uniformity.
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Musicals as cultural collisions: Introduction to the 2016 ATHE Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging scholars papers in music theatre/dance
More LessAbstractEach year the Music Theater and Dance Focus Group of the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) sponsors the Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging Scholars panel at its annual conference, held this year in Chicago. The winning panellists present their work at the conference before revising their papers for publication in Studies in Musical Theatre. This year’s panellists Elyse Singer, Arianne Johnson Quinn and Hyewon Kim present their articles on the following pages, introduced in this short essay by the ATHE conference’s respondent, Stuart J. Hecht. In his essay, Hecht considers how American musicals initially featured escapist spectacle that often meant placing action in foreign settings, apart from everyday experience. Composers and lyricists responded by writing songs that incorporated strands of other nations and cultures but which did not alienate American playgoers’ expected musical norms. Many leading composers and the New York audience were assimilated children of immigrants, so productions of such operettas offered reassuring nostalgia along with escapist plots. Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed this dynamic in their productions, assigning larger issues to exotic locales, preaching liberal values of social justice. They and their peers felt comfortable creating foreign settings, places they themselves might never have known, for the entertainment and enlightenment of New York playgoers. In the years following the Second World War American musicals found currency touring England and then beyond, signalling European acceptance of American culture and political might. By century’s end the exportation of culture for prestige was increasingly replaced by American culture as commodity, alongside sales of goods. Yet American musicals have always embodied democracy, as such shows promote diversity and hope. Hence the global exportation of musicals promotes American values as much as American merchandise. The article goes on to introduce the articles of our three debut scholars, placing their essays within this larger historical and cultural context.
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Flesh-coloured tights in space: Intersections of spectacular corporeality and visuality in The Seven Sisters
By Elyse SingerAbstractThis article examines the intersections between female performing bodies and stage spectacle in The Seven Sisters, Laura Keene’s 1860 musical extravaganza. In its consideration of patriotic tableaux, precision dance numbers, and the grand transformation scene, the essay suggests relationships between visuality, corporeality and aesthetics at a significant turning point in the development of American popular culture that overlapped with the Civil War. The article argues that contemporary media theories may provide a lens for looking at different historical body-to-spatial models featuring nascent American chorus girls, and locates moments of affect and subjectivity on the part of the performers.
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‘There but for you go I’: Interpreting the signifying world of Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon
More LessAbstractIn 1949, British theatre critic Phil Hanna hailed Lerner and Loewe’s newly imported Brigadoon as a ‘rule-breaking’ production, referring to the innovative elements such as the invisible chorus and the incorporation of traditional Scottish music and dance. This production, which was re-cast in London with Scottish dancers and only the three American leads, faced constant comparisons to the musical, dramatic and dance styles of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s wildly successful imported production of Oklahoma! (1947). This article will examine the imported London production of Brigadoon through the lens of its British reception in order to demonstrate the show’s impact in postwar Britain and explore the distinctive unity of Lerner and Loewe’s musical and dramatic language. Further, it will explore the ways in which the Scottish musical elements, or signifiers, found in Brigadoon allowed British audiences to interpret the work as being simultaneously ‘Scottish’ and as a greater reflection of a postwar British cultural identity.
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Celebrating heteroglossic hybridity: Ready-to-assemble Broadway-style musicals in South Korea
By Hyewon KimAbstractBritish and American musical theatre has made a major contribution to the globalization of musical theatre at large, and the way in which it has been remounted and circulated in international productions has recently caught the attention of scholars. This has been particularly the case when ready-to-assemble replica Broadway-style productions have been remounted. In these productions, shows have been duplicated, from stage props and blocking to the intonation of lines, rather than having their material adapted by taking into consideration the different cultures, historical contexts and audiences. The only two elements in international remountings that are not duplicated are the performers and language; accordingly, translation of the source language into the local language becomes the cardinal factor in local audience reception. This article investigates Korean remountings of the West-End-originated, Broadway-style The Phantom of the Opera (2001), using this as a case study to illuminate a larger and multivocal debate on the remounting of international productions of Broadway-style musicals. It is my attempt to further strengthen Bruce Kirle’s emphasis on the incompleteness of theatrical texts by expanding Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on heteroglossia and creative understanding to musical theatre, in order to argue that these two concepts serve as powerful indicators of the translation of international Broadway-style musical remountings.
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Relocating Iphigénie en Tauride
More LessAbstractThis article reflects upon the director’s experience of directing Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride with a student opera company (Byre Opera) in June 2015, and in particular, insights gained about the topical issues raised by this work. Discussion of this particular production is laid alongside reviews of other, professional productions of this piece in the same year, which reveal a range of possible reactions to the potential for Gluck’s composition to be read as reflecting contemporary anxieties and concerns. The article engages with an earlier essay by Michael Ewans in SMT 9:2, 2015, developing and qualifying suggestions made by Ewans about the classical framing of Gluck’s opera to make the work relatable for modern audiences. It concludes that the classical location is used to position a very specific and not necessarily trans-historical set of topical and political resonances; this places a gap between mimetic representation and reality that should be carefully considered by any company hoping to produce the work using a contemporary realist staging.
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Performance Reviews
Authors: Rebecca Holley and Sanne ThierensAbstractBRIGHT STAR, BOOK BY STEVE MARTIN, LYRICS BY EDIE BRICKELL, MUSIC BY EDIE BRICKELL AND STEVE MARTIN, DIRECTED BY WALTER BOBBIE Cort Theatre, New York, 31 March 2016
FUNNY GIRL, BOOK BY ISOBEL LENNART, MUSIC BY JULE STYNE, LYRICS BY BOB MERRILL, DIRECTED BY MICHAEL MAYER Savoy Theatre, London, July 2016
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Book Reviews
Authors: David Patmore, Michael G. Garber and Ray MillerAbstractTHE BUSINESS OF OPERA, ANASTASIA BELINA-JOHNSON AND DEREK B. SCOTT (2015) Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, Vermont, USA: Ashgate. 218 pp., ISBN 978 1472429452, h/bk, £60
IRVING BERLIN’S AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER, JEFFREY MAGEE (2012) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 328 pp., Broadway Legacies Series, ISBN: 978 0 19 539 826 7, h/bk, $35.00
MARC BLITZSTEIN: HIS LIFE, HIS WORK, HIS WORLD, HOWARD POLLACK (2012) New York: Oxford University Press, 618 pp., ISBN: 9780199791590, h/bk, $39.95
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