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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2016
Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2016
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Editorial
Authors: Kathryn Edney and Laura MacDonaldAbstractThis editorial provides an overview of, and the history behind, the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre entitled ‘All Kinds of Music is Pouring Out of Me: Living Large and Feeling Big in Musical Theatre Performance and Reception’.
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What a crescendo – not to be missed: Loudness on the musical stage
More LessAbstractRecent research suggests that loudness, as an isolated aural quality, has an enormous ability to affect a listener’s emotional response to a musical performance – but loudness is far more complex than simply cranking the volume up or down. This article traces a history of loudness on the musical stage, exploring some compositional, orchestral, dramaturgical, and technical choices, in addition to a plethora of physical and cognitive phenomena, that contribute to a sense of musical largeness onstage, as well as its psycho-emotional consequences.
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The rock star figure: Authenticity, satire and legacy in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2006)
More LessAbstractThis article argues that the rock star figure trope found in some rock musicals illustrates bigness by mirroring mechanisms of rock star construction and projecting a connection to the musical audience. In doing so, the article discusses the rock star figure as a character trope utilizing theories of mediated ‘personas’ and rock authenticity. It uses the rock star figure in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2006) to explore the extension of an onstage crowd that invites the audience into a vicarious connection with Jackson’s historical legacy. When the rock star figure is modelled on an historical figure, the audience member’s role is extended for them to negotiate their interpretation of the character’s historical legacy within contemporary circumstances. In Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, satire, irony and emulation of emo-rock style are layered onto the rock star figure to implicate the audience in contemporary events.
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‘What’s bigger than a standing ovation?’: Intimacy and spectacle at the Tony Awards
More LessAbstractIn 1963, J. S. Siegels described two opposing methods by which artists could affect their audiences. The first was an aesthetic of grandeur: ‘a principle of force, based on the sheer size and power of the impression’. The second was an aesthetic of intimacy, ‘a principle of attraction: it demands a closeness of association between subject and audience, and necessitates identification and involvement’. Almost half a century later there remains a lingering understanding that intimacy and spectacle are irreconcilable. While small performances are increasingly praised for their ability to offer audiences ‘authentically’ intimate encounters with ‘real’ people, ‘largeness’ is often associated with artificiality, insincerity, the manufactured spectacular. By analysing online comments to a YouTube video of ‘Bigger!’ – the celebration of ‘Big Broadway’ performed by Neil Patrick Harris during the 2013 Tony Awards – this article shows how audiences are able to feel a sense of intimacy while watching big performances, even when these are not experienced ‘live’.
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Broomsticks and barricades: Performance, empowerment, and feeling in Wicked and Les Misérables
By Kelsey BlairAbstractIn this article, I examine the act one finales of two Broadway megamusicals – ‘Defying Gravity’ from Wicked (2003) and ‘One Day More’ from Les Misérables (1987) – to query the relationship between the performance of these numbers and the generation and circulation of feelings of empowerment. As musical theatre scholar Jessica Sternfeld argues, megamusicals offer a performance where ‘emotions run high [and] the tears tend to flow both onstage and in the audience’. Both ‘Defying Gravity’ (where one character in a single song offers a performance of empowerment) and ‘One Day More’ (where an ensemble performs empowerment) have been singled out for their affective impact on audience members and their association with empowerment. Through an analysis of these two numbers, I argue that the numbers’ artistic elements intentionally emphasize the performance of empowerment’s two defining characteristics, power and change, in order to amplify characters’ feelings of empowerment. This, in turn, establishes an affective link between stage and auditorium.
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Too big for Broadway?: The limits of historical and theatrical empathy in Parade and The Scottsboro Boys
By Megan StahlAbstractThis article examines the concept of historical empathy through a case study of two factually based musicals: Parade (1998), about the murder trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank in 1915, and The Scottsboro Boys (2010), a retelling of the 1931 trial in which nine African American teenagers were unjustly convicted of rape. In contrast to theatrical empathy, typically characterized by a reflexive emotional reaction to the situation and feelings of another person, historical empathy requires an intellectual involvement with a piece, a consideration of the particular people, places and circumstances within a broader framework. Both Parade and The Scottsboro Boys challenge their spectators to confront two specific moments of racial bias in America through this kind of empathic perspective taking, destabilizing conventions of musical theatre in their prioritization of history over character. Through an analysis of the productions’ presentation of expansive historical narratives, disconcerting subject matter, and unconventional musical forms, this article explores the tension between theatrical and historical empathy in the musicalization of real-world events.
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‘Only the last song if we let it be’: Dancer in the Dark, The Sound of Music and song and dance as traumatic container
More LessAbstractLars von Trier’s homage to and critique of musical theatre and film in Dancer in the Dark (2000) uses the big musical theatre song and dance number as a place where the unfathomability of traumatic emotion is expressed. Trauma’s unfathomability comes from the inability of the person to process the traumatic event at the moment of its occurrence. It tears apart carefully constructed fantasies that structure reality and expose what usually hides from consciousness. Dancer in the Dark uses the framing device of The Sound of Music, both the original 1959 stage version and the 1965 film, and represents the absolute split between reality and fantasy as traumatized Selma dreams herself into musical numbers. This space of tragedy emerges framed by her dream of performing Maria in a community theatre production of The Sound of Music. The affective promise of musical theatre during ‘real’ rehearsals of The Sound of Music contrasts sharply against the cinematic fantasies rooted in the film The Sound of Music that serve to lift off the burden of traumatic reality. This article will explore the revision to the film musical that von Trier offers with Dancer in the Dark alongside the intertexts of theatre and film versions of The Sound of Music in relationship to trauma, emotion and the psychoanalytic concept of the ‘cure’.
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Embracing excess: The queer feminist power of musical theatre diva roles
More LessAbstractDiva musicals: shows built around roles designed to be played by exceptionally charismatic performers, larger-than-life female characters who, like them or hate them (but almost always love them), drive the action and dominate the stage. Sometimes, as in Hairspray (2002), these diva roles are also what might be termed diva characters, female characters whose identities are built at least in part around their status as performers. However some of the greatest diva roles, like Rose in Gypsy (1959), are not diva characters. Likewise, some diva characters, like Felicia in Memphis (2009), are not allowed to expand into the fullness of a diva role. I explore this distinction in this article in order to analyse how the excess inherent in diva roles allows them to serve as productive sites for queer feminist cultural critique, while arguing that diva characters may reinforce more conservative approaches to gender and sexuality.
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Little steps: The absurdity of A Chorus Line
More LessAbstractBy tracing some of the ways that Michael Bennett’s choreographic dramaturgy telescoped, refracted and collapsed the presumed dimensions of musical theatrical space, identity and emotion, this critical rumination listens for the experimental echoes in A Chorus Line. Explicating how A Chorus Line recasts the audition as an especially absurd dramatic scenario, I submit that Michael Bennett re-choreographs theatrical scale – especially through the musical’s fractal storytelling and composite characterizations – to magnify the scale, scope and impact of every little story told and every little step danced ‘on the line’ of A Chorus Line. I contend that A Chorus Line’s absurdity lay not only in its dramatization of (paraphrasing Martin Esslin) the metaphysical anguish that defines the entertainer’s life but also in how its ‘affective absurdism’ has emerged as one of A Chorus Line’s most enduring, influential yet unexamined legacies for the genre of musical theatre.
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‘A Rainbow in Ev’ry Pot’: Southern excess, racial liberalism, and living large in Harburg and Lane’s Finian’s Rainbow
More LessAbstractWhen Yip Harburg and Burton Lane wrote their 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow, they imagined the piece as a vehicle for a host of social justice concerns. Specifically, Harburg created the fictional place of Missitucky and its inhabitants to directly comment upon race and labour conditions in the American South. Yet despite his good intentions, Harburg’s efforts resulted in a musical full of more ambiguity and anxiety than resolution or happy endings. This article focuses on the character of Senator Bill ‘Billboard’ Rawkins to examine how Harburg’s attempts to use the musical as a platform for social justice resulted in the creation of a larger-than-life character full of contradictions. Through the lens of racial liberalism and critical race theory, this article considers Finian’s Rainbow as an important text that expresses the tensions present in Golden Age-era attempts to harness the performative power of the musical towards social justice ends.
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‘There’s gotta be something better than this’: Challenging the role of big emotion in the transition from speech to song
By Sherrill GowAbstractIn musical theatre, the idea that a character sings because speech cannot capture the heightened emotion of a particular moment or situation is broadly accepted. As a director working regularly in training contexts, I see a fundamental problem with describing song as an expression of large emotions: it encourages students to play a generalized emotional state. I propose that emotion in musical theatre is complex, functioning differently whether dramaturgical, musicological or performative. I draw on scholarly critique of the form, practical approaches from guides to training, and reflect on practice-led research undertaken while directing postgraduate students at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in an abridged, in-house production of Sweet Charity (1966). Rather than adhering to the perception that singing in musical theatre is the outcome of big emotions, we found that focusing on the size of what’s at stake is a useful strategy for students. I suggest that if or when there is an emotional response to music, locating this response as an obstacle can provide something to actively play against and offer an alternative scale of ‘largeness’. Ultimately, however, I question the usefulness of approaching the transition from speech to song – in terms of scale, and advocate challenging such generalizations in musical theatre.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Geoffrey Block, Peter Purin, Hannah Robbins and Robynn J. StilwellAbstractOn Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide, Ethan Mordden (2016) New York: Oxford University Press, 198 pp., ISBN: 9780199394814, h/bk, $27.95
Music Theory Through Musical Theatre: Putting it Together, John Franceschina (2015) New York: Oxford University Press, 452 pp., ISBN: 9780199999552, p/bk, £25.99
American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from ‘Irene’ to ‘Gypsy’, Maya Cantu (2015) Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pp., ISBN: 9781137561459, h/bk, $95.00
Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films, Sheri Chinen Biesen (2014) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 210 pp., ISBN: 97814214-083805, p/bk, $25.00
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