Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017

The device of using sung letters as a means to collapse time and space in Broadway musicals has come into increasing prominence in recent years, long after its first important emergence on the 1960s Broadway stage and following intermittent use during the decades since. Choosing from many examples of the device, this article explores its appearances in She Loves Me (1963), 1776 (1969), Passion (1994), Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 (2012, 2013 and 2016), Hamilton (2015) and Dear Evan Hansen (2015 and 2016). The article also considers sung letters and other manipulations of temporality in Sondheim’s Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Assassins, and relates the device to the recent symbiosis between Broadway and film, to the theatre’s need for dramatic intensifiers, and to the expression of individual agency. Its progress may also be sketched, in broad strokes, as occurring somewhere between ‘Telephone Hour’ in Bye Bye Birdie (1960) and the telephone’s latter-day equivalent, the Internet-based social media that govern the central drama of Dear Evan Hansen and define the receptive milieu of recent Broadway more generally.

Between 1930 and 1942, Oscar Hammerstein II was not the failure that he and others claimed. In print and interviews, Hammerstein represented this as a period when his works were rejected by audiences and critics, and biographers have followed his lead. Countering that subject-imposed viewpoint, this article examines newly digitized primary sources, audience reception and a more recent generation of criticism to greatly modify previous assessments. This study tracks 25 songs that attained prominence and explores Hammerstein’s neglected contributions to popular musicals such as May Wine (1935), The Great Waltz (1938, surprisingly well-known in China) and Hellzapoppin (1938).

In 1943, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane were given the plum assignment of writing songs for Judy Garland to sing in the movie musical Meet Me in St. Louis. Although they had the advantage of having worked with her in New York City and Hollywood, for the young songwriters this was still a high-profile motion picture in which to be a part. Because the work’s title came from a 1904 song that the studio would use in addition to other period music, the challenge was to write new material that sounded as though it came from the turn of the century and that showcased Garland, America’s girl next door. All three songs that Martin created for Meet Me in St. Louis, ‘The Boy Next Door’, ‘The Trolley Song’ and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, are emblematic of his writing style. An examination of Martin’s notebooks while at MGM reveals new insight into his process of lyric writing from initial drafts to final versions. In studying his compositions, one discovers how he was influenced by as well as adapted American popular song form. Martin’s skilled craftsmanship yielded the best-known songs of his career, and today they remain standards in the American Songbook.

After distinguished musical theatre scholar Bruce Kirle died in 2007, the Music Theatre and Dance Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) began sponsoring the Bruce Kirle Memorial Emerging Scholars Panel at its annual conference. Each year, three panelists are selected to have the chance to present their work for the first time nationally, and then revise those talks and have their work published here in Studies in Musical Theatre, under the mentorship of the panel’s respondent. Here, respondent Jessica Sternfeld introduces the three articles that emerged from the 2017 Kirle Panel.

Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party is notable for any number of reasons, particularly given that it was one of two adaptations of the John Moncure March poem premiering in New York City during the 1999–2000 season, the other being Andrew Lippa’s adaptation at Manhattan Theatre Club. LaChiusa’s adaptation is also notable for its racialized narrative, given that the central role of Queenie was recast, replacing an actress of colour – singer-actress Vanessa Williams – with a white actress, Oscar nominee Toni Collette. In this article, the implications of this casting change are explored, particularly the ways in which the change from an actress of colour to a white actress forced the musical into a historical conversation with the racialized conventions of vaudeville performance.

Where other, more autonomous art forms would have to share their political inventions in a show-and-tell that leads to the trap of didacticism, social choreography and other forms of social practice can leave room for invention without insisting on it. This approach, however, can give rise to a trap of its own: in the name of participation, artists fashion such an open, unregulated space for audience-participants that those who enter it fall back into roles they know. In this article, I look at a recent collaborative work of social choreography created by Austrian choreographer Michael Kliën with the Martha Graham Dance Company to argue that if social practice is really to intervene in the structure of social space, it must find the art in the way it responds to the pressure of the ordinary.

This piece focuses on the dance style and methodology developed by Katherine Dunham combining African diasporic dance traditions with Eurocentric dance traditions. Dunham was able to use this new choreographic technique to subvert the white-patriarchal gaze and create a space that forever changed the Broadway stage. In the early 1930s, she travelled to the Caribbean to complete ethnographic research on African-rooted dance styles on the islands. She was then able to bring these back to the United States and slowly integrate them into the choreography for her concert dance piece La’Ag’ya (1938) and her choreography for the hit musicals Pins and Needles (1940) and Cabin in the Sky (1940). Her innovation discovered and exploited the possibilities for subversion or transgression within dance using a hybrid movement style performed by black bodies in order to create an opportunity for an authentic black musical theatre.

The Yeoman of the Guard, Arthur Sullivan, Critical Edition, Colin Jagger (ed.) (2016)

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 456 pp.,

ISBN: 9780193413139, p/bk, £67.50

Actor-Musicianship, Jeremy Harrison (2016)

London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 220 pp.,

ISBN: 9781472509635, p/bk, £21.99

New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets, Martha Shearer (2016)

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 230 pp.,

ISBN: 9781137569370, h/bk, £67.99