Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2019

The critical reception of Bill T. Jones’s choreography for the Broadway stage reinvigorates debates about high and low cultural production and reveals persistent critical biases regarding the requirement of authenticity for non-white artists. Jones’s genre crossing participates in a cultural history of choreographers and dancers who dance(d) across concert and commercial stages; Jones’s work is further complicated by a rubric of authenticity as it contributes to both the mythology of the avant-garde and audience expectations of racialized cultural producers. This article argues that the reception of Jones’s choreography evidences the interdependence between blackness as authenticity and high/low dichotomies of artistic production, particularly those that contour dance reception. I foreground the multiple ways in which the formulation of blackness as authenticity supports Broadway’s commercial, often posited as ‘inauthentic’, aesthetics and aims.

This article examines Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso and his dance contributions to Cuban musical theatre from the 1940s through the early 1960s. The analysis integrates the histories of Alonso’s training, performance career and choreographic output with developments in Cuban musical theatre before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In particular, it focuses on Alonso’s 1964 ballet El Solar (The Slum), which became a 1965 musical film Un día en el solar (A Day in the Slum) and live musical Mi Solar (My Slum). I argue that Alonso subtly questioned officialdom with his musical choreography that showed revolutionary movements springing not from the state but from Cuban citizens of different racial backgrounds as they enacted the chores and delights of life. Moreover, Alonso’s work challenged cultural hierarchies, which held so-called high art forms like ballet above popular dance, by emphasizing the endless creativity of Cubans moving through their everyday.

This article takes as its main focus Robert Greenwald’s cult classic movie musical, Xanadu (1980). Reconsidering Xanadu’s distinction as one of the most critically and commercially panned films produced in Hollywood history, my reading uncovers the ways in which the musical’s campy, neo-mythological iteration of Terpsichore resuscitates key Romantic leitmotifs of the muse as technosensual, airborne woman. Focusing on the roller skate as wearable technology, I trace Xanadu’s muse to its historical predecessors. By extension, I reveal how the moving body’s prosthetic territories (i.e. the roller skate and the pointe shoe) and motion media technologies play a central role in reviving Xanadu’s muse as the ‘phantasmagoric feminine’, forming an enduring point of intersection between dance and musical theatre. I develop and theorize this term ‘phantasmagoric feminine’ within the article in reference to a constellation of representational strategies used in the history of Romantic ballet.

This article aims to amplify disability theory’s impact in performance studies by generating a framework for understanding disability representation in musical theatre. Taking the original and revival Broadway productions of Side Show (1997, 2014) as a case study, I articulate how the musical simulates disability through a ‘choreography of conjoinment’ that relies on the exceptional able-bodiedness of the actors playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Using disability as a category of analysis reveals how disabled bodies are made to be maximally productive iterations of themselves in musicals. To support this claim, I track the shift from the 1997 production’s co-construction of disability by the actors and audience, which replicates the social model of disability, to the 2014 revival’s grounding in a diagnostic realism typical of disability’s medical model. Side Show’s trajectory generates possibilities for considering the musical as an archive for disability representation and knowledge, bioethical inquiry, and artistic innovation.