Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2020

Betty Comden and Adolph Green are well-known librettists and lyricists of stage musicals and musical films; their artistic style and verbal expression are considered to bear urban witness to a period understanding of the 1940s and 1950s. Nonetheless, previous studies have scarcely investigated the aesthetic features of their dramaturgy, especially with regard to linguistic expression. This article focuses on the radio comedy Fun with the Revuers, for which they wrote scripts and lyrics. Through a close look at the scripts and sound recordings, it analyses the ‘interruptive sound and voice’ functions that construct the show, and examines how these satirize the conventions of the format, as well as the essential features of the medium. This article will offer a new perspective on the generational dynamics of Comden and Green’s artistry.

Following on from John Osborne’s infamous play Look Back in Anger of 1956, London’s stage saw the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Man’, realistic portrayals of working-class men in a difficult age. Expresso Bongo and Lily White Boys, works of the mid-to-late 1950s, demonstrate that the angry young man was also present in London’s musicals, previously an upper- and middle-class genre. Featuring the Soho district, gangsters, prostitutes and rock music, this unique era of musical theatre changed expectations of what musical theatre could and would offer to a jaded urban audience. These astonishing musical theatre works offer potent commentary on British society, British identity and particularly disenfranchised young British men, and offer insights into American and British relations, gender roles and expectations, and the complicated role of working-class men in the new Elizabethan era.

The 1946 Broadway premiere of Lute Song represents a milestone in reception of the Chinese dramatic tradition in the United States. Despite its yellowface and ‘Oriental pageantry’, it must be situated at the beginnings of a more respectful relationship to China and Chinese people, as the American stage began to move beyond treatments of China dominated by racist vaudeville or fantastical fairy tales. Instead, Lute Song emerged from a classic text, the long drama Pipa ji – even as its own casting and staging inherited some of the same problematic habits of representing Asia. Lute Song, one of several indirect adaptations of Chinese dramas in the American mid-century, represents a milestone as the first Broadway show inspired by American immigrant Chinatown theatre and the first Broadway musical to be based on Chinese classical drama, mediated through European Sinology.

The concept of the dithyrambic dramatist – introduced by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations of 1873–76 – is one of the most performance-oriented concepts to emerge out of the nineteenth century in which theatre was often associated with dramatic literature. This article investigates the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist by tracing, in the first instance, the underlying musical perspectives – already evident in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872 – which led Nietzsche to develop the concept. In the second instance, the author articulates what may be considered as its key conditions, namely the visible–audible and individual–collective relationalities. In view of the arguments brought forward, the concept of the dithyrambic dramatist is located as an interdisciplinary element that emerged out of an art form – music – to which Nietzsche was intimately associated in his youth as a composer. The author further proposes that, rather than a metaphor to philological tropes, the dithyrambic dramatist is a concrete manifestation of interdisciplinary and performative foundations that inform Nietzsche’s analytic perspectives.

In the history of opera, singing has repeatedly been associated with states of crisis – a term and concept traced back by historian Reinhart Koselleck from its origins to expanded meanings in the modern age. By adopting his findings on the medical and economic use of crisis, a delayed discourse surfaces regarding singers and singing. Concepts of crisis as choosing between alternatives, such as trust in vocal technique or medical treatment, flexibility or specialization in repertoire, have been established and maintained. However, the most recent developments make it necessary to consider the uncertainties instead of alternatives, as well as the shifting organizational and networking aspects of the opera industry, with artist managers and agents in special, triadic relations of varying order with the opera companies and the singers. Especially with the economic pressures on the opera companies increasing, the singers’ agencies are in a key position of securing engagements and career developments.

Review of: America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage, Donatella Galella (2019)

Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, ix + 303 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-60938-625-2, p/bk, $99.00

Review of: Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance, Sunny Stalter-Pace (2020)

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 280 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-8101-4191-9, p/bk, $34.95

Review of: The Movie Musical!, Jeanine Basinger (2019)

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 634 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-10187-406-6, h/bk, $45.00