Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2020

This article investigates the ambivalent relationship between Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 megamusical The Phantom of the Opera and its 1910 source novel, Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. Lloyd Webber and his collaborators initially differentiated the megamusical from previous adaptations by heralding a return to the spirit of Leroux’s narrative. In doing so, however, Lloyd Webber lay down the limitations of his own creative authority over the material by establishing a ‘knowing audience’ primed to experience both the ‘hypotext’ of the novel and the ‘hypertext’ of the musical through the prism of the other. This article demonstrates how Leroux’s novel was subsequently marginalized via a strategic project of displacement in the megamusical’s ‘paratexts’, such as programme notes and media interviews. Examining these paratexts and Lloyd Webber’s later reworkings of the material (as seen in its 2004 film adaptation and its 2010 sequel), this article argues that the composer-producer’s attempts to appropriate the ‘phantom’ legend have been repeatedly disrupted by the novel’s spectral resurgences in the public imagination.

The musical Six has taken the United Kingdom by storm, earning five Olivier nominations in 2019 and crossing the pond, previewing on Broadway in the spring of 2020. Six tells the story of Henry VIII’s six wives in what the musical portrays as their own words, with a twist – the six wives form a girl group performing a concert for their audience. Through a rhetorical analysis of the musical’s script, cast recording, piano/vocal score, and field notes from two performances, I argue that Six creates public memory of Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr, focusing on their individual personalities and accomplishments, rather than simply on their relationship to Henry VIII, as documented history describes them. I suggest that by doing so, Six minimizes the role of place and time in the creation of public memory. Furthermore, I argue that this creation of public memory is intertwined with Burkean identification, as theatregoers find themselves connecting with one or more of the queens as they are portrayed in Six. By combining twenty-first-century language with the stories of sixteenth-century women, Six builds consubstantiality between its characters and its audiences. This article also explores how the final number, Six, reinvents the women’s stories as they might have been if they had lived in the twenty-first century and the impact that this has on public memory. Finally, I suggest that Six is a feminist text, advocating for solidarity and the individually defined empowerment of all women.

The character of Rose from Gypsy has been compared to tragic characters such as Medea, King Lear and Willy Loman. She has been credited as one of the most psychologically complex characters in musical theatre history and is a role coveted by performers. Equally appalling and compelling, Rose, like characters in ancient Greek tragedies, is an imperfect human struggling to do her best in difficult situations but is ultimately misguided and suffers a tragic reversal of fortune. This article applies dramatic theory from Aristotle’s Poetics and Arthur Miller’s article ‘Tragedy and the common man’ to discover the dramaturgical practices the authors of Gypsy used to structure Rose, a figure from musical comedy, within the theoretical constructs of a tragic heroine.

Because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the fate of the annual Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference and the twelfth annual Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panel hung in the balance. By sheer will and determination, those at the helm of the ATHE machine managed to pull off a virtual conference, bringing scholars from across the world together from the comfort and safety of their own digital devices. This introduction explores the context of the conference, theatre’s unique COVID-era connection to Kirle’s notion of ‘unfinished business’ and the work of the 2020 Kirle scholars Lindsey Barr, Samantha Lampe and Trystan Loustau.

Dear Evan Hansen, a popular Broadway musical whose narrative centres on connectivity and the protagonist’s social anxiety, offers a disruptive potential to the otherwise standard nostalgic leanings of the contemporary American musical. Operating dramaturgically, nostalgia offers the audience an opportunity to recall an idealized past that imbues the musical they are witnessing with their own positive affect. Dear Evan Hansen’s use of prosthetic memory disrupts the nostalgic tradition of the contemporary musical. Using dramaturgical analysis to identify the narrative operation of nostalgia and prosthetic memory, this article situates the disruptive potential of Dear Evan Hansen as an intervention into the American musical theatre canon writ large.

As the Women’s Liberation Movement developed in the 1970s, women challenged society’s limited female representation as either the Madonna or the whore. Musicals in the 1970s, including Grease (1972), Chicago (1975) and Evita (1979), complicated the female image through the juxtaposition of feminine stereotypes in the heroine’s persona. With each of the shows centralizing the plot around analysing the contradictory feminine image, the women perform in both public and private settings, along with other characters critiquing their personas. From feminist protesters to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, Sandy, Roxie and Eva reflect the requests of contemporary women to display their gender as something beyond the perceived dichotomy of Madonna or whore in their music performances.

Traditional American musicals have often portrayed women in conventional, domestic roles like wives and mothers. Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods (1987) abounds with maternal figures who, at first, appear musically and lyrically complex. The musical’s mothers transgress the confines of housekeeping and childrearing to pursue sexual fantasies, provide for and protect their children and explore their personal and emotional bonds. However, the actions of such transgressive mothers, including the Baker’s Wife, Jack’s Mother and the Witch, are narratively renounced, their agency contained and their stories cut short with fatal punishments. In contrast, Cinderella, the epitome of the pure good woman, prevails as the solitary mother figure of the show’s concluding family. This article argues that despite its overtures towards something more complex, Into the Woods’ depiction of motherhood merely reinforces reductive, patriarchal genre standards.

Review of: The Works of Arthur Laurents: Politics, Love, and Betrayal, John M. Clum (2014)

New York: Cambria Press, 214 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-60497-884-1, £66.99

Terrence McNally and Fifty Years of American Gay Drama, John M. Clum (2016)

New York: Cambria Press, 236 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-60497-922-0, £69.99

Review of: Pal Joey: The History of a Heel, Julianne Lindberg (2020)

New York: Oxford University Press, 288pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19-005120-4, h/bk, £25.99