Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2021

Inspired by New York City Center’s Encores! programme, we came together as a music director and stage director to develop a new college programme focused on producing rarely heard musicals. As faculty members, we select a little-known musical and research basic production history to provide a launchpad for hands-on learning for students. Our process involves examining a show’s production history, exploring the story and score in their original historical milieu, and mounting a workshop production. Given the many forgotten musical theatre pieces, this act of excavation is possible for any college musical theatre programme, including those with limited resources. In this article, we share our approach and process, connecting strategies and tactics to experiential learning, and reflect on challenges encountered and opportunities discovered during our workshop production of Richard Maltby, Jr and David Shire’s The Sap of Life, a show that spent several months Off-Broadway in 1961 and then disappeared into the composer’s closet for the next 54 years. For The Sap of Life, we seized the opportunity to offer our students the experience of working and learning directly from Maltby and Shire, who visited campus as guest artists. Our excavation process provides the opportunity for students and professors alike to learn more about how a musical is developed, written, honed and ultimately produced on the stage.

This article explores how Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George conveys Seurat’s scientific influences, how the show’s Chromolume engages with Seurat and his modernist legacy, and how the 1984 and 2017 Chromolume designs reflect Seurat’s work and legacy. Using original oral history interviews, this article compares the 1984 and 2017 Broadway Chromolume designs to explore how production decisions inform the show’s engagement with pointillism, Seurat and colour theory. By analysing Sunday, this article sets out to provide a case study highlighting how science and technology inform and influence the book, music and theatrical design of a major American musical.

Drawing on studies of fan participation, labour and parasociality, this article explores the continuing diversification of musical theatre fandom via social media and the interactive ways in which productions harness fan engagement. The analysis focuses on Dear Evan Hansen (2016) as a musical that depicts emotionally vulnerable teenagers and exploitative online communication, notions that are also often reflected in how fans interact with the show. Fan-generated content is regularly recycled as marketing material, and even as merchandise, that is used to sell the production. Similarly, the musical’s producers and marketing team frequently invite interaction around the musical’s core mantra, ‘You Will Be Found’. These interactions can benefit fans by potentially eliciting feelings of social inclusion that may be experienced as empowering. However, this practice can also be interpreted as equally as ethically dubious as some of the musical’s narrative content, given that fans are ultimately providing free advertising for a commercial musical.

This article reconsiders the importance of Sidney Lumet’s film adaption of The Wiz, which was panned on release and deemed a commercial failure. Despite this, the film has always been cherished by the African American community. I examine why this is, by analysing the film's relationship to blaxploitation, its production and reception history, and some of the film’s scenes. Finally, I consider its legacy and its meaning for later generations.

Review of: Bernstein and Robbins: The Early Ballets, Sophie Redfern (2021)

Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 293 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-64825-005-7, h/bk, USD $99.00

Review of: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (2020)

Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 338 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-81394-431-9, h/bk, USD $75.00

Review of: Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity, Sarah Whitfield (ed.) (2019)

London: Red Globe Press, xxxii + 241 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35200-439-7, p/bk, $34.99