Studies in Musical Theatre - The Bruce Kirle Memorial Panel, ATHE Conference, Dec 2021

This article details a data inscription method I have termed ethnomusical libretto. The method evolved from three years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the workplace culture and practice of the global musical theatre industry. Through the process of analysing and coding data, I began to explore the possibility of writing up my data as a libretto, as an effective way to both ‘show’ and ‘tell’ what I had seen and experienced as a participant/observer in the musical theatre industry. I also saw value for writing up ethnographic data as a libretto in order to employ it as a device for member checking. This method contributes to a thickening of data and provides not only an alternate way to conceive research findings but also an opportunity to refine and confirm research claims.

Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘refrain’, the article investigates London Road as an example of a ‘minor’ practice in musical theatre, which engages with a tracing and play with ‘territories’ as well as several acts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These processes are examined both at the level of content (and the thematic considerations of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ in the building of a community) and form. The performance introduces new relationships and functions between the components/means at the musical’s disposal and invites a different type of audience engagement (or ‘encounter’) by destabilizing fixed forms and categories like song/speech, lyric/book, diegetic/non-diegetic, audience/actors, auditorium/stage and ultimately reality/representation. This case study exemplifies how the hybrid form of the ‘verbatim musical’ has the potential to mutually deterritorialize both of the genres it brings in dialogue and allows for a new type of engagement with the politics of the musical in the twenty-first century.

Using drag performance as a tool to recuperate the meaning of queer subtext and readings, this article explores thematic intersections between staging coded queerness and the offstage queer practice of cruising in James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s 1987 musical Into the Woods. Though the temporal correlation of the musical’s 1987 Broadway production and the AIDS crisis raises the stakes of comparisons between cruising practices and the setting of the musical, this article does not aim to argue a subjectification of Into the Woods as AIDS parable; rather it asserts the necessity of performances that deliberately queer the canon.

Mainstream musicals rely on popular appeal. Even when the content is serious or tragic, the affective experience generated is generally pleasant. Almost by default, they are happy objects – veritable happiness-circulating machines capable of adhering their own pleasant affects to other objects, whether physical (e.g. things, bodies) or conceptual (e.g. values, ideals, myths). In this article, I explore Come from Away as a happiness-making machine capable of adhering its own happy affects to a homegrown mythos that imagines Canada (not unproblematically) as a welcoming utopia of tolerance and togetherness.

Sight & Sound Theatres, a Christian theatre company known for their musical adaptations of stories from the Bible, takes up the mission of evangelizing through musical theatre. While the genre of musical theatre can transform harsh religious messaging into an accessible and entertaining form, it can also undermine religious messaging by introducing camp and trivializing supernatural deities. This article examines how Sight & Sound Theatres’s Noah keeps with and breaks musical theatre conventions effectively to evangelize to their audiences.

Review of: The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations, Dominic Mchugh (Ed.) (2018)

Oxford: Oxford University Press,

ISBN 978-0-19046-999-3, e-book, £110.00

Review of: Rock Star/Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom, Landon Palmer (2020)

New York: Oxford University Press, 274 pp.,

IBSN 978-0-19088-841-1, p/bk £22.99