Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2022

This article examines the development of operetta and musicals in East and West Germany from 1949 until the reunification in 1989–90. It focuses on the special ideological requirements of popular musical entertainment in the socialist east, discusses how works by Offenbach and Strauss were adapted, considers how works from the Soviet Union were imported and examines how new works were created to fulfil the ideal of ‘socialist realism’. The arrival of Broadway musicals in East Germany in the 1960s were typically made to fit into the system of state subsidized theatre.

In this roundtable held at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in 2021, the participants discussed the racialized politics of citation in musical theatre studies. Some of the speakers lifted up anti-racist scholarly pieces that have significantly shaped their work: SAJ considered Douglas Jones Jr’s chapter ‘Slavery, performance, and the design of African American theatre’, Jordan Ealey shared lessons from Matthew D. Morrison’s article ‘The sound(s) of subjection: Constructing American popular music and racial identity through Blacksound’, Masi Asare expanded upon Fred Moten’s essay ‘Taste, dissonance, flavor, escape’ to think through sweeping away and stealing away, Donatella Galella applied Karen Shimakawa’s book National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage to contemporary yellowface, and Hye Won Kim talked about the influence of Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene on her own work. Morrison, Moten, Shimakawa and Shimizu reflected on why they wrote those pieces of scholarship and how they understand their research years later. Finally, the co-authors spoke to reasons why scholars situated in musical theatre studies have so rarely cited research in fields like Black and Asian American performance studies and imagined radical possibilities beyond a racist citation framework.

Review of: Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America, Stacy Wolf (2020)

New York: Oxford University Press, 382 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19-063953-2, p/bk, USD $99.00

Review of: Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George, James Lapine (2021)

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-37420-009-1, h/bk, GBP £32

Review of: From Camelot to Spamalot: Musical Retellings of Arthurian Legend on Stage and Screen, Megan Woller (2021)

New York: Oxford University Press, 248 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19751-103-9, p/bk, GBP £22.99