Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2024

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is often described by scholars as representing a ‘utopia’, with the definition of that term varying between disciplines. The movie’s vision of small-town living at the turn of the century is a comforting one, and its idyllic portrayal of domesticity has contributed to its success as one of MGM’s greatest film musicals. This article extends the utopian readings found in existing literature by providing an interdisciplinary approach that asks how and why this utopia was built, and that presents new findings gleaned through a comparative study of the film and its source material (Sally Benson’s novel of the same title). I argue that Meet Me in St. Louis represents a specifically patriarchal utopia; an ideological structure made powerful by a distractive form of ‘resistance’ in its musical moments. This article’s approach reveals the interplay between the film’s ‘audible’ and ‘visual’ realms and demonstrates how the two work together to create a narrative that champions nineteenth-century gender ideals to wartime audiences.

This article sets out a methodology for performance meteorology by analysing the weather in the urban pastoral imagery of diegetic and non-diegetic ‘open-air performances’ in three screen musicals set in New York City: Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of In the Heights and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s adaptation of Tick, Tick… BOOM!. Together, these films depict the aerial environment of New York as the context for open-air performances, generating distinct representations of how the weather conditions life in the cultural home of musical theatre. The New York performers and performances represented in these pieces cultivate their identities with the weather, as do the creatives who represent them. They indicate the growing climate anxieties that came to substrate the COVID-19 pandemic, when the premium on access to the open air was brought into renewed focus. Crucially, these iterations of West Side Story, In the Heights and Tick, Tick… BOOM! do more than use the medium of film to record how bodies respond to the weather. They capture the cultural zeitgeist of the New York climate at a crucial juncture between environmental and social history. Beyond the record that they will long provide of the prevailing sense of the city’s climate as culture, they attest to adaptive practices of weathering the city in their expressions of performance in the open air.

Careers in musical theatre necessarily require not only a set of discipline-specific skills but also a range of supplementary, supporting skills. Curricula also must adapt to current industry needs and conventions. To address the breadth of requisite skills and maintain currency, a process of regular curriculum review is implemented by universities and conservatoires offering musical theatre degree programmes. In this article, I offer a framework based on concepts from creative career theory and field research as a possible approach to curriculum renewal and development in musical theatre degree programmes.

Review of: The Little Mermaid, Rob Marshall (dir.) (2023), USA: Walt Disney Pictures

Review of: Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Maria Friedman

Hudson Theatre, New York, USA, 18 November 2023

Review of: Guys and Dolls, directed by Nicholas Hytner

Bridge Theatre, London, UK, 30 November 2023

Sunset Boulevard, directed by Jamie Lloyd

Savoy Theatre, London, UK, 30 November 2023

Review of: Pal Joey, co-directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover (2023)

New York City Center, New York, 5 November 2023

I Can Get It for You Wholesale, directed by Trip Cullman (2023)

Classic Stage Company, New York, 12 October 2023