Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2011

Current economic conditions on Broadway have rendered many of the great musicals of the past prohibitively expensive to produce as originally envisioned. Over the past decade, New York’s Encores! series has overcome this problem by presenting partially staged ‘concert versions’ of such works featuring full orchestra and star performers, but with abbreviated librettos and minimal staging and design. The formula has proved successful on many fronts: the three annual Encores! presentations are major events in the Broadway community, attracting thousands of subscribers and prime publicity. Some of the more popular Encores! projects have even transferred to Broadway with only slight ‘upgrading’ of production values – most notably their revival of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, now an international franchise still running on Broadway, in the West End and in cities around the world. Clearly, Encores! has made an impact on contemporary musical theatre practice. It has provided a service to the field in the areas of restoration and preservation of repertoire, and it has attracted top-rank talent to breathe life into some forgotten works. But, by doing so in the pared-down form of the staged reading, has it also unwittingly set a hazardous precedent for future musical revivals? This article explores the economic and cultural ramifications of Encores!’s success in our current cost-cutting climate and its implications for the future of the American musical theatre legacy.

The 1954 British musical Salad Days has been almost completely neglected by academics, partly, it seems because it is assumed to be light, frothy nonsense with no real significance. Its neglect is particularly noteworthy considering Salad Days’ huge popularity in its own time. But this musical is far from conservative; the protagonists are a young graduate couple, who try to circumvent the restrictions of the grim world of the diegetic narrative and more specifically the gendered and classed roles expected of them. This article revisits Salad Days, reading it as a utopian text and in doing so repositions the show as an articulation of utopian desire for the ‘not-yet’ of a more liberated future. Although, the novel has been the traditional home of utopia, musical theatre is considered here to contain forms that can circumvent the regulations of prose fiction. The abstract and non-representational nature of music and performance makes them effective modes for articulating utopian desire. Salad Days uses both utopian and nostalgic sensibilities, and this article explores ways in which the utopian modes challenge ideological boundaries, and the backward glance signifies mourning for lost opportunities.

The article will explore the accuracy behind the creative conceit that cabaret life during the waning days of the Weimar Republic can serve as ‘metaphor for Germany’. The article will show how the peripheral presence of the cabaret in Christopher Isherwood’s stories and John Van Druten’s play adaptation I Am a Camera assumed primary importance in the musical Cabaret (directed by Hal Prince), Bob Fosse’s film based on the show and future stage productions, including the London and New York revival directed by Sam Mendes. The article will demonstrate that however effective as an artistic and social statement the guiding metaphor of Prince, largely retained by his successors, the powerful and persuasive artistic visions and social statements of the musical versions are historically misleading.

Jingju (Beijing/Peking opera) is a synthesis of elements of many different regional forms and has a ‘tradition’ of innovation and integration of diverse influences. But it currently sits at the centre of intense conflicting pressures: the need to innovate to attract contemporary audiences and the need to preserve, engendered by its current status as endangered yet nationally representative performing art. As a result, jingju has become a difficult form within which to innovate successfully. This article analyses the interplay of traditional and innovative aural and visual elements in a 1999 award-winning jingju production, Camel Xiangzi. Jingju musical structures provided the core mode of character expression, but were interlaced with Beijing folk melodies and computer-synthesized elements in effective and innovative ways.

Through a reading of Jonathan Larson’s rock opera Rent, I explore how the genre of musical theatre ‘queers’ time. Rather than a continuously progressive temporality, I suggest that the musical comprises shifts along a continuum between a standstill and accelerated time, with the production numbers veering towards these heightened extremes. Rent advocates a powerful ‘no day but today’ mentality in the wake of crisis, bringing time to a standstill against the apocalyptic pace of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Anthems, reprises and other repetitive frameworks ‘queer’ narrative time and capture a fragmentary sense of communitas that valuably blurs the lines among characters, performers and audience members. While the genre of musical theatre may seem steeped in abstract idealism, then, performers can step out of character and spectators can join the anthem, appropriating the formal difference and the utopian openness of the musical number to a wide array of concrete social causes.

SONDHEIM ON MUSIC: MINOR DETAILS AND MAJOR DECISIONS, MARK EDEN HOROWITZ (2010) 2nd ed., Lanham, MD, Toronto and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 568 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8108-7436-7, Hardback, £31.95 THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE: 1943–1965, CORINNE J. NADEN (2011) Toronto: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 267 pp., ISBN 978-0-8108-7733-7, Hardback, $39.95 SHOW TUNES: THE SONGS, SHOWS, AND CAREERS OF BROADWAY’S MAJOR COMPOSERS, STEVEN SUSKIN (2010) 4th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 600 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-531407-6, Hardback, $60.00 THE HOLLYWOOD FILM MUSIC READER, MERVYN COOKE (ED.) (2010) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 384 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-533118-9, Hardback, £65; ISBN 978-0-19-533119-6, Paperback, £22.50