Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2014

The Fantasticks by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt is one of the most beloved and well-known musicals in the world. However, it is often dismissed as frivolous entertainment or church basement fluff. The concept of metatheatre, coined by Lionel Abel to describe plays about life seen as already theatricalized, is a potent analytical tool that can reveal a more sophisticated edge to the longest running musical in the world. Throughout the musical, The Fantasticks plays with truth and illusion, blending them and merging them in complex whirligigs that stir up the theatricalized and theatricalizing forces permeating the show, while touching the metaphysical imaginations of its audiences. This article explores some of the metatheatrical elements of the play (role playing within the role, the play within the play, self-reference) to illuminate the complex metatheatrical interplay of truth and illusion in relation to the audiences’ imaginations.

The ‘descent’ of the heroes of Greek mythology, Orpheus and Helen, to the modern Greek-speaking world took place secretly between the decades 1860 and 1870, when French troupes first started visiting Athens in order to perform at the Winter Theatre of the city, provoking a storm of reactions. This article aims to examine the impact of French light music on the newly formed urban Athenian society of the mid-nineteenth century, highlighting the dichotomy between the West and the Orient that characterizes modern Greek history. Their performances rekindled the controversy raging in the musical life of the new Greek state throughout the nineteenth century and became the bone of contention for the duel between European opera troupes – which enjoy the financial and moral support of the court, the government and ‘high society’ in general – and local drama troupes fighting hard to become established.

This article draws on Alenka Zupančič’s and Slavoj Žižek’s recent theorizations of comedy to examine Stephen Sondheim’s highly successful 1973 musical A Little Night Music. Zupančič and Žižek argue that by ‘looking awry’ on popular modes like comedy we can explore how our relation to reality is still structured by fantasy and by passionate attachments to sublime objects – indeed, we can discover in comedy new modes of configuring the sublime. To explore A Little Night Music as a ‘reconciliation’ of comedy and sublimity is to open a consideration of Sondheim’s contributions towards the very debates and deadlocks that Zupančič and Žižek identify and to suggest ways of extending their own psychoanalytic philosophy into the realms of musical theatre, a mode that they leave largely uninvestigated. In the process, the article aims to move beyond more traditional ‘applications’ of Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Sondheim’s musical encourages us to think differently about Lacanian theory per se and to look in new (and comic) ways at enigmatic terms like the ‘Real’.

This article seeks to interrogate aspects of assessment practices in musical theatre. Practices in the training of musical theatre students are rarely a source for reflection, and this project sought to unveil some of the processes of learning, teaching and assessment in a new musical theatre degree. The larger project on which this article is based sought to develop and evaluate assessment protocols that assisted in facilitating practices with a stronger alignment with the professional realities of musical theatre. The data for this research consists of perceptions of students and their lecturers in relation to the implementation of a continuous assessment regime in a musical theatre degree in Australia. The assessment process is designed to provide students with regular commentary about their progress. In addition to end-of-semester exams, weekly marks are awarded for approximately twenty sub-activities within the broad areas of acting, dance, performance project, singing and speech. In addition, this means of assessment is located within a degree structure that employs a sliding scale across three years: students are assessed through formative assessment in the early years, and summative in the later years of the degree. Through individual interviews with staff and students, the efficacy of this assessment process was documented. Staff members who worked with students in the programme were interviewed to ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach. Students were interviewed to determine whether they believed it assisted them in both their learning and in achieving goals during and beyond the degree. An action research cycle was initiated and the findings demonstrate a relative degree of agreement between expectations of participants in the course and the proposed outcomes at the end of the degree. These findings, combined with artefacts from the programme and previously reported student perceptions, are presented as a model that may provide the potential for replication in other training programmes that seek to prepare students for the realities of a career in the creative and performing arts.

In this performance review, the author considers two new musicals premiering on Broadway in the spring of 2014: Rocky, the stage adaptation of Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 movie, by Thomas Meehan and Stephen Flaherty, and Violet, the adaptation of Doris Betts’ short story ‘The Ugly Pilgrim’, by Brian Crawley and Jeanine Tesori. Although in theme and subject matter the author finds certain similarities between these shows, the productions themselves play out quite differently and offer an interesting comparative analysis.

The novel The Bridges of Madison County (1992) by Robert James Waller sold over 50 million copies and was made into a film that garnered an Academy Award nomination for Meryl Streep. Composer Jason Robert Brown and writer Marsha Norman, the creators of the musical The Bridges of Madison County, reframed the original love story for the Broadway stage using traditional musical theatre conventions such as the addition of a secondary comedic couple, the use of an ensemble and a linear plot structure. This article explores the function of these conventions and the critical reception of this adaptation, questioning the adherence to the traditional musical theatre forms in the telling of a non-traditional love story.

Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, Richard Barrios (2014) New York: Oxford University Press, 288 pp., ISBN: 9780199973842, h/bk, £22.99

The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance, Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis (2013) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 269 pp., ISBN: 9789042036918, p/bk, $78

West End Broadway: The Golden Age of the American Musical in London, Adrian Wright (2012) Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 376 pp., ISBN: 9781843837916, h/bk, £25

A Million Miles from Broadway: Musical Theatre beyond New York and London, Mel Atkey (2012) Vancouver and London: Friendlysong Books, 296 pp., ISBN: 9780991695706, p/bk, $23.60

Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, Ethan Mordden (2012) New York: St. Martins, 334 pp., ISBN: 9780312676575, h/bk, $25.95