You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This lively textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the history, theory and practice of this popular theatre form. Bringing critical theory and musical theatre together, Millie Taylor and Dominic Symonds explore the musical stage from a broad range of theoretical perspectives. Part 1 focuses on the way we understand musicals as texts and Part 2 then looks at how musical theatre negotiates its position in the wider world. Part 3 recognises the affiliations of various communities with the musical stage, and finally part 4 unravels the musical's relationship with time, space, intertextuality and entertainment. Written by leading experts in Musical Theatre and Drama, Taylor and Symonds utilise their wealth of knowledge to engage and educate the reader on this diverse subject. With its accessible and extensive content, this text is the ideal accompaniment to any study of musical theatre internationally: an essential tool for students of all levels, lecturers, practitioners and enthusiasts alike.
Gestures of Music Theater explores examples of Song and Dance as performative gestures that entertain and affect audiences. The chapters interact to reveal the complex energies of performativity. In experiencing these energies, music theatre is revealed as a dynamic accretion of active, complex and dialogical experiences.
"Everything is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is the first full-scale analysis of the work of Tommy Tune, and his place in a lineage of Broadway's great director-choreographers. The decade of the 1980s was considered a low point for the American musical. Tune's predecessors in the art of complete musical staging like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, and Michael Bennett were either dead or withdrawn from the Broadway arena. Yet it was the period of Tune's greatest success. The book examines how he adapted to an increasingly corporatized, high-stakes producing and funding environment. It considers how Tune kept the American musical a thriving, creative enterprise at a time when Broadway was dominated by British imports. It investigates Tune's work of the last twenty-five years, when he shifted his attentions to touring and regional productions, far from the glare of Broadway. Unlike his fellow director-choreographers, Tune also maintained a successful performing career, and the book details the deft balancing act that kept him working as a popular singer-dancer-actor while directing a series of striking and influential Broadway musicals"--
What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussions centre on the construction of the composed text, but then attention is given to performance and audience response. Musical theatre contains disruptions and dissonances in its multiple texts, it all...
"This book explores musicalizations of Arthurian legend as filtered through specific versions of the tale as told by Mark Twain, T.H. White, and Monty Python. For centuries, Arthurian legend with its tales of Camelot, romance, and chivalry has captured imaginations throughout Europe and the Americas. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, musical versions of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have abounded in the United States, shaping the legend for American audiences through song. The ever-shifting, age-old tale of King Arthur and his world is one which thrives on adaptation for its survival. New generations tell the story in their own ways, updating or enhancing the rele...
This book provides a unique chronicle and analysis of the work of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire, an extraordinary Broadway songwriting team whose work is revered by musical theater aficionados. Anyone interested in Broadway musicals will enjoy this book, which covers other well-known figures who feature prominently in the Maltby/Shire story, including Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, Francis Ford Coppola, Craig Lucas, Mike Ockrent, Susan Stroman, Garth Drabinsky, and Jonathan Tunick. The book includes enlightening, entertaining interviews with the subjects as well as illuminating analyses of some of Maltby and Shire's greatest songs.
This ground-breaking volume is the first of its kind to examine the extraordinary prevalence and appeal of the Gothic in contemporary British theatre and performance. Chapters range from considerations of the Gothic in musical theatre and literary adaptation, to explorations of the Gothic’s power to haunt contemporary playwriting, macabre tourism and site-specific performance. By taking familiar Gothic motifs, such as the Gothic body, the monster and Gothic theatricality, and bringing them to a new contemporary stage, this collection provides a fresh and comprehensive take on a popular genre. Whilst the focus of the collection falls upon Gothic drama, the contents of the book will embrace an interdisciplinary appeal to scholars and students in the fields of theatre studies, literature studies, tourism studies, adaptation studies, cultural studies, and history.
Arthur Schwartz (1900-1984), a premier composer of American Popular Song during the mid-20th century, has been overlooked by historians. This first full-length biography covers his work on Broadway and in Hollywood, where he was known as the "master of the intimate revue" for his songs in the 1930s with Howard Dietz. Schwartz wrote music for films in the 1940s--with Academy Award nominations for They're Either Too Young or Too Old and A Gal in Calico--produced two popular movie musicals--Cover Girl and Night and Day--and was among the first songwriters to work in the new medium of television. The author describes his creative process and includes behind-the-scenes stories of each of his major musicals.
This monograph centres on the history of musical theatre in a space of cultural significance for British identity, namely the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which housed many prominent American productions from 1924-1970. It argues that during this period Drury Lane was the site of cultural exchanges between Britain and the United States that were a direct result of global engagement in two world wars and the evolution of both countries as imperial powers. The critical and public response to works of musical theatre during this period, particularly the American musical, demonstrates the shifting response by the public to global conflict, the rise of an American Empire in the eyes of the British government, and the ongoing cultural debates about the role of Americans in British public life. By considering the status of Drury Lane as a key site of cultural and political exchanges between the United States and Britain, this study allows us to gain a more complete portrait of the musical’s cultural significance in Britain.
Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk, and social dance imports and America’s indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. This historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway-style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance, and Cultural History.