You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book argues that the digital revolution has fundamentally altered the way musicals are produced, followed, admired, marketed, reviewed, researched, taught, and even cast. In the first hundred years of its existence, commercial musical theatre functioned on one basic model. However, with the advent of digital and network technologies, every musical theatre artist and professional has had to adjust to swift and unanticipated change. Due to the historically commercial nature of the musical theatre form, it offers a more potent test case to reveal the implications of this digital shift than other theatrical art forms. Rather than merely reflecting technological change, musical theatre scholarship and practice is at the forefront of the conversation about art in the digital age. This book is essential reading for musical theatre fans and scholars alike.
This book argues that the digital revolution has fundamentally altered the way musicals are produced, followed, admired, marketed, reviewed, researched, taught, and even cast. In the first hundred years of its existence, commercial musical theatre functioned on one basic model. However, with the advent of digital and network technologies, every musical theatre artist and professional has had to adjust to swift and unanticipated change. Due to the historically commercial nature of the musical theatre form, it offers a more potent test case to reveal the implications of this digital shift than other theatrical art forms. Rather than merely reflecting technological change, musical theatre scholarship and practice is at the forefront of the conversation about art in the digital age. This book is essential reading for musical theatre fans and scholars alike.
Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015 and quickly became one of the hottest tickets the industry has ever seen. Lin-Manuel Miranda - who wrote the book, lyrics, and music, and created the title role - adapted the show from Ron Chernow's biography Alexander Hamilton. Although it seems an unlikely source for a Broadway musical, Miranda found a liminal space where the life that Hamilton led and the issues that he confronted came alive more than two centuries later while also commenting on contemporary life in the United States and how we view our nation's history. With a score largely based on rap and drawing on other aspects of hip-hop culture, and staged with actors of color playing the white F...
TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age explores how TikTok has revolutionized musical theatre fandom and democratized musical theatre fan cultures and spaces. The book argues that TikTok has created a new canon of musical theatre thanks to the way virality works on the app, expanding musical theatre into a purely digital realm that spills into other, non-digital aspects of U.S. popular culture.
This book introduces readers to the widespread phenomenon of how social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok become an extension of long-standing aspects of musical theatre engagement. Although casual observers may dismiss social media's import, social media has revolutionized the field of musical theatre since the early days of Web 2.0 with spaces such as AOL, LiveJournal, and Myspace. Now, as social media continues to grow in relevance, the nuanced ways in which digital platforms influence musical culture remain ripe for study. Social Media in Musical Theatre moves beyond viewing social media merely as a passing fad or a space free from critical engagement. Rather, this volume takes a serious look at the critical role social media play in musicals, thus challenging how social media users and musical theatre-makers alike approach digital spaces. This book introduces the relationship between musical theatre and social media in the 21st century as well as methods to study social media's influence on musicals through three in-depth case studies organized around marketing on YouTube, fan engagement on Twitter, and new musical development on TikTok.
20 Seasons: Broadway Musicals of the 21st Century catalogues, categorizes, and analyzes the 269 musicals that opened on Broadway from the 2000-2001 season through the 2019-2020 season. This book is the first to comprehensively examine the musicals that premiered on Broadway during this important historical period, which was bookended by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on one end and the Coronavirus pandemic on the other. It begins by exploring the historical context for the first 20 years of the 21st century and how this impacted American culture and theatre. Rather than chronologically, the musicals are then organized into categories based on their source material and whether they were original ...
The essay collection Americana poses the basic question of how American music can be described and analyzed as such, as American music. Situated at the intersection between musicology and American Studies, the essays focus on the categories of aesthetics, authenticity, and performance in order to show how popular music is made American-from Alaskan hip hop to German Schlager, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to film scores, from popular opera to U2, from the Rolling Stones to country rap, and from Steve Earle to the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles.
With chapters on The Sound of Music, Milk and Honey, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, The Rothschilds, Rags, Ragtime and The Producers, this book examines both direct and indirect references to, or resonances of, the Holocaust, tracing changing American attitudes through the chronological progression of these musical productions and their subsequent revivals. Despite the abundance of writing on both musical theatre history and on the difficulties of Holocaust representation, history and theatre scholars alike have thus far ignored the intersections of these areas. The academy thereby risks excluding precisely those works that shed the most light on our culture's evolving response to the Shoah, an event that still helps to define American identity. This book redresses this lapse by focusing on the theatrical form seen by the greatest amount of people--musicals--which either trigger or reflect changing American mores.
It was as if American television audiences discovered the musical in the early 21st century. In 2009 Glee took the Fox Network and American television by storm with the unexpected unification of primetime programming, awkward teens, and powerful voices spontaneously bursting into song. After raking in the highest rating for a new show in the 2009-2010 season, Glee would continue to cultivate rabid fans, tie-in soundtracks and merchandising, and a spinoff reality competition show until its conclusion in 2015. Alongside Glee, NBC and Fox would crank up musical visibility with the nighttime drama Smash and a string of live musical productions. Then came ABC's comedic fantasy musical series Gala...
Audiences are not what they used to be. Munching crisps or snapping selfies, chatting loudly or charging phones onstage – bad behaviour in theatre is apparently on the rise. And lately some spectators have begun to fight back... The Reasonable Audience explores the recent trend of ‘theatre etiquette’: an audience-led crusade to bring ‘manners and respect’ back to the auditorium. This comes at a time when, around the world, arts institutions are working to balance the traditional pleasures of receptive quietness with the need to foster more inclusive experiences. Through investigating the rhetorics of morality underpinning both sides of the argument, this book examines how models of 'good' and 'bad' spectatorship are constructed and legitimised. Is theatre etiquette actually snobbish? Are audiences really more selfish? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘reasonable’ within public space?Using theatre etiquette to explore wider issues of social participation, cultural exclusion, and the politics of identity, Kirsty Sedgman asks what it means to police the behaviour of others.