Stacy Wolf

From Adelaide in "Guys and Dolls" to Nina in "In the Heights" and Elphaba in "Wicked," female characters in Broadway musicals have belted and crooned their way into the American psyche. In this lively book, Stacy Wolf illuminates the women of American musical theatre--performers, creators, and characters--from the start of the Cold War to the present day, creating a new, feminist history of the genre. The musicals discussed here are among the most beloved in the canon--"West Side Story," "Cabaret," "A Chorus Line," "Phantom of the Opera," and many others--with special emphasis on the blockbuster "Wicked." Along the way, Wolf demonstrates how the musical since the mid-1940s has actually been dominated by women--women onstage, women in the wings, and women offstage as spectators and fans.

A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical

Changed for Good

Raymond Knapp

Mitchell Morris

The American musical is a paradox. On stage or screen, musicals at once hold a dominant and a contested place in the worlds of entertainment, art, and scholarship. Born from a mélange of performance forms that included opera and operetta, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrelsy and jazz, musicals have always sought to amuse more than instruct, and to make money more than make political change. In spite of their unapologetic commercialism, though, musicals have achieved supreme artistry and have influenced culture as much as if not more than any other art form in America, including avant-garde and high art on the one hand, and the full range of popular and commercial art on the other. Reflecting, refracting, and shaping U.S. culture since the early twentieth century, musicals converse with shifting dynamics of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and race, and the very question of what it means to be American and to be human. The chapters gathered in this book, Volume I of the reissued Oxford Handbook, explore the American musical from both the outside and the inside. This first volume concentrates in particular on large-scale, more philosophical issues of relevance to the genre, considering issues of historical situations and formal procedure as they bear on the narratives we make concerning productions and performers, artists and audiences, commerce and context. The first four essays discuss ways of defining histories and texts, and apprehending the formal choices of singers and dancers; the second group of four take up the subtle challenges of the genre's signal transformations out of minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley to "integration" and beyond.

An Oxford Handbook of the American Musical

Histories of the Musical

The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical presents keywords and critical terms that deepen analysis and interpretation of the musical. Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions.

Stacy Wolf

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