ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society.
Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway—the idea, if not the place—and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|21 pages
Setting the Stage
part 2|40 pages
Starting with the ‘70s
chapter 4|9 pages
“My Corner of the Sky”
part 3|73 pages
Aesthetic Transformations
chapter 9|10 pages
Starlight Expression and Phantom Operatics
chapter 11|14 pages
The New “Sounds of Broadway”
part 4|41 pages
Reading the Musical through Gender
chapter 15|11 pages
It’s Still Working
chapter 17|9 pages
“A Little More Mascara”
part 5|52 pages
Reading the Musical through Race and Ethnicity
chapter 19|10 pages
“Before the Parade Passes By”
chapter 21|10 pages
Can We “Leave Behind the World We Know”?
chapter 22|9 pages
Falsettos and Indecent in the Shadow of Fiddler on the Roof
part 6|28 pages
Reading the Musical through Dance
chapter 23|10 pages
What Makes a Musical?
chapter 24|9 pages
Dance in Musical Theater Revival and Adaptation
part 7|59 pages
Reading the Musical through Interdisciplinary Lenses
part 8|71 pages
Beyond Broadway
chapter 33|10 pages
“Trash Talk and Virtual Protests”
chapter 34|10 pages
The Great Generational Divide
chapter 38|10 pages
Dual-Focus Strategy in a Serial Narrative
part 9|59 pages
Growth and Expansion