ABSTRACT
This chapter provides examples of musicals and plays about cheerleaders, all written or premiered since the year 2000, with a few brief turns to reality TV, movies, fiction, and academic texts to think through some of the ramifications of cheerleaders at the conjunction of sport and theatre, real life and representation. It focuses on six musicals and two plays for this study: Bring It On: The Musical, Lysistrata Jones, We Are the Tigers, Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical, Cheer Wars, But I’m a Cheerleader: The Musical, Cheerleaders vs. Aliens by Rachel Bublitz, and Aliens vs. Cheerleaders: A Short Action Comedy by Qui Nguyen. Cheerleading has always occupied an ambiguous, parasitic relationship to “real” sports: the first cheerleaders in the early twentieth century were US college men, in an era where many colleges, especially elite ones like the Ivy League, were male-only institutions. Cheerleaders function as both predators and prey.
