ABSTRACT
Representations of motherhood permeate popular performance, and the contemporary American musical is no exception. This chapter explores how the representations of motherhood have changed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, culminating in what I term the “mad mother trope.” Foregrounding twentieth-century representations, this chapter explores Mama Rose in Gypsy as representative of the overbearing mother trope and juxtaposes it with the absent mother trope present in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Using Next to Normal as a case study for the mad mother trope, this chapter argues that it illuminates how a character’s maternity is narratively used to signal her madness with reverberations that deeply impact the prized possession of American society—the nuclear family.
