ABSTRACT
This chapter moves from a short, low-budget, low-status work with an audience prepared to engage with its complex, discontinuous texture, to a high-profile film with a problematic reception history. It proposes a mode of reception that approaches jukebox musicals as interrogative texts that draw audiences into conversation with them, rather than as containing fixed and identifiable meanings. The chapter argues instead that the film is more productively approached in terms of pasticcio and pastiche rather than recreation or revival; the manifold discontinuities of its pasticcio texture and its approach to music-dramatic integration set it up as an interrogative text which draws viewers into conversation with it, rather than as a consistently readable text containing fixed and identifiable meanings. It suggests that one of the potential 'conversations' the film invites is an interrogation of the concept of escapism. In the case of Love's Labour's Lost, however, the Shakespearean play is relatively little known.
