Musical Theater and American Culture

(Hardback)

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Though there have been many histories of the theater and specifically the theatrical musical, none has done quite what Musical Theater and American Culture achieves: it explores how the musical emerged in the late-18th and 19th centuries as a specifically American form of entertainment and went on to become a powerful medium of popular and political collective expression, articulating the tensions and reconciliations of everyday relations between individuals and society. Intimately related to the forging of social, cultural, and political American identities, the musical-often dismissed as merely entertainment-is tied inextricably to America's sense of itself as a New World, a land of opportunity, and above all, the emblem of modern culture. Including material on genres ranging from minstrel shows to melodrama to the development of the contemporary book musical and the megamusical, Musical Theater and American Culture delves into such important shows as Anything Goes, West Side Story, Evita, and Rent; it represents the first sustained analysis of this medium as a social and political vehicle. Authors David F. Walsh and Len Platt further consider how the current condition of the musical, the emergence of specialist musicals, revivals, and blockbuster musicals intended for a globalized audience relate both aesthetically and culturally to their Broadway progenitors. Tackling the much broader question of what the fragmentation of this popular culture now indicates about contemporary America, they forge a new and unique study sure to appeal to both scholars of the theater and fans of its ongoing and always -fascinating new forms.

Reviews

"[A] must read for the musical theater scholar, hitherto starved of academically oriented musical theater texts, and both are useful for the theater and/or musical theater history professor, as they explore the niche the musical carved for itself in the larger context of American culture and popular entertainment....Provides a solid foundation for the scholarly study of the American musical."-Theater History Studies
"I enjoyed this book tremendously and found the arguments it presents persuasive and enlightening. A must for any serious student of the American musical."-Journal of American Studies
[A] must read for the musical theater scholar, hitherto starved of academically oriented musical theater texts, and both are useful for the theater and/or musical theater history professor, as they explore the niche the musical carved for itself in the larger context of American culture and popular entertainment....Provides a solid foundation for the scholarly study of the American musical.-The Musical Times
[U]seful in collections serving beginning undergraduates and general readers.-Choice
I enjoyed this book tremendously and found the arguments it presents persuasive and enlightening. A must for any serious student of the American musical.-Theater History Studies
[i]t is a book to love, because Walsh himself loves and believes in American musicals for the best of reasons, that in establishing themselves in the third and fourth decades of the 20th century they 'prevented an avant-garde pretentiousness [and] made for a vernacular American theater that both reflected and was reflexive upon contemporary American society'- The Musical Times
"it is a book to love, because Walsh himself loves and believes in American musicals for the best of reasons, that in establishing themselves in the third and fourth decades of the 20th century they 'prevented an avant-garde pretentiousness and made for a vernacular American theater that both reflected and was reflexive upon contemporary American society'"-The Musical Times
"A must read for the musical theater scholar, hitherto starved of academically oriented musical theater texts, and both are useful for the theater and/or musical theater history professor, as they explore the niche the musical carved for itself in the larger context of American culture and popular entertainment....Provides a solid foundation for the scholarly study of the American musical."-Theater History Studies
"Useful in collections serving beginning undergraduates and general readers."-Choice
"[i]t is a book to love, because Walsh himself loves and believes in American musicals for the best of reasons, that in establishing themselves in the third and fourth decades of the 20th century they 'prevented an avant-garde pretentiousness [and] made for a vernacular American theater that both reflected and was reflexive upon contemporary American society'"-The Musical Times
"[U]seful in collections serving beginning undergraduates and general readers."-Choice

Author Bio

DAVE WALSH is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department of Goldsmiths College at the University of London. He publishes and teaches in the area of sociological theory with particular emphasis, in recent years, on the sociology of music and music theater. LEN PLATT is Senior Lecturer at the University of London, where he runs a part-time undergraduate program in cultural and social studies. He has published widely on literary cultures of the early 20th century, and is currently advisory editor of The James Joyce Quarterly. He is the author of Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival and Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Literatures.