Music Program Classes

Theatre 82000 Critical Perspectives on American Musical Theatre
Prof. David Savran (3 credits)
Tuesday, 4:15-7:15pm: this class is cross listed with the theater department.

American musical theatre has long been ignored, marginalized, or cordoned off by most theatre scholars and musicologists. To all but legions of enthusiastic theatre-goers, musicals remain, in Gerald Mast’s pithy account, “essentially frivolous and silly diversions: lousy drama and lousy music.” Because they represent the most category-defying theatrical form, they are especially adept at arousing the critical disdain and anxiety linked historically to middlebrow culture. This course will be devoted to analyzing why musical theatre has been the only theatrical genre that could since the 1920s even begin to claim a place in popular culture. How and why has the American musical theatre been assigned a middlebrow position in the constantly changing cultural hierarchy in the US?

This course provides an analysis of the history and historiography of the musical, from Showboat (1927) to the works of Stephen Sondheim, with critical analyses of music, text, performance, and reception. New scholarship—on the sociology of culture, taste, orientalism, critical race theory, gender roles, and queer spectatorship—will be emphasized. The class will focus both on the development of the genre, especially between Showboat (1927) and Gypsy (1959), and on individual musicals that have been especially adept at challenging generic boundaries, including Of Thee I Sing, Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, Oklahoma!, Street Scene, South Pacific, West Side Story, Hair, Follies, and Sunday in the Park with George.

Although scholarship on musical theatre has long been anecdotal and superficial, a new generation of scholars has emerged that is questioning the clichés and transforming the field. These include Andrea Most, D.A. Miller, Stacy Wolf, Raymond Knapp, Lauren Berlant, Kim Kowalke, and Steve Swayne. We will frame our examination of this criticism with the work of theorists who have analyzed the history and sociology of popular and/or mass-cultural forms, including Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Middleton. We will pay special attention to the musical’s relationship to other genres and media (including so-called straight theatre, opera, minstrelsy, vaudeville, jazz, musical modernism, and cinema), its role in consolidating American identities, its seemingly magical power to thrill and enrapture, and its status as a lightening rod for fears and anxieties swirling around cultural legitimation in the US.

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